Seventy-four percent. That is the number traveling with Owl Labs' new State of Hybrid Work report: 74 percent of the American knowledge workers it surveyed (the usual label for white-collar desk jobs) say they do some work on Sundays. The company's press release says it found "Sunday work becoming standard," a subhead declares "The six-day workweek takes hold," and its CEO, Frank Weishaupt, told Fortune the four-day week had been "waved bye-bye a while ago." If you spent a few hours of last Sunday catching up on real work, it reads like a diagnosis.
Your Sunday was real. The six-day week, as a trend, is not: read the chart behind the headline and it shrinks to about one in five people working what you would call a full Sunday.
Owl Labs did not hide that. Its release puts both numbers in one sentence, 74 percent doing "some kind of work on a typical Sunday" and 21 percent saying it amounts to "a full or near-full workday," and Fortune printed both. The trouble is what got built on top. The report's chart, titled "Do workers clock in on Sunday?", offers five answers, shown below. The 74 is everyone who did not say "never," which includes the 18 percent who said "rarely" and the 11 percent who quickly check messages. By the release's own wording, someone who answers "rarely" is not working on a typical Sunday. The six-day-week headline counts "rarely" and a quick look at messages as a working Sunday.
The report itself is more measured than the release: "We've seen the introduction of work on Sundays, with 74% saying they work on their off days," it says, which it describes as "either extending the microshifting concept or allowing for deeper work (with fewer disruptions)." "Introduction" claims something new, and one survey can't show that. Last year's report, which I searched for Sunday, Saturday, or the weekend, has no figure to compare it with.
Then look at who answered. Owl Labs surveyed 2,000 full-time knowledge workers in the US; its UK release, published via Yahoo Finance, says the research firm Vitreous World ran the survey online in July 2026 across four countries, including the US. Two in three US respondents are managers, a group you would expect to answer more weekend email, though the report never breaks Sunday work down by role. And Owl Labs sells video-conferencing hardware. Its site, report page included, advertises Meeting Owl cameras, among them the Meeting Owl 3 at $1,099, and the release links Sunday work to meeting time lost to technical difficulties. None of that makes the figures wrong. It is worth knowing who is doing the framing.
In fairness, the release's own suggested fix is not a camera but microshifting, splitting the day into shorter blocks: "If employees had that flexibility built into the week, they might not feel the need to reclaim time on Sundays." Weishaupt pushed back, by Fortune's account only a little, when its reporter said the report sounded like nightmare fuel. "I don't know if I see it that way," he said, then ran through the report's findings and conceded, "I just said a bunch of things that don't sound really good in that mixture." In the same interview he described Sunday hours as time traded for a weekday: "If you're taking that Tuesday afternoon or that Thursday morning… you might be giving it back," he said, "but as long as that Sunday's not additive to the whole picture and you can make it work, I see that as flexibility."
For an outside check, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics runs the American Time Use Survey, which asks people to account for one specific day rather than describe a typical Sunday. In the 2025 results, released in June, 30 percent of employed people worked on an average weekend day, the same as the year before. Among full-time workers, the share working on an average Saturday, Sunday, or holiday was 29.6 percent, down from 34 percent in 2019. The federal survey covers every kind of job, so it cannot rule out office jobs creeping into Sunday. What it does show is no nationwide rise in weekend work through 2025.
The four-day week is still wanted, too. Asked what makes a prospective employer appealing, 28 percent of Owl Labs' respondents picked a four-day week, second only to flexible hours and about the same as in last year's report. An analysis in Nature Human Behaviour of 2,896 employees at 141 organizations in six countries found well-being gains from a four-day week after the organizations first reorganized their work.
So what survives? In this survey, 21 percent say Sunday is a full or near-full workday, and another 24 percent often put in a few hours. If you regularly work Sundays, trend or not, you have a week that does not fit in five days, and that is a design problem. Owl Labs' own list of what drives meeting fatigue is a fair place to start: meetings that run long, too many of them, and ones that should have been an email.
For four weeks, write down the hours you work each Sunday and what they went on. Then take the list to your manager and say: "I've been working about this many hours most Sundays to keep up. Which of these can move, shrink, or stop?" A number on paper is harder to wave away than a feeling.
