What our unpaid overtime is worth

The TUC has calculated just how much the extra hours we put in each week are worth.

We worked a staggering two billion hours of unpaid overtime last year, according to figures by the TUC. And it calculates that adds up to 7.2 hours per person per week, or around £5,300 per person over the course of a year.

Around 5.3 million of us are now putting in some extra unpaid hours, up by over a million since the TUC began compiling records.

Workers in the West Midlands put in the most extra hours a week, working an average of 8.3 hours unpaid overtime. London and Yorkshire and the Humber come in joint second with 8.2 hours apiece.

People in Wales and Scotland work the lowest amount, but still put in an extra 5.9 and 6 hours respectively.

And the West Midlands has also seen the biggest growth in people working extra hours, with 56,000 more workers coming in early or working late.

Here’s how the unpaid overtime breaks down across the UK:

Region	Number of people doing unpaid overtime	Average number of hours of unpaid overtime per week
South East England	875,000	7
London	848,000	8.2
Eastern England	564,000	7.4
North West	500,000	6.9
South West	462,000	6.9
Scotland	417,000	6
West Midlands	406,000	8.3
Yorkshire & the Humber	389,000	8.2
East Midlands	356,000	7.5
Wales	193,000	5.9
North East England	177,000	6.2
Northern Ireland	66,000	7.5

The TUC has called for “a small number of employers” to stop exploiting their staff and, more generally, “changing work practices and [an end to] the UK’s culture of pointless presenteeism”.

Recent figures by the Office for National Statistics found that we work more hours than almost all of our European counterparts, with the exceptions of Austria and Greece.

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