How Many Hours Do Your Part Time Staff Want To Work? Nobody In Your Business Has Asked Them

About one in five want more, and nine in ten of those could start inside a month. The Australian Bureau of Statistics published the count on 28 October: of the 4.2 million Australians who usually work part time, 803,500 preferred more hours. Outstaffer sells hiring and the system that holds the people data, so read this as a disclosure of interest rather than neutral advice. Our own HRIS would already carry your version of this number.

Most founders running two open ads have never looked at it.

The cheapest hours in your business are already on your payroll

The ABS counted 4.2 million part-time workers aged 18 to 75. Of those, 803,500 said they would prefer to work more hours, and 90 per cent of them were available to start working more within four weeks. That is roughly 723,000 people already employed, already inducted, and wanting a bigger share of the week.

The number gets sharper at the bottom of the distribution. Among the 1.0 million people working fewer than 16 hours a week, 22 per cent want more. In the 16 to 34 hour band it is 18 per cent, or 576,500 people.

How many hours do your part time staff want to work, and can they start?

Nineteen per cent of them want more, and nine in ten of those can start inside four weeks. Both figures sit in the same release. The second matters more, because four weeks beats most recruitment processes, and all of the slow ones.

The arithmetic on hours you already pay for

Take a practice or an agency with six part-timers. At the national rate, one of them wants more hours. Finding that person costs you one conversation. Finding them outside costs an ad, a shortlist, an interview round, an offer and a notice period, and the seat stays empty throughout. We have priced what that empty seat does to the month before.

The extra hours also arrive pre-qualified on the only two things recruitment cannot test quickly. The person knows your systems. You know whether they are any good.

The honest case for ignoring all of this

Willingness is not capability, and that is the real counter-argument. The seat you want to open is usually open because you are short of a skill, not short of hours. Somebody who does twenty hours of client admin wanting thirty does not become the second bookkeeper you actually need.

The ABS supports that caution from the other side. Among people who were looking for work and available to start, 15.7 per cent named lacking the necessary training, qualifications or experience as their main difficulty in finding a job. Capability is genuinely scarce. Hours are not.

Availability is also lumpier than the headline. Of the 803,500, some 83,500 could not start within four weeks, and the main reasons were caring for children at 38 per cent and study at 15 per cent.

When does wanting more hours not help you?

When the open role needs a qualification, a registration or a signature the person does not have. Capacity and capability are different purchases, and a written definition of the work is what tells you which one you are short of.

Related reading

• Twenty Hours Is A Real Job. The Market Will Not Sell You One.
• Australia’s Skills Shortage Just Got Harder To Blame

What to ask your part time staff this week

Ask them before you write the ad. If the hours are there and the skills match, you have bought capacity with no ad, no agency fee and a four-week lead time. If the skills do not match, you have learned something more useful: you are hiring for a capability, and the job ad you were about to write for a generalist was the wrong ad.

Do it now, too. The ABS says this was the last Barriers and Incentives survey in its current form and the replacement series is not due until early 2027, so this is the cleanest read on part-time hours for a while.

Then the question worth arguing about. If one in five of your part time staff want to work more hours and almost all of them could start next month, what is the defensible reason your next hire comes from outside? When you do need the capability rather than the hours, sign up and run one role through it.