Who’s Working the Most Overtime? Analyzing Patterns Across Roles and Experience Levels

Overtime shows up in almost every organization, but not in the same places, and not for the same people. While some roles barely exceed standard hours, others quietly absorb extra work week after week, often without additional pay or formal recognition.

That raises a practical question many HR and operations teams struggle to answer clearly: who is actually working the most overtime, and where is it coming from? 

Short answer: The heaviest overtime consistently falls on production and industrial workers, technical and engineering roles, and mid-to-senior employees. Managers and tech workers are also among the most likely to work unpaid extra hours.

However, knowing who works the most overtime is not enough. What matters for HR and operations teams is understanding why overtime concentrates in certain roles and experience levels, and how that pressure shows up in everyday work. 

This report answers that by breaking overtime down by industry, role, and experience level, showing where extra hours concentrate, how much goes unpaid, and why those employee overtime trends matter for workforce planning, productivity, and retention.

Key takeaways

Behind productivity metrics and delivery timelines sits a growing volume of unpaid and extended work. The data below illustrates how overtime manifests, who works it most, and where it remains unpaid.

• 215 overtime hours per year on average

Employees work the equivalent of more than five extra weeks each year, making overtime a routine part of modern work rather than an exception.

• 42% receive no overtime compensation

A significant share of overtime goes unpaid, particularly among salaried and managerial roles, turning extra hours into hidden labor.

• 6.8 hours of unpaid overtime per week in Europe

Unpaid overtime remains common even in regions with stronger labor protections, pointing to cultural and operational drivers beyond formal policy.

• Overtime clusters by industry

Mining, logging, and heavy manufacturing report the longest workweeks, showing how industry structure and production pressure shape overtime expectations.

• Tech and engineering roles regularly exceed 40 hours

Software developers and technical teams, especially in startups, often work extended hours tied to delivery cycles rather than formal overtime planning.

• More than half of U.S. full-time workers exceed 40 hours weekly

Long workweeks are common across the full-time workforce, not limited to high-pressure or frontline roles.

• Mid-to-senior employees work the most unpaid overtime

Overtime tends to increase with seniority, as managers and experienced professionals absorb coordination, planning, and off-hours decision-making work that often goes untracked.

Overtime trends by industry and regional workforce patterns

Overtime patterns vary sharply by industry, and those differences are rarely accidental. They reflect the underlying structure of work: production cycles, physical labor requirements, safety constraints, and demand volatility. In practice, some industries build overtime into their operating model, while others rely far less on extended hours.

Mining, logging, and heavy industry

In the U.S., workers in the mining and logging industry averaged about 43.7 hours per week in early 2025, well above the private-sector average. That gap points to sustained workload pressure in sectors where production schedules, safety procedures, and site-based operations limit flexibility.

Manufacturing shows a similar pattern, though with variation across subsectors. Industries with the highest average weekly overtime include:

• Petroleum and coal products: 8.2 overtime hours.
• Nonmetallic mineral products: 5.8 overtime hours.
• Primary metal manufacturing: 5.7 overtime hours.

In these environments, overtime is less about short-term spikes and more about structural necessity. Production continuity, equipment utilization, and regulatory requirements often leave little room to absorb demand within standard hours.

Taken together, these figures show that overtime by industry is shaped by operational realities, not individual performance or preference.

Europe vs. U.S. workforce patterns

Regional context further shapes how overtime shows up.

In Europe, average weekly working hours remained around 36 hours in 2024, yet 10.8% of employees still worked more than 45 hours per week by mid-2025. This indicates that even within tighter regulatory frameworks, a meaningful minority of workers consistently exceed standard limits.

The U.S. picture looks different. About 48% of U.S. workers report working more than 40 hours per week, compared with roughly 31% in Europe. Higher baseline hours and broader exemption rules mean overtime is more normalized, even when it is not formally labeled or compensated.

The distinction matters. European overtime often appears as unpaid or informal extensions beyond regulated hours, while U.S. overtime is more closely tied to cultural expectations around availability and workload.

What this means for HR and operations teams

Several patterns emerge clearly:

• Overtime by industry reflects structural pressure, not isolated workload issues.
• Regional differences are shaped by labor policy and work culture, not just job demands.
• Average overtime hours provide essential benchmarking context, especially when comparing teams across industries or geographies.

For HR leaders, industry-specific overtime benchmarks are critical. Without them, it’s easy to misinterpret extended hours as individual inefficiency rather than a predictable outcome of the operating environment.

Overtime by sector: snapshot comparison

Regional overtime by sector breakdown

Beyond mining and manufacturing, U.S. sectors such as utilities and durable goods manufacturing also report above-average weekly hours. Eurostat data shows a similar skew in agriculture and mining/quarrying across several European countries.

These differences make industry-specific overtime benchmarking essential when comparing time-tracking data across teams, locations, or business units. Without that context, overtime signals can be misleading.

Unpaid overtime: The silent majority

Unpaid overtime is not limited to a small subset of roles or regions. Multiple studies show that up to 42% of employees receive no additional compensation for overtime, even when they regularly exceed contracted hours.

In the UK, nearly 49% of workers report doing unpaid overtime, averaging just over three extra hours per week. Managers consistently report higher levels, working around 4.1 hours of unpaid overtime weekly. This suggests that unpaid overtime increases with seniority rather than disappearing at higher pay grades.

U.S. estimates point to an even larger gap. Some studies indicate that American workers average up to nine hours of unpaid overtime per week, translating into substantial lost income over the course of a year. In many cases, these hours are absorbed quietly and never reflected in payroll, productivity metrics, or workload planning.

Taken together, these figures show that unpaid overtime is not an anomaly. It is a material component of overall employee overtime trends that traditional compensation models often fail to capture.

Why unpaid overtime persists

Unpaid overtime continues for a combination of structural and cultural reasons:

• Exempt employment classifications exclude many salaried employees from overtime eligibility under labor law.
• Role expectations, particularly in management, tech, and startup environments, normalize extended availability.
• Hybrid and remote work blur the boundary between working time and personal time, making extra hours easier to accumulate and harder to track.

These factors mean unpaid overtime is often tolerated, and sometimes encouraged, even when it creates long-term risks.

What this means for HR and operations teams

When unpaid overtime is invisible, its impact is easy to underestimate.

Organizations that rely only on paid hours or payroll data often miss early signals of workload imbalance, burnout risk, and declining engagement. Over time, this gap can distort productivity analysis and staffing decisions.

Time tracking approaches that capture actual hours worked, including unpaid overtime, provide a more accurate view of how work is distributed and where pressure is building across roles and experience levels.

Practical actions to consider

• Measure both paid and unpaid overtime through time tracking and employee self-reporting.
• Review unpaid overtime patterns by role and experience level, not just by team or department.
• Revisit policies, staffing models, or compensation structures where prolonged unpaid overtime is concentrated.
• Take advantage of Tmetric timesheets.

Unpaid overtime by worker segment

Overtime by role: Who works extra most?

Role expectations play a decisive role in how overtime accumulates. In many cases, extra hours are not driven by formal requirements, but by delivery cycles, coordination demands, and implicit availability expectations tied to specific functions.

Tech workers and developers

Software developers and technical teams illustrate how role-driven overtime takes shape.

Available data shows that software engineers typically work 40–44 hours per week, while tech managers often meet or exceed 47 hours. In startup environments, those numbers rise sharply, with developers averaging 50–60 hours per week during active delivery phases.

Overtime frequency is also high. Around 26.7% of developers report working overtime one to two days per month, while another 25% do so every week. Even earlier surveys found that 38% of developers regularly worked after hours, pointing to a long-standing pattern rather than a recent shift.

In most cases, this overtime is tied to sprint deadlines, product launches, and incident response rather than explicit compensation incentives. The result is extended work that is often normalized and inconsistently tracked.

Managerial and senior roles

Overtime pressure does not stop at individual contributor roles.

Across industries, managers consistently report more unpaid overtime than non-managers. Senior roles typically combine operational oversight with planning, coordination, and decision-making work that spills beyond standard hours.

As responsibility increases, so does off-hours work: meetings across time zones, after-hours problem solving, and informal availability expectations all contribute to longer workweeks that are rarely reflected in official schedules.

What this means for HR and operations teams

• Overtime by role reflects how work is designed, not individual effort. Roles that combine delivery, coordination, and availability naturally accumulate more off-hours work.
• Consistent overtime within the same functions signals structural load, such as sprint-driven deadlines in tech or cross-team dependencies in management roles.
• Uniform overtime policies often miss the issue, because the pressure is role-specific rather than organization-wide.
• Segmenting overtime data by function makes it easier to distinguish temporary spikes from roles where extended hours have become routine.

What to do:

• Benchmark overtime by role and experience level against industry norms.
• Monitor patterns across project cycles to anticipate staffing spikes.
• Encourage boundary-setting through cultural cues and policies.

Experience levels & overtime: The less obvious pattern

While overtime by role is well documented, experience level adds another layer that is often overlooked.

Early-career employees may work longer hours to close skill gaps or signal commitment, but overtime tends to intensify rather than disappear as careers progress. Mid-career employees, especially those moving into management, often absorb coordination, mentoring, and delivery responsibilities that extend beyond core hours.

At the senior level, overtime shifts again. Leadership roles frequently involve strategic planning, cross-functional alignment, and decision-making that takes place outside formal working time — much of it unpaid and unrecorded.

Emerging European data shows that employees aged 35–44 are among the most likely to accumulate unpaid overtime, reinforcing the link between experience, responsibility, and extended availability.

Why experience-level overtime matters

Overtime by experience level can act as an early signal of deeper issues:

• Sustained unpaid overtime among mid-career employees often points to role overload or unclear responsibility boundaries.
• Persistent overtime at senior levels may indicate decision bottlenecks or insufficient delegation.

Time tracking data, when segmented by experience level, can surface these patterns before they translate into burnout, disengagement, or attrition.

How TMetric helps HR and operations teams make overtime visible (without adding surveillance)

The patterns in this report make one thing clear: overtime isn’t evenly distributed—and it’s often not formally recorded. For HR and operations teams, that creates a practical visibility gap. When extra hours are hidden inside “just getting it done,” it becomes difficult to answer basic questions: where overtime is building, who is absorbing it, and whether it’s a temporary spike or a structural workload issue.

TMetric helps close that gap by turning overtime into measurable, reviewable time data—without relying on invasive monitoring. Instead of tracking behavior, it focuses on hours, projects, and reporting clarity, which supports workload planning, compliance, and retention decisions.

Below are key ways TMetric supports overtime management in practice:

Overtime tracking by default
Capture actual hours worked across days and weeks, making it easier to quantify overtime rather than rely on manager perception or payroll-only views.

Clear timesheets for audit and review
Centralized timesheets make overtime patterns visible across teams, roles, and locations—useful for internal review, audits, and policy enforcement.

Reporting that highlights workload hotspots
Reports help identify where overtime concentrates (industry teams, technical roles, mid-to-senior employees), turning “we feel overloaded” into measurable trends.

Alerts and thresholds to flag risk early
Set overtime limits or working-hour thresholds and get notified when teams consistently exceed them—supporting early intervention before burnout or attrition.

Project- and task-based context
Overtime becomes actionable when it’s tied to what caused it. Logging time to projects/tasks helps teams trace extra hours to delivery cycles, staffing gaps, scope creep, or recurring blockers.

Balanced visibility without surveillance mechanics
TMetric provides work-time transparency without requiring keystrokes, screenshots, or website monitoring—helpful for organizations that want overtime clarity without creating surveillance stress.

Supports compensation and compliance workflows
Overtime visibility helps teams align recorded hours with payroll rules, local labor requirements, and internal compensation policies—especially where unpaid overtime is common.

Better benchmarking across roles and seniority
By segmenting time data by team, role, and experience level, HR can distinguish normal industry baselines from chronic overload and misallocated responsibilities.

What TMetric users are saying

Over to you

Overtime is common, but it is not evenly distributed. The data shows clear concentration by industry, role, and experience level, with production, technical, and managerial positions absorbing a disproportionate share of extra hours, often without compensation. These employee overtime trends reflect how work is structured and managed, not isolated individual choices.

For HR and operations leaders, the implication is straightforward: without visibility into where overtime concentrates, workload imbalance, burnout risk, and inefficiencies are easy to miss.

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