A Day in the Life: New SHARE working paper reveals how Europeans over 50 spend their hours

Berlin, 1st April 2026

­Drawing on SHARE's Time Use module introduced in Wave 8 — the first cross-national, longitudinal tool of its kind for adults aged 50 and over — a new SHARE working paper offers a revealing look at how older Europeans structure their daily lives, with striking differences by gender, education and country.

The paper, authored by SHARE BERLIN Institute researchers Magdalena Quezada Villanueva, Dr. Magdalena Gerum, Alexander Schumacher and Yasemin Yilmaz, uses data collected in Wave 8 of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and describes the design of this module.

Among the headline findings: education is a powerful predictor of time spent in paid work, with tertiary-educated older adults working nearly three times as long each day (119 minutes) as those without a secondary degree (44 minutes). Gender gaps are also clearly visible. Women spend roughly an hour more per day on household chores than men — a gap that widens to between 78 and 109 minutes in Southern Europe. Men, meanwhile, report more time in both paid work and leisure. Care work emerged as broadly equal between the sexes, with one notable exception: in Israel, women shoulder a substantially larger share.

Because the Time Use module has been incorporated into later SHARE waves, researchers will now be able to track whether these patterns hold steady over time or shift alongside changes in health, relationship status and proximity to end of life.

The full working paper series is available on the SHARE website.