Four-Day Work Weeks: Results From Companies That Tried It

The four-day work week has moved from a thought experiment to something hiring managers get asked about in first interviews. Candidates search for it by name: “four-day week” was one of the 20 most common phrases typed into the HireWise job search in the first half of 2026, up from outside the top 200 two years earlier.

But what happens when a company actually tries it? We spoke with five employers that ran structured pilots between September 2025 and June 2026. They range from a 22-person design agency to a 640-person logistics software firm. Some kept the policy, one dropped it, and one is still arguing about it. The details matter more than the headline, so this article focuses on them.

What “four-day week” means in practice

The phrase covers several different arrangements, and mixing them up leads to bad comparisons. Before looking at results, it helps to know which model each company used.

1. 100-80-100: 100% pay, 80% of the time, 100% of the output
   • The most common model in pilots
   • Usually 32 hours across four days
2. Compressed hours: the same 40 hours squeezed into four 10-hour days
   • Popular in operations and support teams
   • Not really a reduction in work, and staff often say so
3. Staggered Fridays: half the team off on Monday, half on Friday
   • Keeps customer coverage five days a week
   • Harder to schedule meetings across both groups

All five companies in our sample used some version of the first model, though two added staggered days off for customer-facing teams.

The five pilots, in numbers

Each company measured slightly different things, so we asked for the same handful of figures: how long the pilot ran, the change in a primary output metric, the change in sick days and the effect on hiring. The figures below compare the pilot period with the same months a year earlier.

Company	Size	Pilot dates	Output change	Sick days change	Kept it?
Lumen & Hart (design agency, Lisbon)	22	2025-09-01 to 2026-02-27	+4% billable hours per head	−38%	Yes
Tidewater Analytics (SaaS, Toronto)	85	Oct 6, 2025 to Mar 27, 2026	+1.5% tickets resolved	−21%	Yes
Groenveld Software (Utrecht)	140	Q4 2025	−6% story points	−12%	No
Pemberton Legal Tech (Manchester)	310	Jan 5 to Jun 26, 2026	+0.8% revenue per employee	−27%	Extended
Northgate Freight Systems (Denver)	640	Feb 2 to May 29, 2026	Flat	−18%	Yes, for 70% of staff

Sick days fell everywhere, which matches most published research. Output was mixed. In four out of five cases it held steady or improved slightly, which for a 20% cut in hours is a good result. Groenveld was the exception, and the reason is worth a closer look.

Why one pilot failed

Groenveld Software ran its trial for a single quarter, from October 1 to December 31, 2025. The leadership team announced it in late August, gave teams a month to prepare and then measured output using story points.

Several things went wrong. The trial overlapped with the busiest release cycle of the year. Teams did not change their meeting load, so the same 11 hours of recurring meetings per person now took up a larger share of a shorter week. And story points, as any engineer will tell you, are an estimate rather than a measure of output.

“We tried to fit five days of meetings into four days and called it a productivity experiment. If we did it again, I would cut the meetings first, run the pilot for six months, and measure what customers actually received.”

Femke de Wit, COO at Groenveld Software

The company has said it will try again in Q2 2027 with a longer pilot and different metrics.

What the successful pilots had in common

The companies that kept the policy did not have special industries or unusually motivated staff. They did a few practical things before the first short week.

They cut meetings first

Lumen & Hart moved every internal meeting to Tuesdays and Thursdays and capped them at 25 minutes. Tidewater banned recurring meetings with more than six people unless a director approved them. Pemberton’s engineering teams replaced two weekly status calls with a written update due by 11:00 GMT on Mondays.

They defined output before they started

Each team agreed on one or two numbers that customers would notice: tickets resolved within 24 hours, invoices sent on time, releases shipped. Internal activity metrics such as hours logged or messages sent were deliberately ignored.

They protected customer coverage

Customer-facing teams at Tidewater and Northgate used staggered days off, so phones and chat were staffed from 08:00 to 18:00 MT every weekday. Response times did not change in either company. Northgate’s median first reply to a support ticket stayed at 1 hour 52 minutes before and during the pilot.

The effect on hiring

For most of the companies we spoke with, recruiting was the most surprising result. Tidewater advertised a backend role on HireWise in January 2026 at CA$118,000 with “four-day week” in the title. It received 412 applications in 14 days, compared with 96 for a similar role posted a year earlier at CA$124,000. In other words, candidates were willing to accept a lower salary in exchange for the extra day.

Pemberton saw a similar effect. Their time to fill for mid-level roles dropped from 47 days to 31 days, and offer acceptance rose from 72% to 89%. The recruiting team estimates the pilot saved around £96,000 in agency fees across 2026.

Not every number moved in the right direction. Two companies saw a small rise in candidates who wanted the four-day week but were not a good fit otherwise. Pemberton added a screening question about how applicants would plan a 32-hour week, which cut those applications by about a third.

If you are an employer weighing whether to mention a shorter week in a listing, our guide to posting your first job explains how to add perks so they appear in search filters.

What it costs

A four-day week is not free, even at full output. The main costs come from customer coverage, overtime for roles that cannot reduce hours and the time spent planning the pilot.

• Coverage: Northgate hired four extra support staff at roughly $58,000 each
• Overtime: Pemberton paid about £14,500 in overtime during the pilot, mostly in finance at quarter end
• Planning time: most companies estimated 60 to 120 hours of management time before launch
  • Workshops with team leads
  • Rewriting job descriptions and contracts
  • Setting up measurement

Against those costs, the savings from lower sick leave and faster hiring tend to come out ahead after six months. Lumen & Hart estimated a net saving of €41,000 in the first year, mostly from avoided freelancer costs during staff absence.

How to run your own pilot

If you want to try it, the companies we spoke with agreed on a basic structure. The plan below is based on their advice, and many teams keep a version of it in a shared config file so everyone can see the dates and rules.

{
  "pilot": "four-day-week-2027",
  "model": "100-80-100",
  "start": "2027-01-04",
  "end": "2027-06-25",
  "hours_per_week": 32,
  "day_off": {
    "default": "Friday",
    "customer_teams": "staggered Monday or Friday"
  },
  "meeting_rules": {
    "max_recurring_minutes": 25,
    "meeting_days": ["Tuesday", "Thursday"]
  },
  "metrics": ["tickets_resolved_24h", "revenue_per_employee", "sick_days", "time_to_fill"],
  "review_dates": ["2027-02-26", "2027-04-30", "2027-06-25"]
}

A few final points from the people who ran these pilots:

1. Run it for at least six months, so you see more than the novelty effect
2. Pick metrics customers would notice, not internal activity
3. Agree in advance what happens if output drops
   • A 5% drop might mean adjusting the rules
   • A 15% drop might mean ending the pilot
4. Tell candidates honestly whether the policy is permanent

Where to find four-day week jobs

The number of listings mentioning a shorter week is still small, about 3.2% of all roles on HireWise in July 2026, but it has roughly doubled each year since 2024. You can search for them using four-day week jobs or browse company profiles for details on working hours and benefits. If you want broader context on remote and flexible work, the HireWise blog covers both regularly, and our job seeker FAQ explains how to filter by benefits.