4-Day Work Week Jobs: Remote Roles and Companies Hiring

Most of us learned the five-day week the way we learned the alphabet: it was just there. But the schedule was designed for factory floors a century ago, and a growing number of companies have decided it doesn't fit knowledge work anymore.

4-day work week jobs are full-time roles worked on a four-day schedule. That's the whole definition, and the word that matters in it is full-time. You keep your salary, your benefits, and your career track — you just fit the work into four days, either by working fewer hours or by working longer days.

If you're hunting for one, the honest picture is that these roles are real, still relatively rare, and clustered at companies that already measure people by what they finish rather than how long they're online. That last part is why we care about them here — it's the same cultural shift that makes asynchronous work possible.

What Is a 4-Day Work Week Job?

To put it simply, a 4-day work week job is a full-time position where the standard schedule is four working days instead of five. There are two very different versions, and listings don't always say which one they mean.

The 32-Hour Week: Four Day Work Week Jobs at Full Pay

This is the version people usually picture. Four day work week jobs in this model run about 32 hours — four eight-hour days — with the fifth day simply removed. Pay and benefits stay at 100%. The company's bet is that a rested team focused on outcomes produces the same results in less time, and the published pilots (more on those below) have mostly borne that out.

The trade is honest: you're expected to protect the four days you do work. Fewer meetings, less busywork, more finishing.

The Compressed Work Week: 4 Day 10 Hour Work Week Jobs

A compressed work week keeps the full 40 hours and folds them into four days. 4 day 10 hour work week jobs are common in healthcare, public-sector, manufacturing, and shift-based support teams — anywhere coverage has to be maintained and the schedule is negotiated per person or per team.

You still get the three-day weekend. You also get 10-hour days, which is a genuine difference if you have a school pickup at 3 p.m. Both models are full-time; only one of them shortens your total hours.

32-Hour Week vs. Compressed Work Week vs. Async Flexible Hours

There's a third option worth putting next to the other two, because for many people it delivers most of what they wanted from a four-day week without needing to find one of the rare roles. Here's how they compare:

	32-hour week	Compressed 4×10	Async flexible hours
Hours per week	~32	40	~40, self-scheduled
Days worked	4	4	Usually 5, shaped however you like
Pay	Full salary	Full salary	Full salary
Who decides your day	Company sets the four days	Company or team sets the four days	You, within a small overlap window
Ability to take Wednesday afternoon off	Depends on the team	Rarely — days are long and fixed	Normal — output is what's measured
How common the roles are	Rare, growing	Uncommon, mostly shift-based fields	Widely available at remote-first companies
Where to look	Dedicated 4-day boards	Company-by-company, often negotiated	Async-first job boards

Notice what the three columns share: full pay, and a company that has stopped counting hours as the measure of work. That's the real prerequisite for any of them.

Companies With 4 Day Work Weeks

The list of companies with 4 day work weeks is shorter than the headlines suggest, and it changes — some adopt it permanently, some run it as a pilot, some quietly go back. These are the well-documented cases worth knowing:

Buffer moved to a four-day work week in 2020 and has kept it since, one of the longest-running examples at a fully remote company.
Bolt, the checkout company, adopted a permanent four-day week in 2022.
Kickstarter piloted a four-day week in 2022 as part of the 4 Day Week Global trial.
Basecamp runs 32-hour "summer hours" — four-day weeks during the summer months — rather than a year-round change.
The 4 Day Week Global UK pilot in 2022 put roughly 60 companies on a four-day schedule; most of them kept it when the trial ended.

Two patterns stand out. 4 day work week companies tend to be small to mid-sized, and they tend to have a written, output-first culture already in place. Buffer, for example, had been publicly documenting how it works for years before it cut a day. The shorter week wasn't a perk bolted on; it was a consequence of already trusting people to manage their own time.

That's the pattern we'd look for in any employer, four-day week or not.

4 Day Work Week Remote Jobs: Where They Actually Are

Here's the straight answer. 4 day work week remote jobs are concentrated in a handful of places:

Dedicated boards. 4dayweek.io is the best-known, and it's the right first stop if a four-day schedule is your non-negotiable. It lists roles at companies that have committed to the schedule, and it separates 32-hour weeks from compressed ones.
The careers pages of the companies above. Buffer, Bolt, and the pilot alumni hire directly, and their listings say what the schedule is.
Negotiated arrangements inside companies that don't advertise them. This is quieter than the first two, and it's where the most roles actually live — more on how to ask below.

4 Day Work Week Companies vs. Async-First Companies

We should be clear about our own board. The async-first companies on Working Async — GitLab, Automattic, Zapier, PostHog, Remote.com, and the rest — do not currently advertise a formal four-day week in their listings. If a listing on our board has a four-day schedule, it will say so; none do at the time of writing, and we'd rather tell you that than let you assume.

What they do share with the four-day-week companies is the part that makes a four-day week workable in the first place. They publish written handbooks, keep required overlap to a minimum, and judge work by what ships. In practice that means the flexibility people want from a shorter week — a Friday afternoon that's yours, a walk at 2 p.m., a week compressed around a trip — is often already available on a normal full-time schedule, without anyone needing to call it a policy. Our post on remote jobs with flexible hours covers how that plays out day to day.

So the honest framing is this: if you want a guaranteed four-day week, use the dedicated boards. If you want the culture that produces four-day weeks — and the flexibility that comes with it right now — look at async-first employers, then check each listing and ask in the interview.

The Trade-Offs of Jobs With 4 Day Work Weeks

With everything in life there are trade-offs, and jobs with 4 day work weeks have a few that don't make it into the headlines.

Drawbacks:

There are far fewer of them. A search that filters for a four-day week shrinks the market dramatically. If you're early in your career or in a specialized field, you may be choosing between the schedule and the role you actually want.
They skew senior and technical. The companies that have adopted the schedule are mostly software and services firms, and the roles they post lean toward experienced engineers, designers, and marketers. Junior openings are scarcer still.
Some are pilots, not policies. A company "trialing" a four-day week can end the trial. Ask whether it's permanent, how long it's been running, and what would make them reverse it.
Compressed days are long. Four 10-hour days with a commute or a kid's bedtime in the middle can be harder than five eight-hour ones. Be honest with yourself about which model you're actually after.
Customer-facing roles still need coverage. Support, sales, and success teams on a four-day week usually run staggered days off — your "day off" may be Tuesday, not Friday, and it may rotate.
Pay can be reviewed. The well-known programs keep pay at 100%, but not every employer does, and a negotiated 32-hour arrangement sometimes comes with a proportional salary. Get the number in writing.

None of these are reasons to skip a four-day week. They're reasons to read the listing twice and ask the questions before you accept.

How to Find 4 Day Work Week Jobs (and How to Ask for One)

Because the pool is small, the search is different from a normal job hunt. You're looking for a culture first and a title second.

Start with the dedicated board. Check 4dayweek.io for roles where the schedule is already settled, and note which are 32-hour and which are compressed.
Read for how work is measured. Whether a listing mentions four days or not, look for the language that predicts flexibility: "async-first," "written culture," "we measure outcomes," a public handbook, a stated overlap window. Our async rubric is the checklist we use to score exactly this.
Shortlist async-first employers. Browse the company profiles and the senior openings on our board — that's where output-first cultures are concentrated, even without a formal four-day policy.
Ask directly in the interview. "Does anyone on the team work a four-day or compressed schedule?" is a fair question, and the answer tells you more about the company than the perks page does.
Apply on the company's own site. Every listing on Working Async links straight to the employer's careers page. No fees, no middleman.

How to Ask an Employer for a Compressed Work Week or 32-Hour Week

Most four-day arrangements are never advertised; they're proposed by an employee and agreed to by a manager. Making that proposal well is an async skill, because the whole case has to stand up in writing without you in the room.

What a strong proposal includes:

Which model you want, in one sentence. "A 32-hour week at my current salary" and "the same 40 hours across Monday to Thursday" are different asks with different objections. Pick one.
The output case, not the hours case. List what you delivered in the last quarter and how you'd keep delivering it — which meetings you'd drop, which work you'd batch, which handoffs you'd document so nothing waits on you.
A coverage plan. Who picks up urgent questions on your day off, and how (a documented runbook, a shared inbox, a rotation).
A trial with a review date. Three months, then a written check-in against the same output metrics. It lowers the risk for your manager and gives you a date to make it permanent.
The written version. Send the document before the conversation, so the decision-maker can read it, think, and answer without a live pitch. That's asynchronous communication doing what it does best.

If you already work at a company that runs on written proposals and measures results, this is a normal document to send. If you don't, the reaction to it will tell you a lot.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a 4-day work week job?

A full-time position worked on a four-day schedule. It's either a 32-hour week (four eight-hour days at full pay) or a compressed week (the full 40 hours in four 10-hour days). Both keep your salary and benefits; only the first shortens your total hours.

Are 4-day work week jobs full-time?

Yes. The four-day week is a way of arranging a full-time job, not a reduced one — full salary, full benefits, same career track. If a listing offers four days at reduced pay, that's a different arrangement and it should say so plainly.

Which companies have a 4-day work week?

Buffer has run one since 2020, Bolt made it permanent in 2022, Kickstarter piloted it in 2022 through 4 Day Week Global, and Basecamp uses 32-hour summer hours. Most companies in the 2022 UK pilot kept the schedule afterward. The full list changes often, so check a company's own careers page before assuming.

Do 4-day work week jobs pay less?

Usually not. The best-known programs keep pay at 100% for a 32-hour week, and a compressed 4×10 week is the same 40 hours at the same pay. Individually negotiated arrangements sometimes come with a proportional salary, so confirm the number in writing before you agree.

How do I ask my employer for a 4-day work week?

Put it in writing before you discuss it. Name the model you want, make the case on output rather than hours, include a plan for coverage on your day off, and propose a three-month trial with a review date. Managers say yes to proposals that remove their risk, and a written trial does exactly that.

Fewer Hours Start With Better-Measured Ones

The four-day week isn't a trick. It's what happens when a company stops measuring time and starts measuring results — and then notices it doesn't need all the time it was measuring. The employers who've made that shift are the ones worth applying to, whether or not they've put a number on the days.

→ Browse full-time roles at async-first companies

→ Meet the remote-first companies that measure output, not hours

→ See how we score a company's async culture

Work fewer, better hours — and be judged on what you finish.