Who works harder - the French or the Germans?

France's prime minister recently scolded his compatriots for not working enough, while the country's public accounts minister went further and said: "In France, we work 100 hours less per person than in Germany".

The comments come in the context of France's fraught budget debates - the 2026 Budget aims to save €40 billion to finally get a handle on the country's spiralling budget deficit and one of the measures proposed is to axe two public holidays.

But is it actually true, as minister Amélie de Montchalin says, that the Germans work harder than the French?

Judging by the country's respective stereotypes, you would think it is - while Germans are clichéd as hard-working, efficient and (dare we say it?) just a touch humourless, the French are widely seen as far more interested in having a good lunch, a long holiday and perhaps a romantic encounter than they are in work.

But stereotypes are not statistics, and here, the data tells an unexpected story.

De Montchalin's figures appear to be based on OECD data from 2024 which shows that France worked an average of 666 hours per capita, compared with 724 hours in Germany. Both countries are slackers by European standards - the European Union average is 776 hours.

So case closed? Not quite.

This data uses the crude metric of dividing the total numbers of hours worked per year by the country's population - and that's the whole ppopulation including children, pensioners, the unemployed and other people not in the workforce.

This puts France at a disadvantage, because it it has a relatively high percentage of the population not in work, due to a combination of factors such as a long life expectancy which, coupled with an early retirement age, means that around a quarter of the population is retired.

France also has a higher unemployment rate than Germany, but it also has a higher birth-rate meaning that there are more children who are not (yet) in the workforce.

The OECD also publishes more nuanced data which looks at work hours divided by the total workforce - a more accurate measure of how hard each worker is actually working .

On this metric, France wins - French workers work 1,494 hours per year, while Germans work 1,340 hours a year. Once again, both are below the EU average of 1,570 hours a year. The European champions/suckers are Greece, where people work 1,882 hours per year.

Eurostat data backs up this picture, showing that on average French workers work 35.8 hours per week, while Germans work 33.9 hours per week (this data includes full time and part time workers).

Last year, France's Conseil d'analyse économique (council for economic analysis) published a study on the total number of working hours over time, comparing France, Germany, the UK and the USA.

It shows a uniform decline in the number of hours worked in Europe from the 1970s, a trend that was reversed 20 years later - since the mid-1990s, the number of hours worked has been rising in France, Germany and the UK.

So overall we can say that Germans are more likely to be part of the workforce than the French - but among those who do work, the French work more.

It is still true that the French lunch break is widely observed, though, in fact the country's workplace code specifies that it is illegal to eat lunch while at your desk/work station.