Sales Workers Put in 7.44 Hours on an Average Workday
How many hours sales workers actually work: a Hollerly analysis of the American Time Use Survey. Published October 2026.
Key findings
- US sales workers averaged 7.44 hours of work at their main job on the days they worked in 2025, according to the BLS American Time Use Survey.
- That is 8 minutes less than the 7.58-hour average for all employed workers in 2025.
- Sales workers' hours on days worked rose from 7.14 in 2019 to 7.44 in 2025, an increase of 18 minutes.
- On an average day in 2025, 67.1% of employed sales workers did some work at their main job, counting weekends and holidays.
- Sales ranked 7th of 10 major occupation groups for hours on days worked in 2025, ahead of management, business and financial occupations (7.39 hours).
- Sales workers who went into a workplace in 2025 averaged 7.49 hours of work there on those days.
- From 2021 to 2025, sales workers averaged 7.42 hours on days worked, compared with 7.34 hours from 2015 to 2019.
A sales workday runs just under 7.5 hours
The American Time Use Survey (ATUS) asks a large national sample of Americans to account for every minute of a single day. That makes it one of the few public sources that measures the hours people actually work, rather than the hours their schedule says they work.
In 2025, people in sales and related occupations who worked on a given day spent an average of 7.44 hours working at their main job. Employed people as a whole averaged 7.58 hours. The gap was 8 minutes.
Sales hours fell from 7.76 in 2015 to a low of 7.14 in 2019, then climbed back. They have stayed between 7.37 and 7.45 hours every year since 2021. Single-year ATUS figures for one occupation group move around because of sample size, so the multi-year averages are a steadier read: 7.34 hours a day for 2015 to 2019 and 7.42 hours for 2021 to 2025.
| Year | Sales and related: hours on days worked | All employed: hours on days worked | Difference (minutes) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 7.76 | 7.54 | +13 |
| 2019 | 7.14 | 7.54 | -24 |
| 2021 | 7.37 | 7.66 | -17 |
| 2022 | 7.40 | 7.62 | -13 |
| 2023 | 7.45 | 7.69 | -14 |
| 2024 | 7.43 | 7.51 | -5 |
| 2025 | 7.44 | 7.58 | -8 |
How sales compares with other jobs
Among the 10 major occupation groups BLS publishes, sales ranked 7th for hours on days worked in 2025. Installation, maintenance and repair workers put in the longest days at 8.59 hours, followed by production at 8.26 hours. Management, business and financial workers averaged 7.39 hours, slightly less than sales. Service workers had the shortest days at 7.27 hours.
Sales workers were also among the more likely to work on any given day. In 2025, 67.1% of employed sales workers did some work on an average day, a figure that includes weekends and holidays. That compares with 70.9% for management, business and financial occupations and 60.0% for service occupations.
What it means for sales teams
A 7.44-hour day is the whole day: prospecting, meetings, admin, CRM updates and internal calls all fit inside it. The figure gives sales leaders a realistic baseline when they plan activity targets, since any time spent on manual tasks comes out of the same fixed block of hours.
Hollerly's LinkedIn message automation tool writes each message with AI and follows up on LinkedIn and email until someone replies.
About the data
- Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, American Time Use Survey (ATUS), annual news release Table 7, "Employed persons working on main job at home, workplace, and time spent working at each location by class of worker, occupation, and earnings," data years 2015 to 2025. The 2025 results (released June 2026) are the latest available. The 2020 figures come from Table 5 of the 2020 release, which covers May 10 to December 31 only.
- Measure: average hours worked at the main job on days worked, for employed people age 15 and over. Days include weekdays, weekends and holidays. Work travel is excluded.
- All employed figure: Table 7 has no total row, so this is the average of the published wage-and-salary and self-employed rows, weighted by the number of people in each who worked on an average day.
- Occupation group: "Sales and related" is a broad Census occupation group. It includes retail salespeople and cashiers as well as B2B sales representatives and sales managers.
- Limitations: ATUS estimates for a single occupation group in a single year have wide sampling error, so small year-to-year changes may not be meaningful. BLS suspended collection from mid-March to mid-May 2020, and 2020 figures are not directly comparable with other years. Starting with 2020 data, occupations follow the 2018 Census occupation classification, which BLS says is not strictly comparable with earlier years. Multi-year averages are simple means of the annual figures, computed by Hollerly.
Sources
- BLS ATUS 2025 results, Table 7: bls.gov/news.release/atus.t07.htm
- BLS ATUS 2024 results: bls.gov/news.release/archives/atus_06262025.htm
- BLS ATUS 2023 results: bls.gov/news.release/archives/atus_06272024.htm
- BLS ATUS 2022 results: bls.gov/news.release/archives/atus_06222023.htm
- BLS ATUS 2021 results: bls.gov/news.release/archives/atus_06232022.htm
- BLS ATUS 2020 results: bls.gov/news.release/archives/atus_07222021.htm
- BLS ATUS 2019 results: bls.gov/news.release/archives/atus_06252020.htm
- BLS ATUS 2015 to 2018 results: bls.gov/news.release/archives/atus_06242016.htm, bls.gov/news.release/archives/atus_06272017.htm, bls.gov/news.release/archives/atus_06282018.htm, bls.gov/news.release/archives/atus_06192019.htm
Source: Hollerly, How many hours sales workers actually work, October 2026. https://hollerlyai.com/research/sales-hours-worked
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