> To be fair, 35 hours in qualified jobs is really rare and this limit is only working for jobs that are paid hourly (when your employer counts the number of hours you work to determine your pay).

Almost all white collar jobs in the UK are 35 hours

> The vast majority of those jobs are paid monthly and, even if legal maximums exists, they rarely matter since, by definition, in monthly paid jobs, hours are not counted.

35 hours is the expected salaried agreement, similar to 40 hours in the US. I expect most of Europe is 35 hours and that is protected by labor laws.

> Almost all white collar jobs in the UK are 35 hours

Are they really? I'm British, and I don't think I've ever seen an IT-based job contracted at only 35h per week. 37.5h or 40h seem to be the norm.

Yah definitely wrong on my part saying “almost all”, Maybe not at an IT specific company? But this is what I’ve seen in IT departments in finance (37.5, 9 - 5:30) and other large commerce (35, 9 - 5) companies, in my short career.

I know some people in France that say 35 hours is mandatory, but some work more anyway.

I think it means if you assume lunchtime is part of work or not. I'm in the UK, every job I've had is 9-5 or 9:30-5:30, with a 1 hour lunch break.

I'm in the UK and I don't think I've ever encountered a job with those hours.

The shortest "standard working hours" I'm aware of is 9.00-5.30 with 1 hour for lunch in places with formal time. That's 37.5 working hours.

In Germany, the official statistics for 2019 state that someone who was fully employed worked 41.0 hours per week on average, when part-time employed the number was 19.5 hours. The average over all employees was 34.8 hours.

Source: https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Arbeit/Arbeitsmarkt/Qualit... (in German). The article also contains a table of the average for a lot of European countries, which range from 30.4 in the Netherlands to 45.4 in Turkey. The article also states that the majority of the differences in the average working hours between the countries are typically due to a different ratio of part-time to full-time jobs.

In Sweden, we are supposed to work 40 hours a week. However, working time includes 2x15 min daily coffee breaks and 1 weekly "wellness" hour. So ... I guess it's a 36.5 hours a week country. :)