When 61 companies trialled a four-day week in 2024, the sceptics predicted a slow slide back to normal. Two years later, 89% of them are still working four days, and a quarter say they will never go back.
The surprise is not that people like it. It is that the businesses do. Revenue held steady or grew at most firms, and sick days fell by more than a third.
What changed on day five
Managers describe the same shift: meetings got shorter, handovers got written down and nobody could hide behind being busy. The lost day forced a kind of honesty about what work actually mattered.
We didn’t lose a day. We lost the parts of the week nobody would miss.
The firms that went back had one thing in common: client work that was measured in hours. Where a customer paid for time, the fifth day was hard to give up.
