Time Tracking Statistics You Should Know in 2025
Did you know that workers allocate 392 hours — or 16 full days — per year attending meetings? To make matters worse, some of these meetings turn out to be unnecessary or ineffective.
Now, if you identify workplace bottlenecks such as this one, you and your team will start enhancing your time management and productivity.
Here are some more game-changing time-tracking statistics on how we spend our lives — from work and overtime to watching TV and doing sports.
Average life in numbers
A person with an average lifespan of 79 years spends years on everyday, repetitive activities:
- Sleep: 26 years,
- Time at work: 13 years (out of an average working period of 50 years),
- Watching TV: 8 years and 4 months,
- Trying to fall asleep: 7 years,
- Eating: 4 and a half years,
- Social media: 3 years,
- Holidays: 3 years,
- Working overtime: about a year and a half,
- Exercising: 1 year and 4 months,
- Primary and secondary school: almost 1 year (334 days), and
- Waiting in queues: 235 days.
The study Your Life in Numbers tells us that we spend most of our time sleeping, and that the time we spend at work comes in second. The worrying time statistics are that we spend about 8 years and 4 months watching TV, despite these habits being detrimental to our brains.
Apart from TV, people worldwide spend a lot of time watching TV shows and movies on various platforms. According to the Netflix Engagement Report for 2024, worldwide members have spent 94 billion hours watching shows on this platform.
In essence, average results show that we spend too much time on activities labeled as time wasters and distractions, rather than allocating some of this time to exercising and socializing, which are actually beneficial for the brain.
Average time spent on daily activities in the US in 2024
One of the most comprehensive statistics about time tracking is the yearly Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data on the amount of time Americans spend on various activities on a typical day:
- Sleeping: 9 hours and 1 minute,
- Work and work-related activities: 3 hours and 25 minutes,
- Watching television: 2 hours and 36 minutes,
- Eating and drinking: 1 hour and 14 minutes,
- Food preparation and cleaning up afterwards: 40 minutes,
- Housework: 37 minutes,
- Socialization and communication: 35 minutes,
- Helping other household members: 30 minutes,
- Educational activities: 25 minutes,
- Childcare: 22 minutes,
- Buying consumer goods: 18 minutes,
- Sports, exercising, and recreation: 18 minutes,
- Caring for the lawn and garden: 12 minutes,
- Other activities: 12 minutes,
- Helping and caring for non-household members: 10 minutes,
- Telephone calls, emails, and regular mail: 10 minutes,
- Managing the household: 9 minutes, and
- Volunteering: 7 minutes.
All activities are expressed as an annual average.
Americans use their 24 hours on various activities, but there’s definitely room for improvement in the average daily schedule. For example, more time could be allocated to:
- Educational activities,
- Sport-related activities, and
- Socialization.
Also, less time could be spent watching TV.
For a better grasp of how you spend time on individual activities and how you could manage your time better, here’s a closer look at some of the more prominent sections of a typical day for an American in 2024.
Time spent on sports and leisure activities
Statistics about time tracking in 2024 show that Americans spent 5 hours and 1 minute on:
- Sports,
- Leisure activities,
- Watching TV, and
- Socialization, on average.
When it comes to sports as a category, the average result was 18 minutes per day.
If we break this down into weekdays and weekends, the results for sports only are as follows:
- On weekdays: 18 minutes, and
- On weekends and holidays: 19 minutes.
The results for sports, broken down by employment status:
- Employed people: 13 minutes, and
- Unemployed people: 15 minutes.
The results for sports, for participants with children:
- Employed people with children aged 13 to 17 years old: 25 minutes,
- Employed people with children aged 6 to 12 years old: 18 minutes, and
- Employed people with children younger than 6 years old: 13 minutes.
In total, Americans spent 2 hours and 36 minutes watching TV in 2024, on average, or more precisely:
- On weekdays: 2 hours and 21 minutes, and
- On weekends and holidays: 3 hours and 9 minutes.
Furthermore, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reveals that Americans allocate 35 minutes per day to communicating and socializing, which was a daily average in 2024.
If we break it into weekdays and weekends, these are the results:
- On weekdays: 26 minutes, and
- On weekends and holidays: 56 minutes.
Time spent on goods and services
The same BLS survey included data on the time people spent on goods and services in 2024, per day, expressed by an annual average.
On average, people allocated 40 minutes per day to this category (buying consumer goods and professional and personal care services).
This is how much time was spent buying consumer goods, on average, per day:
- On weekdays: 15 minutes, and
- On weekends and holidays: 25 minutes.
When it comes to the time Americans allocated to care services (both personal and professional), it averaged only 1 minute per day.
In total, people spend a lot of time each day on various services and purchasing goods, although the best practice would be to allocate this time specifically to weekends and save weekdays for more productive activities.
Time spent on household activities
As we can see from the BLS statistics about time tracking, people spent 2 hours and 1 minute on average doing household chores (housework included) in 2024:
- On weekdays: 1 hour and 52 minutes,
- On weekends and holidays: 2 hours and 21 minutes.
🎓 The 2024 Gender Inequality in Unpaid Domestic Work Report
Average time spent working — worldwide and in the US
As a project manager or department head, you know that tracking employee work hours is a vital step for accurately billing your clients and complying with DCAA Timekeeping requirements.
Worldwide working hours by country
Not all countries spend the same number of hours working.
According to the OECD data on working time by country for 2024, these are the top 5 countries with the highest number of hours worked per year:
- Mexico: 2,193,
- Costa Rica: 2,149,
- Chile: 1,919,
- Greece: 1,898, and
- Israel: 1,877.
As per the same research, here are the top 5 countries with the lowest number of annual hours worked:
- Austria: 1,432,
- Sweden: 1,431,
- Norway: 1,407,
- Denmark: 1,379, and
- Germany: 1,331.
The time across countries varies up to almost 1,000 hours between Mexico (the first one in the world) and Germany (the last country on the list), meaning people from different countries allocate time to work differently.
Hours spent working and on work-related activities in America
According to the previously mentioned American Time Use Survey for 2024, people spend an average of 3 hours and 25 minutes per day on work and work-related activities.
When it comes to both work and work-related activities, here’s the breakdown of hours spent:
- Weekdays: 4 hours and 22 minutes, and
- Weekends and holidays: 1 hour and 13 minutes.
And these are the results for the time spent on telephone calls, mail, and emails:
- Weekdays: 10 minutes, and
- Weekends and holidays: also 10 minutes.
The study also included data about work hours spent across different employment types, on an average day (not necessarily weekday or weekend):
- Full-time employees: 8 hours and 1 minute,
- Part-time employees: 5 hours and 21 minutes,
- Workers with one job: 7 hours and 34 minutes,
- Workers with multiple jobs: 7 hours and 51 minutes,
- People working for wages and salaries: 7 hours and 35 minutes, and
- Self-employed individuals: 6 hours and 22 minutes.
🎓 Part-time vs. Full-time Employment: Understanding the Difference
The following results show differences in time spent working, based on employees’ occupation:
- Managers, people working in business and finance: 7 hours and 40 minutes,
- People providing professional services: 7 hours and 23 minutes,
- Sales and related: 7 hours and 25 minutes,
- Administrative support: 7 hours and 27 minutes,
- Forestry, farming, fishing: 7 hours and 11 minutes,
- Construction, extraction: 7 hours and 21 minutes,
- Installation, repair, and maintenance: 7 hours and 36 minutes,
- Production: 8 hours and 42 minutes, and
- Transportation and material-moving industry: 7 hours and 46 minutes.
Billable and non-billable hours tracked in the US
According to Clockify’s 2026 Productivity and Profitability Report, which looked at 2,300 US companies, the billability status of work hours is as follows:
- 65.9% of work hours in the US are billable, and
- 34.1% of work hours in the US are non-billable hours.
Project managers and department heads such as yourself should strive to have as many billable hours as possible, because this portion of work is what you can bill your clients for.
🎓 First Time Billing Clients? Here’s How to Start | Afraid of Undercharging? Here’s How to Bill Clients Accurately
Overtime hours tracked worldwide and in the US
As per CAKE.com’s State of Workplace Culture and Work-Life Balance Trends, which included over 8,800 participants, different generations have diverse habits and attitudes towards working overtime.
When it comes to the percentages of people in the US who report logging more than 15 overtime hours per week, the numbers are the highest for participants aged 45-54.
On the other hand, the same study shows that many participants don’t log any hours over 40 hours per week. More precisely, these are the percentages for worldwide data:
- 18-24 age group: 40.67%,
- 25-34 age group: 35.28%,
- 35-44 age group: 35.45%,
- 45-54 age group: 35.30%,
- 55-64 age group: 29.98%, and
- 65+ age group: 32.60%.
In the US only, 53% of respondents aged 18 to 24 reported not logging any overtime hours. Here are the details for other generations in the US:
We can conclude that Gen Z participants (aged 18-24) are more likely to avoid working overtime compared to the respondents aged 55-64.
Meetings and email management
As an operations or project manager, you may wonder how much time your team spends on meetings. This will give you a better clue of whether you can eliminate some unnecessary team sessions.
Flowtrace’s State of Meetings Report 2025 claims that we spend 16 full days per year on meetings. Here are some compelling facts from this report:
- 67% of meetings are unproductive,
- 92% of workers claim they multitask during meetings, and
- 45% of employees are overwhelmed by meetings.
Considering meeting duration, the study reveals that 45% of meetings last 30 minutes. On the other hand, recurring meetings (15% of them) last an average of 15 minutes.
When it comes to virtual meetings, participants sometimes experience challenges such as technical difficulties, which can impact the time spent on meetings. To be more precise, technical difficulties cause problems for 72% of respondents, according to Pumble’s communication statistics for 2025.
According to the Email Marketing Statistics for 2025, here’s how much time respondents allocate to email management on an average day:
- 35% of respondents allocate less than 1 hour,
- 30% of participants spend 1 hour,
- 18% of surveyed employees dedicate 2–5 hours, and
- 17% of respondents spend 2 hours.
Tracking time spent on breaks, time off, and holidays
Surprisingly, Clockify’s study on productivity and profitability reports that only 5% of US companies utilize a dedicated breaks feature to record breaks within their teams.
At the same time, 95% of surveyed business leaders, team leaders, and project managers aren’t using a dedicated breaks feature. However, some companies create projects in their time tracker called “Breaks” to record break time.
Apart from breaks, our research also analyzed whether US businesses log their time off and holidays.
These are the results for time off:
- 18% of US companies use a dedicated time off feature to record PTO and leaves, while
- 82% of US businesses don’t record PTO for their employees via a time off feature.
When it comes to holidays, only 17% of US companies track their holidays. The remaining 83% of businesses:
- Record their holidays as part of their general PTO, or
- Don’t track holidays with time-tracking software; instead, they use different software.
As for the number of PTO days employees take, it’s 15 days on average, as per the Out of Office Culture Report. Some employees are allowed to have unlimited paid time off, but in practice, it seems like there isn’t any major difference between limited and unlimited policies. Workers in companies with an unlimited PTO policy took 18 days in 2024, on average.
The same research compared how different generations approach their PTO, and these are the number of PTO days used in 2024, by generations:
- Gen Z: 11.4,
- Millennials: 14.6,
- Gen X: 16,4, and
- Boomers: 16.2.
Workplace distractions and unproductive activities
If you’ve noticed that your employees get distracted at work, but you’re not sure what their biggest time sinks are, let’s review some employee productivity statistics on the topic.
A 1Password study claims that 79% of employees are distracted, while 32% of them experience stress at the workplace.
When it comes to the leading causes of distractions across all industries, they are:
- COVID-19 pandemic for 44% of participants,
- Recession/inflation for another 42% of respondents,
- Economic uncertainty for 38% of surveyed workers,
- Gas prices for34% of participants, and
- Personal relationships for 29% of respondents.
For 39% of tech workers, the leading cause of distractions is world events.
Another survey on workplace distractions reports that the most critical period when distractions occur is between noon and 3 p.m. for 46% of participants.
The same research claims that 74% of Millennials and Gen Zers get distracted at work. In fact, 36% of Millennials and Gen Zers spend 2 or more hours on their phones at the workplace.
On the other hand, around 30% of Baby Boomers report they don’t use their phones while working.
According to the Work Trend Index Annual Report, 68% of respondents claim they struggle to stay focused at work for extended periods. The top challenge that hinders their productivity is inefficient meetings.
What tools and features are available to help analyze time tracking statistics?
Time tracking software statistics help you analyze your and your team’s time tracking habits and trends.
When choosing the right software for your team, look for apps that offer additional features, such as those that help you estimate project timelines and costs:
- Scheduling,
- Forecasting, and
- PTO tracking.
The previously-mentioned Clockify report states that 31% of surveyed business leaders, team leads, and project managers use scheduling to:
- Plan workload across the team,
- Have an overview of revenues and costs per team member,
- Make project milestones for important events, and
- See scheduled time off.
As a team leader, your mission should be to improve team productivity and efficiency by identifying time sinks.
With Clockify’s forecasting feature, you can get notified when a team member tracks too much time working on a task/project per day, week, or month.
In fact, the 2026 Productivity and Profitability Report shows that 29% of survey respondents have used the forecasting feature at least once to:
- Plan projects,
- See scheduled, spent, and remaining hours,
- Set time and budget estimates, and
- Get notified if they have overscheduled hours.
FAQs about time statistics
For more time tracking employee statistics, read our FAQs section.
Why are time tracking statistics important for businesses?
Statistics about time tracking are essential for businesses across all industries because they let you see:
- Employee attendance for a day, week, or month,
- Time-wasting activities within your team, like unnecessary meetings,
- Overtime hours that your team members have tracked, if there are any, and
- Project progress on a team or individual level.
Apart from these benefits, keeping an eye on employee productivity statistics can help you discover blind spots. For example, we mentioned that workers spend an average of 392 hours per year on meetings. This eye-opening information can prompt you to reevaluate your meetings and prioritize only the essential ones.
🎓 4 Warning Signs You’re Holding Too Many Meetings
What is the average time spent sleeping?
According to the aforementioned American Time Use Survey, in 2024, Americans spent an average of 9 hours and 1 minute per day sleeping.
If we break this data down, these are the results for:
- Weekdays: 8 hours and 48 minutes, and
- Weekends and holidays: 9 hours and 35 minutes.
What percentage of employees use their paid time off?
According to the QuickBooks time and attendance study, a whopping 70% of employees in the US don’t take their paid time off. This leaves us with only 30% of workers who use their PTO.
The same research also claims that 16% of employees don’t get any PTO from their employers.
🎓 PTO vs. Vacation: What Is the Difference?
Does time tracking affect productivity?
Yes, time tracking impacts productivity. It helps you analyze your productivity levels during a day, week, or month.
When you track your time at work, you’ll find out how you spend your work day and how much time you need for particular tasks.
If you’d like to have a breakdown of activities and apps you use during a day, you can try Clockify’s auto tracker.
As we can see from the screenshot above, the auto tracker shows you:
- Start and end times for each app you’ve used,
- Task durations, and
- Idle time.
So, if you dedicate too much time to particular websites or apps, you’ll see it in your report. This way, you’ll know how to modify your tasks and improve productivity.
How much time do we spend on social media?
According to a Zippia study on social media usage at work, employees spend 12%of their work time browsing unproductive social media apps. In total, 77% of workers utilize social media at the workplace.
One of the most common reasons employees spend time on social media at work is to:
- Have a mental break from work,
- Reach out to family and friends, and
- Make connections with other professionals in their field.
Surprisingly, the same survey shows that 45% of companies don’t have any social media policies in the workplace. Even in companies with policies in place, some workers still choose to allocate time to social media for a quick mental break from their work.
Apart from policies, 36% of employers block social media in the workplace.
Be in control of your time — with Clockify
Tracking the exact time you spend at work, no matter the profession and type of employment, helps you:
- Measure how productive you really are,
- Calculate your billable hours,
- Calculate payroll, and
- Comply with the FLSA and DCAA requirements.
In Clockify, you can track time using:
- The work hours timer for tracking time on work activities in real time, or
- Timesheets and logging hours manually at the end of each day.
It’s important that you fill out the sheets regularly, while the information is still fresh in your mind.
If you need any help finding your way around Clockify features, just reach out to our 24/7 customer support team, and you’ll be in good hands.
Ready to take back control of your time and productivity?
