Part-time work has risen significantly in popularity in the past 40 years. The increase is greatest among male wage earners, but women still make up the largest group.
The number of people working part-time in Belgium has tripled since 1983, from 8.3% of wage earners four decades ago – around 243,000 people – to 26.4% in 2024 (around 1.1 million people), figures from Statbel, the Belgian statistics bureau, showed.
"The percentage of wage earners working part-time has gradually evolved from 8.3% in 1983, to exceed 25% for the first time in 2009," Statbel spokesperson Wendy Schelfaut said. "In the years that followed, the figure fluctuated between 25% and 27%. Since 2020, however, there seems to be a slight decline."
The increase is significant among men: in 2024, 12.8% of them worked part-time, in 1983 it was barely 1.9%. In absolute figures, the number of men working part-time has risen from 36,000 to 283,000 over this period.
However, it is still mainly female wage earners who work part-time. The figure doubled from 20.5% in 1983 to 40.5% in 2024. The rise in the proportion of women working part-time is strongly related to the increasing labour market participation of women in the same period.
"In 2024, 857,000 female wage earners had a part-time job, which is more than four times the number at the start of the measurement in 1983."
For both men and women, working four in five days is the most popular part-time regime.
Hospitality to healthcare
Part-time work is more popular in some sectors than others. It is most common in the hospitality and healthcare sectors, which struggle most with filling vacancies.
Approximately half of the jobs in the hospitality industry are part-time. The percentage is high for both men (40.5%) and women (61.6%).
In the human healthcare and social services sector, just under half of the employees work part-time. Among women, this is just over half (52.8%) and among men, about a quarter (25.3%).
In several sectors, between 30 and 40% of the employees have a part-time job, including the administrative and support services sector, the arts sector, education, wholesale and retail trade and the ‘other services’ sector.
"The differences by gender can sometimes be quite large," Schelfaut noted. The largest gap between men and women is in the administrative and support services sector. While 53.3% of women here work part-time, this is the case for only 16.8% of men.
The sector with the lowest proportion of part-time work is construction, which is also a sector with a small proportion of female employees.
