Hennings, who works under the tattooing name Lordmayor, said the variety and creativity of his job along with a good work environment kept him motivated during 14-hour days.
“It’s always fun coming to work,” he said. “There’s always something different going on with the people who come into the shop. Working on the different [tattoo] designs for people is refreshing – it resets the mind.”
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The census showed full-time body artists, which includes body piercers and tattoo artists, average 42 hours and 56 minutes per week.
Small business people such as Hennings often work relatively long hours to keep their firms afloat.
A snap poll by peak body Business NSW last month asked 95 small business owners how their weekly work hours compared with a year ago. About half (49 per cent) said they were working at least 10 more hours each week than last year, while 13 per cent reported doing at least five additional hours (30 per cent said about the same hours and only 8 per cent were doing fewer hours).
Hennings says he often works from 10am to beyond midnight at his tattoo business.Credit: Sitthixay Ditthavong
Gerardo Barrios, who owns Don Adan’s Coffee Tree at Mosman and Don Adan Coffee Too at Cremorne, said he and his wife often work after hours to keep up with paperwork, especially business compliance tasks.
“The cafes can be quite hands-on; there’s always someone or something wanting your time,” he said. “You can’t do paperwork when you’re engaged with customers … so you have to dedicate time outside the cafe just to do the admin.”
Barrios estimates he and his wife work “50 to 60” hours a week, and his two cafes are in suburbs where workers do relatively long average full-time weeks (Mosman workers clock up 45.6 hours and workers in Cremorne 44.3 hours).
“When I talk to my peers, and my customers, it seems that everybody seems to be working much longer than 10 years ago,” Barrios said.
Full-timers in Sydney average 42.7 hours work a week, census data shows. Credit: Louie Douvis
Business NSW chief executive Daniel Hunter said the burden of regulation was a big factor in the long hours worked by many small business owners.
“Small business owners need solutions, not more hurdles,” he said. “Staff shortages, rising costs and red tape are pushing them to work longer hours just to keep their doors open. Many feel they’ve got no choice but to do everything themselves … firing up the laptop after the kids have gone to bed is a common thing.”
Full-timers across most of Sydney’s eastern suburbs, the north shore, inner west and north-western suburbs had longer work hours than the citywide average. The same went for a band of commuter suburbs in the city’s outer west and south-west.
But overall, full-time work hours are fairly consistent across Greater Sydney; in more than 60 per cent of Sydney suburbs, full-timers work between 40 and 42.9 hours a week, on average.
There were only three Sydney suburbs where full-timers reported working less than an average of 40 hours a week: Nirimba Fields (39.7 hours) and Melonba (39.8) in the city’s north-west, and Airds in the south-west (39.9).
KPMG urban economist Terry Rawnsley said differences in work hours across suburbs were influenced by the composition of the workforce.
“In some areas, especially western Sydney, a lot of people are employed in sectors which tend to have typical work hours that are a little lower than average, such as retail,” he said.
A few well-paid occupations dominate the suburbs where full-timers worked over 45 hours per week.
In Balgowlah Heights, Birchgrove, Hunters Hill, Millers Point and Point Piper, the most common job was chief executive officer; full-time chief executives work 49.5 hours per week on average and ranked 72 out of the 920 jobs the Australian Bureau of Statistics has data for when it comes to the longest average hours.
Solicitor was the most common job in Darling Point, Northbridge, Paddington, The Rocks and Queens Park. They work 46.5 hours a week on average, and rank 144 out of 920 for hours worked.
In Longueville and Castlecrag, it was a tie between solicitors and chief executives for most common jobs; there were 40 of each occupation living in Longueville and 58 of each in Castlecrag.
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Sydney’s most common job – general sales assistant – had average full-time hours of 40.5 hours, about two hours less than the citywide average.
There were 3.1 million full-time workers in NSW last month, having climbed by about half a million during the past decade.
The share of female full-time workers has risen steadily over that period: in August 2015, about 37 per cent of full-time employees in NSW were women, but that figure had climbed to 41 per cent by August 2025.
Average weekly work hours in some towns in regional NSW easily eclipsed Sydney’s longest working suburbs.
Cobar takes the crown for the longest weekly work hours in NSW at 53.2 hours per week, on average, followed by Boggabri (52.2 hours), Dunedoo (50.2 hours), Trangie (50.1) and West Wyalong (49.8).
Cobar, Boggabri and West Wyalong all have a high share of mining employees, while farming work is common in Dunedoo and Trangie.
The mining town of Nullagine in northern Western Australia topped the national list for work hours for full-timers with an average of almost 76 hours a week.
