[Brashman]

My experience in the US is the same. 9-5 is just a saying. More typically a work day is 9-6 or 8-5 to account for a 1 hour non-paid lunch.

[Nicholas_C]

I'm not really sure where the term 9-5 came from considering I've never had a job or known anyone who actually worked 9-5 with a one hour lunch.

[pmjordan]

7.5h of work with 30 mins lunch break is fairly common in Europe; when my wife was an accountant in London, she had that schedule. In the UK, the typical hours for that would indeed be 9-5. (In some parts of Europe, 8-4 seems more common)

[eigenvector]

7.25 hours of work plus 1 hour of unpaid lunch and including 0.5 hours of paid breaks is the standard in the Canadian public sector. That is, 9:00 am to 5:15 pm, 7.25 hours of which are paid and 6.75 of which are spent working.

[antjanus]

Yeah, it's what annoys the crap out of me. A 9-5 week means you worked 7 hours a day. That's a 35 hour week.

:/

[collyw]

Huh, why does that annoy you? Too little or too much? That seems kind of normal to me (well less and less so). Anywhere between 35 and 40 hour week I would class as normal (though the trend is towards 40).

[antjanus]

Oh, it's totally normal. What's annoying is that the saying is "nine to five" which is supposed to represent "full time" while it doesn't whatsoever.

In the US (at least for office jobs), full time is 40 hours, either 8-5, 9-6, or somewhere in between. Because of the 1 hour break.

I think that 9-5 is a total acceptable amount of time to work.

[stuaxo]

Pretty sure that's all I get to bill for at my current client and about what I work.

[k-mcgrady]

The majority of retailers seem to open from 9am-5pm in my experience with workers showing up 10 mins before opening.

[Bahamut]

I've never had that - 9-5 from my experience meant working 7 hours with a 1 hour lunch. Of course YMMV, but I don't take any employer seriously when they say otherwise - if they want to raise hell, I'd probably just walk.