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Good practice Imported

Belgium's Legal Right to a Compressed Four-Day Week (2022 Labour Deal)

Belgium · Brussels · See the Belgium profile · See the Brussels profile

Evidence: Observational / pre–post Top 50% 67/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

Belgium's 2022 Labour Deal gave every employee the right to request compressing a full working week into four longer days at the same total pay — but two years on, only around 1% of the workforce has taken it up, a cautionary case on legislating flexibility alone.

~60%
Approval rate among formal requests (first two years (2022-2024))
~1%
Actual workforce uptake of compressed schedule (2024)
9.5 hours
Maximum compressed daily hours cap
Belgium's Legal Right to a Compressed Four-Day Week (2022 Labour Deal) Belgium's Legal Right to a Compressed Four-Day Week (2022 Labour Deal)

Details

Maturity
Established
Promoter
Federal Public Service Employment, Labour and Social Dialogue (Belgium)
Period
Since November 2022
Region (NUTS)
BE10
Keywords
labour law, public policy, workplace flexibility

Context

Belgium's Labour Deal, in force since 21 November 2022, gives employees a statutory right to request compressing their existing weekly hours (e.g. 38 hours) into four days instead of five, raising the daily cap to 9.5 hours.

Objectives

To give employees a legal right to request a compressed four-day working week without reducing total hours worked, with employer refusal permitted only in writing and dismissal in retaliation prohibited.

Activities

Unlike Iceland's or Portugal's trials, the Belgian law does not reduce total hours worked — it only compresses the existing schedule into four longer days.

Results

Legal analysis by L&E Global recorded roughly 60% approval rates among employees who formally requested the arrangement in the law's first two years. Independent reporting by Newsweek in 2024 found actual uptake far lower than approval rates suggest: only about 1% of Belgian workers were using the compressed four-day schedule.

Conclusions

Commentators attribute the low uptake to the law requiring longer, not fewer, total hours — a cautionary example of a legal right to flexibility that has not translated into workforce-wide retention gains.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Low (< €50k)
Time to results
Long (> 3 years)
Staffing & skills
Federal Public Service Employment, Labour and Social Dialogue (Belgium)

Conditions for success

  • Statutory right applying automatically nationwide, requiring no pilot-to-scale-up phase
  • Written-refusal requirement and anti-retaliation protection for employees who request the arrangement

Common failure modes

  • Design compresses rather than reduces hours, which commentators link to very low uptake (~1%) despite high approval rates among those who requested it
  • Uptake concentrates among roles where longer daily hours are feasible, effectively excluding shift and care-dependent workers

Commonly funded by

National / regional programmes

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Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

Attachments

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