Teacher workload statistics show that the job extends well beyond classroom teaching. In England, full-time teachers reported 50.1 hours in a term-time week in 2025, while full-time leaders reported 56.5 hours. International evidence also shows that teaching is often less than half of teachers’ task-based working time, with planning, marking, administration, and behaviour follow-up taking substantial shares.
Table of contents
- Weekly workload in England
- Workload by school phase
- Classroom teaching time
- Administrative and behaviour-related work
- How workload perceptions are changing
- International workload and time allocation
- U.S. teacher hours and comparisons
Weekly workload in England
The Working lives of teachers and leaders: wave 4 summary report reports self-reported estimates for the most recent term-time working week in England. Across all teachers in the survey, reported weekly workload fell from 48.7 hours in 2022 to 49.4 hours in 2023, 48.1 hours in 2024, and 46.9 hours in 2025. These are term-time figures, not year-round weekly averages.
Full-time teachers reported 50.1 hours per term-time week in 2025, down from 51.2 hours in 2024. The leadership figures were higher. Leaders reported 57.4 hours in 2023, 56.6 hours in 2024, and 55.5 hours in 2025. Among full-time leaders, the reported figure declined from 58.2 hours in 2023 to 57.6 hours in 2024 and 56.5 hours in 2025.
| England subgroup | Earlier reported week | 2025 reported week |
|---|---|---|
| Full-time teachers | 51.2 hours in 2024 | 50.1 hours |
| Leaders | 57.4 hours in 2023 | 55.5 hours |
| Full-time leaders | 58.2 hours in 2023 | 56.5 hours |
The distribution of long working weeks adds context to the averages. In the 2025 England survey, 37% of full-time teachers reported 50–59 hours in their latest full working week, while 15% reported 60–69 hours. The corresponding shares for full-time leaders were 43% for 50–59 hours and 32% for 60–69 hours. Because these figures describe bands in one latest full week, they should not be treated as a measure of every week or as a direct conversion from the averages above.
Workload by school phase
Reported hours varied by school phase and role. Full-time primary teachers in England reported 51.4 hours per week in 2025, compared with 53.2 hours in 2022. Full-time secondary teachers reported 49.3 hours in 2025, compared with 51.2 hours in 2022. The reported figure for full-time teachers in special schools, pupil referral units, or alternative provision was 47.4 hours in 2025, compared with 48.2 hours in 2022.
Leaders reported longer weeks in each of these phase groupings. Full-time primary leaders reported 56.5 hours in 2025, compared with 57.2 hours in 2022. Full-time secondary leaders reported 57.3 hours, compared with 58.6 hours in 2022. Full-time leaders in special schools, pupil referral units, or alternative provision reported 52.8 hours in 2025, compared with 54.7 hours in 2022.
The 2023-to-2025 comparisons show a similar downward pattern in reported hours. Full-time primary teachers moved from 53.9 to 51.4 hours, and primary leaders from 57.9 to 56.5 hours. Full-time secondary teachers moved from 51.4 to 49.3 hours, and secondary leaders from 59.1 to 57.3 hours. In special schools, pupil referral units, or alternative provision, full-time teachers moved from 49.3 to 47.4 hours, while full-time leaders moved from 55.5 to 52.8 hours.
These comparisons are useful for identifying differences between phases, but the teacher and leader categories are not interchangeable. The England report also cautions that the figures are self-reported estimates and that teacher, middle-leader, senior-leader, leader, and full-time subgroups should be kept distinct.
Classroom teaching time
Direct classroom time is only one component of the reported working week. Full-time teachers with teaching responsibilities in England taught an average of 23.3 classroom hours in the 2025 reference week. The comparable figures were 23.3 hours in 2024, 24.0 hours in 2023, and 23.7 hours in 2022.
Full-time leaders with teaching responsibilities taught less classroom time on average: 11.8 hours in the 2025 reference week, compared with 12.4 hours in 2024, 12.8 hours in 2023, and 13.3 hours in 2022. In 2025, 67% of full-time leaders with teaching responsibilities taught fewer than 15 hours in the reference week.
Teaching time also differed by phase. In 2025, average classroom teaching time was 25.6 hours for full-time primary teachers, 21.4 hours for full-time secondary teachers, and 22.2 hours for full-time teachers in special schools, pupil referral units, or alternative provision. Across all full-time teachers with teaching responsibilities, 38% taught 20–24 hours in the reference week.
The reference week matters here: classroom hours describe the selected week used by the survey, while the workload figures above refer to a most recent term-time working week. They are related measures, but they are not identical survey concepts.
Administrative and behaviour-related work
Teachers’ workload includes tasks that happen before, after, and between lessons. In England in 2025, 71% of teachers and middle leaders said they spent too much time on general administrative work. That was lower than the 75% reported in both 2022 and 2023.
Behaviour follow-up was another prominent demand. In 2025, 59% of teachers and middle leaders said they spent too much time following up behaviour incidents. The corresponding figures were 57% in 2023 and 50% in 2022. For classroom management, this indicates that behaviour-related work was a reported workload issue even as the broader long-week measures declined.
Other non-teaching tasks also affected the working day in 2025. Half of teachers and middle leaders, or 50%, said they spent too much time recording, inputting, monitoring, or analysing pupil-performance data. A further 41% said they spent too much time on individual lesson planning or preparation, while 38% said they spent too much time marking or correcting pupils’ work.
These percentages describe perceptions of excessive time, not the share of each person’s week spent on a task. They therefore complement, rather than replace, the hour-based workload measures.
How workload perceptions are changing
Only 17% of teachers and leaders in England agreed that they had an acceptable workload in both 2022 and 2023. The share rose to 22% in 2024 and 26% in 2025. This is an improvement in reported perception, but it still means that fewer than three in ten agreed with the statement in 2025.
Perceived control also changed. In 2025, 39% of teachers and leaders agreed that they had sufficient control over their workload, compared with 26% in 2022. The increase in perceived control occurred alongside a decrease in reported weekly hours, although the survey statistics do not establish that one caused the other.
Taken together, the England findings show several dimensions of workload: reported hours, direct teaching time, time spent on specific tasks, and views about acceptability and control. A school can therefore have a lower average weekly figure while still facing specific pressures around administration, behaviour follow-up, data work, planning, or marking.
International workload and time allocation
The OECD’s The demands of teaching: Results from TALIS 2024 covers full-time lower-secondary teachers and uses the most recent complete calendar week. On average, these teachers reported working almost half an hour more per week than in TALIS 2018. Total working time increased in 12 participating education systems and was stable in about half of them.
Changes varied considerably. Reported total working time increased by almost 5 hours per week in Brazil and by about 9 hours in Korea between TALIS 2018 and 2024. It decreased in nine participating education systems, by about 4 hours per week in Japan and by more than 14 hours in Kazakhstan.
TALIS 2024 also shows how working time was allocated. Teaching accounted for about 43% of full-time lower-secondary teachers’ task-based working time on average. It accounted for at least 50% only in Finland and the French Community of Belgium, while it was below one-third in Azerbaijan, Japan, Shanghai, Singapore, and Uzbekistan.
Lesson planning averaged 14% of task-based working time and marking or correcting averaged 9%. Administrative tasks averaged about 6%, exceeding 9% in Japan and reaching about 12% in Korea. TALIS notes that task-specific hours are reported separately and may not sum to reported total workload, so these percentages should not be combined into a complete weekly timetable.
U.S. teacher hours and comparisons
The RAND report All Work and No Pay — Teachers’ Perceptions of Their Pay and Hours Worked describes a U.S. survey of K–12 teachers during the 2022–2023 school year. U.S. teachers reported working 53 hours per week, compared with 46 hours for working adults in the same dataset.
In RAND’s 2023 teacher survey, 88% of teachers reported working more than 40 hours per week, compared with 47% of working adults. Sixteen percent of teachers reported working more than 60 hours per week. The share was 27% among Black teachers and 21% among Hispanic teachers, compared with 14% among White teachers.
Hours were also linked to satisfaction. Only 24% of U.S. teachers were satisfied with their total weekly hours worked, compared with 55% of working adults. These RAND figures describe a U.S. K–12 population and are not directly comparable with the England or OECD measures without accounting for different definitions, survey populations, and reference periods.
For that reason, the clearest use of teacher workload statistics is to compare patterns within each source: England’s term-time workload and task pressures, TALIS’s lower-secondary international time allocation, and RAND’s U.S. teacher-versus-worker comparisons. The measures point in the same broad direction—teaching work includes substantial activity outside direct classroom instruction—but they should not be merged into a single global average.