After nine consecutive years of rising average weekly working hours for enterprise employees, China saw a modest reversal in 2025: apart from January, each month’s average weekly hours for enterprise staff fell below the same month in 2024. The drop punctures a near-decade trend and has been interpreted by labour scholars as partly a response to changing public attitudes and stepped-up enforcement, but it does not resolve deeper structural problems in China’s labour market.
Zeng Xiangquan, director of the China Institute of Employment Research at Renmin University, who has advised domestic and international organisations, argues the 2025 decline reflects two connected forces. One is a mechanical limit — hours cannot rise indefinitely as a buffer against economic pressure — and the other is a nascent reaction against “involution” and a modest strengthening of workers’ rights and corporate compliance.
Behind the headline movement, however, the labour market presents a paradox. Large shares of workers still exceed internationally recognised overtime thresholds: China’s average weekly hours for urban workers have been substantially above peers in East and Southeast Asia — for comparison, South Korea and Vietnam reported 37.9 and 41.5 hours respectively while China has been near 48. At the same time, a growing cohort of workers reports very short weeks of under 20 or 20–39 hours, highlighting parallel problems of overwork and underemployment.
Several structural drivers explain why firms, until recently, preferred lengthening hours rather than hiring. Fixed labour costs have risen: social insurance bases and compliance have moved higher, and the consolidation of collection under tax authorities has improved enforcement. Local increases in minimum contribution bases — for example, Beijing’s social insurance base lower limit almost doubled between 2020 and 2025 — mean that even minimally compliant firms face bigger employer costs, so extending existing staff hours becomes a short-run cost-management tool.
The unequal distribution of hours exposes sharp sectoral and ownership contrasts. Competitive and labour‑intensive sectors such as hospitality, construction, mining and much of manufacturing commonly show overlong hours, and gig-economy roles like ride-hailing and food delivery increasingly push some workers beyond safe physiological limits. By contrast, monopolistic utilities and many state‑dominated organisations report far fewer cases of chronic overtime, while public institutions and some small employers exhibit pronounced underemployment among certain groups.
Wages are central to the story. Long hours often coexist with low hourly pay, so extended work is a compensation strategy for inadequate wage levels rather than a sign of rich, productive employment. Zeng suggests a policy pivot: convert monthly minimum-wage rules for full‑time employees into an hourly statutory floor. Under current rules, full-time monthly minima can translate into lower effective hourly rates than the statutory hourly floors that apply to part‑time work, incentivising employers to squeeze hours and pay in ways that distort labour cost calculations.
Policy remedies that specialists and Zeng emphasise start with restoring labour’s share of income and expanding domestic demand through higher earnings for low‑ and middle‑income households. Complementary steps include reducing employer social insurance burdens to lower the incentive to avoid hiring, improving labour-law enforcement so workers can prove and claim overtime pay, and strengthening unions’ capacity for collective bargaining. All of these must be managed against local officials’ concerns that strict enforcement might deter investment and harm headline employment figures.
The 2025 dip in average hours may therefore be ambiguous. If it reflects real improvements in work‑life balance and stronger compliance, it is welcome. But if employers respond to rising labour costs and weak demand by substituting fewer workers for longer‑running productivity measures, the decline could presage job shedding and a deterioration in employment quality — a scenario that would intensify pressures on consumption and complicate China’s economic rebalancing.