How we decide what counts
Every listing on 4dayweek.io is tagged by schedule type, and the tag has to be earned. This page sets out the criteria, how we verify an employer’s policy, and exactly how the work-life score is calculated.
A compressed 4x10 is not a 4-day week
This is the distinction we are asked about most, and the one most often reported incorrectly elsewhere. Both schedules give you a three-day weekend. Only one reduces the hours you work.
A genuine 4-day week
36 hours or less, usually 32, across four days, with no reduction in salary. Four 8-hour days instead of five. This is the 100-80-100 model: 100% of the pay, 80% of the time, 100% of the output.
737 tracked companies
A compressed 4x10
The same 40 hours packed into four 10-hour days. Your weekly total does not change, your working days get longer, and the evidence on wellbeing is mixed. We list these, clearly labelled as a compressed work week, and never count them as a 4-day week.
77 tracked companies
The practical consequence: if you filter for a 4-day week on this site, you will not be shown 10-hour days. Read the full comparison in 4x10 vs 4-day week.
When we say “full pay”
“Full pay” means the shorter week came with no cut to salary. We apply it to one schedule type only: the plain 4-day week. Two related schedules are explicitly not full pay, and are always labelled as such:
- 4 Day Work Week (80%) — four days at pro-rata pay. A real reduction in hours, at a proportionally reduced salary.
- Part Time — fewer than four days, pro-rata, and not a full-time role.
Because a filtered page can mix schedule types, we do not put a blanket “full pay” claim on a page unless every role on it qualifies. A page that mixes a 4-day week with a flexibility policy says “reduced hours” instead.
How a policy gets verified
We say tracked, not “verified”, for our company count — because most profiles are researched by us from public sources rather than claimed and confirmed by the employer. Where we make a stronger claim, it is backed by a reference we store against the record:
- Schedule policy— a public source stating the employer’s reduced-hours policy, stored per company and used when the tag is questioned.
- Awards— a “best place to work” badge requires a named issuer, a year, and a link to the award itself. No link, no badge.
- Listings — jobs are re-checked against their source continuously and expire when the source stops listing them, so a closed role does not linger.
What we do not do: we never estimate or impute a salary, and we never infer a policy an employer has not published. Where a figure is missing, the listing shows nothing rather than a guess. Roughly seven in eight listings do not publish a salary, and we would rather report that than fill the gap.
How the work-life score is calculated
Every company gets a score out of 100. It starts at 50, because a company has to have a meaningful work-life policy to be listed at all, and the remaining 50 points are earned across five components. Actual hours carry the most weight, deliberately: a shorter week is the thing that changes your life, not the policy’s branding.
| Component | Weight | How it works |
|---|---|---|
| Base | 50 pts | Every company on the platform already has a meaningful work-life policy, so 50 is the floor rather than zero. |
| Weekly hours | up to 22 pts | Linear from a 40-hour baseline: roughly 1.83 points per hour below 40, reaching the cap around 28 hours. Hours are the heaviest single factor by design. |
| Remote and flexibility | up to 13 pts | Remote policy (5), flexibility level (5), and published core hours (3). |
| Paid time off | up to 8 pts | Linear from a 15-day baseline at about 0.53 points per day, capped at 30 days. |
| Schedule type | −3 to +7 pts | The ranking in the table above. Negative values are floored to zero when a company publishes a week under 38 hours, so a genuinely short week is never penalised for its label. |
| Work-life benefits | up to 2 pts | Two points maximum across few-meetings culture, work-from-anywhere, sabbaticals and workations. |
How schedule types rank against each other
The ordering below is the one the whole platform uses. The primary criterion is how much it actually reduces your hours; pay basis is secondary. A genuine reduction in days or hours always outranks a flexibility or leave perk, however generous the perk sounds.
| Schedule | Points | Why |
|---|---|---|
| 4 Day Work Week | +7 | 36 hours or less, 100% salary. The only schedule we describe as "full pay". |
| 4 Day Work Week (80%) | +6 | Four days at pro-rata pay. Genuinely reduced hours, explicitly not full pay. |
| 9 Day Fortnight · Half Day Fridays · Rotating 4 Day | +5 | A genuine recurring reduction to around 36 hours at full pay. |
| Compressed Work Week · Part Time | +3 | Valuable but compromised. A compressed week gives a three-day weekend with NO cut in hours; part-time cuts hours but is pro-rata and not full-time. |
| Summer Fridays | +2 | Seasonal only. |
| Generous PTO | +1 | A guaranteed 30+ days is a real benefit, and ranks above "unlimited". |
| Flexible Hours | 0 | Full week, own schedule. |
| Unlimited PTO · Best Place to Work | −1 | "Unlimited" PTO correlates with FEWER days actually taken, so it ranks below guaranteed PTO. A verified award is surfaced as a badge, not a score boost. |
| Flex Fridays · No Meeting Days | −2 | A full week with a flexibility policy attached. |
| Generous Parental Leave | −3 | A full week; valuable, but not a reduction in ordinary working hours. |
Note the hours-primacy rule: where a schedule type scores negatively but the company publishes a week under 38 hours, the penalty is floored to zero. The shorter week is already rewarded by the hours component, and we do not want a label to override a measured fact.
Related
- The 4-day week job market in data — the figures these criteria produce, with the raw data.
- Press and data — key facts and how to cite them.
- About 4dayweek.io — who runs the site and why.