"Chick" on the job

Smoking breaks cost two weeks of working time per year

In principle, there are no statutory smoking breaks. But according to a survey of 1,000 smokers in Austria, more than two hours of their weekly working time is spent smoking during a five-day week. If you take vacations and public vacations into account, you end up with two weeks of additional free time per year.

If you work more than six hours a day, you are legally entitled to a 30-minute break. Apart from this, some employers want to keep track of exactly how often their employees take a cigarette break and see this documented as time off work - others are not so strict about it.

Five smoke breaks per day
In the survey conducted by Censuswide (on behalf of online retailer Haypp), 19 percent of respondents stated that they leave the workplace for a cigarette five times a day. 13 percent go outside four times a day, twelve percent three times. Almost one in ten respondents even take six timeouts a day.

In terms of the length of individual absences, five minutes was the most frequently mentioned answer (39 percent). Extrapolated to an entire working week, this adds up to around two hours. Some people shorten their regular lunch break to this extent so that the cigarette breaks would be balanced out. However, it can be assumed that not every smoker does this.