Nearly Four in Ten Dutch Workers Are Part-Time

The widest labour market difference in the Union

Part-time work covers anyone whose usual hours are below the full-time norm in their country. Across the EU in 2025, 17.0% of employed people aged 20 to 64 worked part-time.

The national figures span 38.6% to 1.7%: a ratio of nearly 23 to one, and the widest spread this site has recorded on any labour market indicator.

The Dutch case

The Netherlands records 38.6%. Close to two workers in five are part-time, which is not a fringe arrangement but a mainstream way of holding a job.

Austria at 30.2%, Germany at 29.2% and Belgium at 24.3% follow, forming a north-western European group well clear of the rest.

The question a figure like that raises is whether it represents opportunity or constraint, and the same dataset answers it. Involuntary part-time work — people working part-time because they could not find full-time hours — is 4.3% of Dutch employment. Against a part-time rate of 38.6%, that means roughly one Dutch part-time worker in nine would prefer to work more.

The other eight in nine are working part-time by choice.

Spain, and the contrast

Spain records 13.1% part-time work and 5.0% involuntary part-time. Around 38% of Spanish part-time work is not wanted, against 11% in the Netherlands.

The Spanish part-time rate is a third of the Dutch one and its involuntary component is larger in absolute terms. Two countries can be compared on the headline figure and reach opposite conclusions from it.

That is the reason a part-time rate should never be read on its own, and why the involuntary series is quoted alongside it here.

The east

Bulgaria records 1.7%, Romania 2.3%, Croatia 2.9%, Slovakia 4.2% and Hungary 4.6%.

Part-time work is effectively absent from these labour markets. The usual explanation is that wages are low enough that part-time earnings do not support a household, so the arrangement is not viable regardless of whether anyone would prefer it.

Involuntary part-time work in those same five countries is correspondingly small as a share of all employment: 0.4% in Bulgaria, 0.5% in Hungary and Slovakia, 0.9% in Romania and Croatia. Almost nobody is working part-time against their wishes, because almost nobody is working part-time at all.

Measured the way this study measured Spain, though, Romania inverts the picture. Its 0.9% against a part-time rate of 2.3% means 39% of Romanian part-time work is unwanted — the largest share in the Union, ahead of Spain, with Croatia at 31% close behind. The option is largely absent in both countries, and the little of it that exists is disproportionately not chosen.

What the ranking tracks

Part-time rates follow household income levels, the availability of childcare, and whether tax and benefit systems make a second partial income worthwhile. They also follow gender: part-time work across the Union is disproportionately done by women, and the Member States at the top of this ranking are those where a partial return to work after children is the norm.

That connection is why this indicator belongs beside the gender employment gap rather than being read as a measure of job quality on its own.