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It is Sunday night and you are still at the kitchen table, marking a stack that should have been done Friday and roughing out Monday's lessons. You are not slow or disorganised. The job has quietly grown past the timetable it is supposed to fit inside.
This guide covers where a teacher's week actually goes, how much of it is really teaching, and which tasks eat the most time. It is written for teachers and school leaders, and leans on OECD TALIS data, the Grattan Institute, and national workforce surveys rather than guesswork.
The quick answer
Full-time teachers work around 46 to 54 hours a week. Australian lower-secondary teachers report 46.5 hours, and US teachers report 53 to 54. Less than half of that is actual teaching. The rest goes to lesson planning, marking, and administrative work that happens before and after the bell.
How much of a teacher's week is actually spent teaching?
Teaching is the single biggest task in a teacher's week, but it accounts for less than half of total working time. Across OECD countries, classroom teaching makes up about 43% of the hours a teacher works.
Here is how the teaching load compares across systems:
- Australia: 20.0 hours a week in front of a class.
- OECD average: 22.7 hours a week.
- United States: roughly 21 hours of a 54-hour week.
The other half of the week is invisible on a timetable: planning what happens in those lessons, marking what comes out of them, and the meetings, emails, and paperwork that surround them. When teachers say the job has grown, this is what they mean. The teaching has not expanded. The work around it has.
The short version: teaching is under half the job.
This is the central finding of OECD TALIS 2024, the largest international survey of teachers, and it reframes the whole workload question. The problem is rarely the lessons themselves. It is the volume of work that has to happen for those lessons to run.
How many hours do teachers spend planning and preparing lessons each week?
Lesson planning and preparation is the largest non-teaching demand on a teacher's week. Australian lower-secondary teachers spend 8.4 hours a week planning and preparing, more than the OECD average of 7.4 hours and up 0.8 hours since 2018.
It is also the task teachers feel they can never do well enough. The Grattan Institute's Making time for great teaching report found that 92% of Australian teachers say they do not have enough time to prepare for class, and 86% say they have no time for high-quality lesson planning. Much of that time is spent building resources from scratch, one worksheet and one slide deck at a time.
The demand is real, but a large share of it is duplicated effort across classrooms teaching the same curriculum in the same term. When five teachers in five schools build near-identical fractions worksheets on the same Tuesday night, four of those planning sessions are avoidable.
That duplication is the important detail. The preparation load is high, but a meaningful slice of it is repeated work rather than genuinely new thinking.
How much time do teachers spend marking student work?
Marking is the second-largest non-teaching drain, and one of the most resented. Australian teachers spend 5.7 hours a week marking and correcting student work, above the OECD average of 4.6 hours and up 0.7 hours since 2018.
The load looks similar in other systems. In England, lower-secondary teachers report 6.3 hours, according to the UK Department for Education's TALIS 2018 report. In the US, grading takes about 5 hours of the week, based on the EdWeek Research Center's breakdown of how teachers spend their time. The frustration is not the feedback itself, which teachers value, but the volume and the repetition.
The EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit is clear that feedback is among the highest-impact things a teacher does. The problem is finding the hours to give it well when the marking pile never shrinks. Time spent on low-value marking is time not spent on the feedback that actually moves learning.
How much of a teacher's week goes to admin and meetings?
Administrative work is where Australia diverges most sharply from the rest of the world. Australian teachers spend 4.7 hours a week on general administrative tasks, well above the OECD average of 3.0 hours. This is data entry, compliance paperwork, emails, duty rosters, and meetings that could often have been an email.
It is also the single most common complaint: 69% of Australian teachers report too much administrative work, making it the number one source of workload stress in the country. Unlike teaching, planning, and marking, almost none of this work touches a student directly. It is the part of the week teachers most often describe as pointless, and the part school systems have the most power to cut without any loss to learning.
Admin is the one big block schools can cut without a student noticing.
That distinction matters when schools try to reduce workload. Cutting admin removes hours without removing anything a student would notice. Cutting planning or marking risks the opposite. So the most sensible place to start is the paperwork.
Do teachers in Australia work more hours than teachers in other countries?
Yes. Australian full-time lower-secondary teachers report working 46.5 hours a week, well above the OECD average of 41 hours. Yet they spend fewer hours actually teaching, 20.0 against the OECD's 22.7. The extra hours are loaded onto planning, marking, and admin instead.
The table below breaks the week down by task and by country. Task rows do not add up to total working hours, because teachers estimate each task separately.
| Country / source | Teaching (hrs/wk) | Lesson planning & prep (hrs/wk) | Marking / grading (hrs/wk) | General admin (hrs/wk) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Australia (OECD TALIS 2024, lower secondary) | 20.0 | 8.4 | 5.7 | 4.7 |
| OECD average (TALIS 2024, lower secondary) | 22.7 | 7.4 | 4.6 | 3.0 |
| England (OECD TALIS 2018, lower secondary) | 20.5 | ~7.5 | 6.3 | 4.0 |
| United States (EdWeek Research Center 2022) | ~21 | 5 | 5 | 3 |
Figures are self-reported full-time hours from OECD TALIS 2024 and 2018, and the EdWeek Research Center 2022 survey.
US teachers work even longer weeks. Federal data from the NCES National Teacher and Principal Survey puts the average at 53.3 hours, and RAND's State of the American Teacher survey finds teachers work about 53 hours a week against 44 for comparable working adults. England sits close to Australia, with lower-secondary teachers reporting 20.5 hours teaching inside a much longer total week.
Across all of these systems the pattern holds. The total week is long, the teaching is the smaller half of it, and the non-teaching load is what varies from country to country. Australia's distinctive feature is how much of that load is administrative.
What is the difference between a teacher's contracted hours and the hours they actually work?
The gap between what teachers are paid for and what they actually work is largest in the US, and it is stark. NCES data shows US public school teachers are contracted for 38.2 hours a week but work 53.3, a difference of more than 15 hours. RAND's survey found 92% of teachers are contracted for 21 to 40 hours, while 88% actually work 41 to 80 or more.
In Australia, contracts are structured around face-to-face teaching loads rather than a single total-hours figure, so the mismatch shows up differently: the planning, marking, and admin spill into evenings, weekends, and school holidays. Either way, the hours a timetable shows are not the hours the job takes.
This is why headline averages can understate the load. A weekly figure captures term-time hours but misses the holiday programming and weekend resource-building that keep the average teacher afloat. The unpaid overflow is where most of the workload actually lives.
What tasks cause teachers the most stress?
Administrative work and marking top the list. In Australia, according to OECD TALIS 2024, the two most common sources of workload stress teachers report are:
- Administrative work: 69% of teachers say they have too much of it.
- Marking: 50% say they have too much of it.
Notably, teaching itself is rarely named as the problem. Teachers do not want to teach less. They want the load around teaching to be smaller and more sensible.
The stress comes from three things:
- The volume of low-value paperwork.
- The repetition of building resources that already exist elsewhere.
- The erosion of personal time as work follows teachers home.
This matters beyond wellbeing. Workload is one of the strongest predictors of whether teachers stay in the profession, which makes the hours question a retention question, not just a fairness one.
How can teachers win back planning and marking time?
The data points to a clear target. Teaching hours are fixed, but the planning and resource-creation hours are heavily duplicated, and that is where time can be recovered. Grattan Institute research found that giving teachers access to high-quality, common curriculum resources would free up around 3 hours a week, and that 90% of teachers want them.
The bottleneck has always been that good resources take hours to build. That is the specific job an AI teaching platform does. tutero.ai builds curriculum-aligned worksheets, lesson resources, and assessments in minutes, and can produce the same task at three levels of difficulty in one step, so the differentiation that used to eat a planning session is done before you finish your coffee.
It targets exactly the hours the research flags as heaviest, planning and resource creation, and hands them back. The teaching stays yours. The repetitive build-from-scratch work does not have to be.
Want your planning hours back? Create your first curriculum-aligned resource free at tutero.ai. Start creating, it's free.
The teaching has not expanded. The work around it has.
The teaching has not expanded. The work around it has.
It is Sunday night and you are still at the kitchen table, marking a stack that should have been done Friday and roughing out Monday's lessons. You are not slow or disorganised. The job has quietly grown past the timetable it is supposed to fit inside.
This guide covers where a teacher's week actually goes, how much of it is really teaching, and which tasks eat the most time. It is written for teachers and school leaders, and leans on OECD TALIS data, the Grattan Institute, and national workforce surveys rather than guesswork.
The quick answer
Full-time teachers work around 46 to 54 hours a week. Australian lower-secondary teachers report 46.5 hours, and US teachers report 53 to 54. Less than half of that is actual teaching. The rest goes to lesson planning, marking, and administrative work that happens before and after the bell.
How much of a teacher's week is actually spent teaching?
Teaching is the single biggest task in a teacher's week, but it accounts for less than half of total working time. Across OECD countries, classroom teaching makes up about 43% of the hours a teacher works.
Here is how the teaching load compares across systems:
- Australia: 20.0 hours a week in front of a class.
- OECD average: 22.7 hours a week.
- United States: roughly 21 hours of a 54-hour week.
The other half of the week is invisible on a timetable: planning what happens in those lessons, marking what comes out of them, and the meetings, emails, and paperwork that surround them. When teachers say the job has grown, this is what they mean. The teaching has not expanded. The work around it has.
The short version: teaching is under half the job.
This is the central finding of OECD TALIS 2024, the largest international survey of teachers, and it reframes the whole workload question. The problem is rarely the lessons themselves. It is the volume of work that has to happen for those lessons to run.
How many hours do teachers spend planning and preparing lessons each week?
Lesson planning and preparation is the largest non-teaching demand on a teacher's week. Australian lower-secondary teachers spend 8.4 hours a week planning and preparing, more than the OECD average of 7.4 hours and up 0.8 hours since 2018.
It is also the task teachers feel they can never do well enough. The Grattan Institute's Making time for great teaching report found that 92% of Australian teachers say they do not have enough time to prepare for class, and 86% say they have no time for high-quality lesson planning. Much of that time is spent building resources from scratch, one worksheet and one slide deck at a time.
The demand is real, but a large share of it is duplicated effort across classrooms teaching the same curriculum in the same term. When five teachers in five schools build near-identical fractions worksheets on the same Tuesday night, four of those planning sessions are avoidable.
That duplication is the important detail. The preparation load is high, but a meaningful slice of it is repeated work rather than genuinely new thinking.
How much time do teachers spend marking student work?
Marking is the second-largest non-teaching drain, and one of the most resented. Australian teachers spend 5.7 hours a week marking and correcting student work, above the OECD average of 4.6 hours and up 0.7 hours since 2018.
The load looks similar in other systems. In England, lower-secondary teachers report 6.3 hours, according to the UK Department for Education's TALIS 2018 report. In the US, grading takes about 5 hours of the week, based on the EdWeek Research Center's breakdown of how teachers spend their time. The frustration is not the feedback itself, which teachers value, but the volume and the repetition.
The EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit is clear that feedback is among the highest-impact things a teacher does. The problem is finding the hours to give it well when the marking pile never shrinks. Time spent on low-value marking is time not spent on the feedback that actually moves learning.
How much of a teacher's week goes to admin and meetings?
Administrative work is where Australia diverges most sharply from the rest of the world. Australian teachers spend 4.7 hours a week on general administrative tasks, well above the OECD average of 3.0 hours. This is data entry, compliance paperwork, emails, duty rosters, and meetings that could often have been an email.
It is also the single most common complaint: 69% of Australian teachers report too much administrative work, making it the number one source of workload stress in the country. Unlike teaching, planning, and marking, almost none of this work touches a student directly. It is the part of the week teachers most often describe as pointless, and the part school systems have the most power to cut without any loss to learning.
Admin is the one big block schools can cut without a student noticing.
That distinction matters when schools try to reduce workload. Cutting admin removes hours without removing anything a student would notice. Cutting planning or marking risks the opposite. So the most sensible place to start is the paperwork.
Do teachers in Australia work more hours than teachers in other countries?
Yes. Australian full-time lower-secondary teachers report working 46.5 hours a week, well above the OECD average of 41 hours. Yet they spend fewer hours actually teaching, 20.0 against the OECD's 22.7. The extra hours are loaded onto planning, marking, and admin instead.
The table below breaks the week down by task and by country. Task rows do not add up to total working hours, because teachers estimate each task separately.
| Country / source | Teaching (hrs/wk) | Lesson planning & prep (hrs/wk) | Marking / grading (hrs/wk) | General admin (hrs/wk) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Australia (OECD TALIS 2024, lower secondary) | 20.0 | 8.4 | 5.7 | 4.7 |
| OECD average (TALIS 2024, lower secondary) | 22.7 | 7.4 | 4.6 | 3.0 |
| England (OECD TALIS 2018, lower secondary) | 20.5 | ~7.5 | 6.3 | 4.0 |
| United States (EdWeek Research Center 2022) | ~21 | 5 | 5 | 3 |
Figures are self-reported full-time hours from OECD TALIS 2024 and 2018, and the EdWeek Research Center 2022 survey.
US teachers work even longer weeks. Federal data from the NCES National Teacher and Principal Survey puts the average at 53.3 hours, and RAND's State of the American Teacher survey finds teachers work about 53 hours a week against 44 for comparable working adults. England sits close to Australia, with lower-secondary teachers reporting 20.5 hours teaching inside a much longer total week.
Across all of these systems the pattern holds. The total week is long, the teaching is the smaller half of it, and the non-teaching load is what varies from country to country. Australia's distinctive feature is how much of that load is administrative.
What is the difference between a teacher's contracted hours and the hours they actually work?
The gap between what teachers are paid for and what they actually work is largest in the US, and it is stark. NCES data shows US public school teachers are contracted for 38.2 hours a week but work 53.3, a difference of more than 15 hours. RAND's survey found 92% of teachers are contracted for 21 to 40 hours, while 88% actually work 41 to 80 or more.
In Australia, contracts are structured around face-to-face teaching loads rather than a single total-hours figure, so the mismatch shows up differently: the planning, marking, and admin spill into evenings, weekends, and school holidays. Either way, the hours a timetable shows are not the hours the job takes.
This is why headline averages can understate the load. A weekly figure captures term-time hours but misses the holiday programming and weekend resource-building that keep the average teacher afloat. The unpaid overflow is where most of the workload actually lives.
What tasks cause teachers the most stress?
Administrative work and marking top the list. In Australia, according to OECD TALIS 2024, the two most common sources of workload stress teachers report are:
- Administrative work: 69% of teachers say they have too much of it.
- Marking: 50% say they have too much of it.
Notably, teaching itself is rarely named as the problem. Teachers do not want to teach less. They want the load around teaching to be smaller and more sensible.
The stress comes from three things:
- The volume of low-value paperwork.
- The repetition of building resources that already exist elsewhere.
- The erosion of personal time as work follows teachers home.
This matters beyond wellbeing. Workload is one of the strongest predictors of whether teachers stay in the profession, which makes the hours question a retention question, not just a fairness one.
How can teachers win back planning and marking time?
The data points to a clear target. Teaching hours are fixed, but the planning and resource-creation hours are heavily duplicated, and that is where time can be recovered. Grattan Institute research found that giving teachers access to high-quality, common curriculum resources would free up around 3 hours a week, and that 90% of teachers want them.
The bottleneck has always been that good resources take hours to build. That is the specific job an AI teaching platform does. tutero.ai builds curriculum-aligned worksheets, lesson resources, and assessments in minutes, and can produce the same task at three levels of difficulty in one step, so the differentiation that used to eat a planning session is done before you finish your coffee.
It targets exactly the hours the research flags as heaviest, planning and resource creation, and hands them back. The teaching stays yours. The repetitive build-from-scratch work does not have to be.
Want your planning hours back? Create your first curriculum-aligned resource free at tutero.ai. Start creating, it's free.
FAQ
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Online maths tutoring at Tutero is catering to students of all year levels. We offer programs tailored to the unique learning curves of each age group.
We also have expert NAPLAN and ATAR subject tutors, ensuring students are well-equipped for these pivotal assessments.
We recommend at least two to three session per week for consistent progress. However, this can vary based on your child's needs and goals.
Our platform uses advanced security protocols to ensure the safety and privacy of all our online sessions.
Parents are welcome to observe sessions. We believe in a collaborative approach to education.
We provide regular progress reports and assessments to track your child’s academic development.
Yes, we prioritise the student-tutor relationship and can arrange a change if the need arises.
Yes, we offer a range of resources and materials, including interactive exercises and practice worksheets.
The teaching has not expanded. The work around it has.
The teaching has not expanded. The work around it has.
The teaching has not expanded. The work around it has.
The hours a timetable shows are not the hours the job takes.
It is Sunday night and you are still at the kitchen table, marking a stack that should have been done Friday and roughing out Monday's lessons. You are not slow or disorganised. The job has quietly grown past the timetable it is supposed to fit inside.
This guide covers where a teacher's week actually goes, how much of it is really teaching, and which tasks eat the most time. It is written for teachers and school leaders, and leans on OECD TALIS data, the Grattan Institute, and national workforce surveys rather than guesswork.
The quick answer
Full-time teachers work around 46 to 54 hours a week. Australian lower-secondary teachers report 46.5 hours, and US teachers report 53 to 54. Less than half of that is actual teaching. The rest goes to lesson planning, marking, and administrative work that happens before and after the bell.
How much of a teacher's week is actually spent teaching?
Teaching is the single biggest task in a teacher's week, but it accounts for less than half of total working time. Across OECD countries, classroom teaching makes up about 43% of the hours a teacher works.
Here is how the teaching load compares across systems:
- Australia: 20.0 hours a week in front of a class.
- OECD average: 22.7 hours a week.
- United States: roughly 21 hours of a 54-hour week.
The other half of the week is invisible on a timetable: planning what happens in those lessons, marking what comes out of them, and the meetings, emails, and paperwork that surround them. When teachers say the job has grown, this is what they mean. The teaching has not expanded. The work around it has.
The short version: teaching is under half the job.
This is the central finding of OECD TALIS 2024, the largest international survey of teachers, and it reframes the whole workload question. The problem is rarely the lessons themselves. It is the volume of work that has to happen for those lessons to run.
How many hours do teachers spend planning and preparing lessons each week?
Lesson planning and preparation is the largest non-teaching demand on a teacher's week. Australian lower-secondary teachers spend 8.4 hours a week planning and preparing, more than the OECD average of 7.4 hours and up 0.8 hours since 2018.
It is also the task teachers feel they can never do well enough. The Grattan Institute's Making time for great teaching report found that 92% of Australian teachers say they do not have enough time to prepare for class, and 86% say they have no time for high-quality lesson planning. Much of that time is spent building resources from scratch, one worksheet and one slide deck at a time.
The demand is real, but a large share of it is duplicated effort across classrooms teaching the same curriculum in the same term. When five teachers in five schools build near-identical fractions worksheets on the same Tuesday night, four of those planning sessions are avoidable.
That duplication is the important detail. The preparation load is high, but a meaningful slice of it is repeated work rather than genuinely new thinking.
How much time do teachers spend marking student work?
Marking is the second-largest non-teaching drain, and one of the most resented. Australian teachers spend 5.7 hours a week marking and correcting student work, above the OECD average of 4.6 hours and up 0.7 hours since 2018.
The load looks similar in other systems. In England, lower-secondary teachers report 6.3 hours, according to the UK Department for Education's TALIS 2018 report. In the US, grading takes about 5 hours of the week, based on the EdWeek Research Center's breakdown of how teachers spend their time. The frustration is not the feedback itself, which teachers value, but the volume and the repetition.
The EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit is clear that feedback is among the highest-impact things a teacher does. The problem is finding the hours to give it well when the marking pile never shrinks. Time spent on low-value marking is time not spent on the feedback that actually moves learning.
How much of a teacher's week goes to admin and meetings?
Administrative work is where Australia diverges most sharply from the rest of the world. Australian teachers spend 4.7 hours a week on general administrative tasks, well above the OECD average of 3.0 hours. This is data entry, compliance paperwork, emails, duty rosters, and meetings that could often have been an email.
It is also the single most common complaint: 69% of Australian teachers report too much administrative work, making it the number one source of workload stress in the country. Unlike teaching, planning, and marking, almost none of this work touches a student directly. It is the part of the week teachers most often describe as pointless, and the part school systems have the most power to cut without any loss to learning.
Admin is the one big block schools can cut without a student noticing.
That distinction matters when schools try to reduce workload. Cutting admin removes hours without removing anything a student would notice. Cutting planning or marking risks the opposite. So the most sensible place to start is the paperwork.
Do teachers in Australia work more hours than teachers in other countries?
Yes. Australian full-time lower-secondary teachers report working 46.5 hours a week, well above the OECD average of 41 hours. Yet they spend fewer hours actually teaching, 20.0 against the OECD's 22.7. The extra hours are loaded onto planning, marking, and admin instead.
The table below breaks the week down by task and by country. Task rows do not add up to total working hours, because teachers estimate each task separately.
| Country / source | Teaching (hrs/wk) | Lesson planning & prep (hrs/wk) | Marking / grading (hrs/wk) | General admin (hrs/wk) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Australia (OECD TALIS 2024, lower secondary) | 20.0 | 8.4 | 5.7 | 4.7 |
| OECD average (TALIS 2024, lower secondary) | 22.7 | 7.4 | 4.6 | 3.0 |
| England (OECD TALIS 2018, lower secondary) | 20.5 | ~7.5 | 6.3 | 4.0 |
| United States (EdWeek Research Center 2022) | ~21 | 5 | 5 | 3 |
Figures are self-reported full-time hours from OECD TALIS 2024 and 2018, and the EdWeek Research Center 2022 survey.
US teachers work even longer weeks. Federal data from the NCES National Teacher and Principal Survey puts the average at 53.3 hours, and RAND's State of the American Teacher survey finds teachers work about 53 hours a week against 44 for comparable working adults. England sits close to Australia, with lower-secondary teachers reporting 20.5 hours teaching inside a much longer total week.
Across all of these systems the pattern holds. The total week is long, the teaching is the smaller half of it, and the non-teaching load is what varies from country to country. Australia's distinctive feature is how much of that load is administrative.
What is the difference between a teacher's contracted hours and the hours they actually work?
The gap between what teachers are paid for and what they actually work is largest in the US, and it is stark. NCES data shows US public school teachers are contracted for 38.2 hours a week but work 53.3, a difference of more than 15 hours. RAND's survey found 92% of teachers are contracted for 21 to 40 hours, while 88% actually work 41 to 80 or more.
In Australia, contracts are structured around face-to-face teaching loads rather than a single total-hours figure, so the mismatch shows up differently: the planning, marking, and admin spill into evenings, weekends, and school holidays. Either way, the hours a timetable shows are not the hours the job takes.
This is why headline averages can understate the load. A weekly figure captures term-time hours but misses the holiday programming and weekend resource-building that keep the average teacher afloat. The unpaid overflow is where most of the workload actually lives.
What tasks cause teachers the most stress?
Administrative work and marking top the list. In Australia, according to OECD TALIS 2024, the two most common sources of workload stress teachers report are:
- Administrative work: 69% of teachers say they have too much of it.
- Marking: 50% say they have too much of it.
Notably, teaching itself is rarely named as the problem. Teachers do not want to teach less. They want the load around teaching to be smaller and more sensible.
The stress comes from three things:
- The volume of low-value paperwork.
- The repetition of building resources that already exist elsewhere.
- The erosion of personal time as work follows teachers home.
This matters beyond wellbeing. Workload is one of the strongest predictors of whether teachers stay in the profession, which makes the hours question a retention question, not just a fairness one.
How can teachers win back planning and marking time?
The data points to a clear target. Teaching hours are fixed, but the planning and resource-creation hours are heavily duplicated, and that is where time can be recovered. Grattan Institute research found that giving teachers access to high-quality, common curriculum resources would free up around 3 hours a week, and that 90% of teachers want them.
The bottleneck has always been that good resources take hours to build. That is the specific job an AI teaching platform does. tutero.ai builds curriculum-aligned worksheets, lesson resources, and assessments in minutes, and can produce the same task at three levels of difficulty in one step, so the differentiation that used to eat a planning session is done before you finish your coffee.
It targets exactly the hours the research flags as heaviest, planning and resource creation, and hands them back. The teaching stays yours. The repetitive build-from-scratch work does not have to be.
Want your planning hours back? Create your first curriculum-aligned resource free at tutero.ai. Start creating, it's free.
The teaching has not expanded. The work around it has.
The hours a timetable shows are not the hours the job takes.
A full-time teacher works around 46 to 54 hours a week, depending on the country. Australian lower-secondary teachers report 46.5 hours, above the OECD average of 41. US teachers report about 53 to 54 hours. In every case, actual classroom teaching accounts for less than half of that total, with the rest going to planning, marking, and admin.
Yes, by the hours. Across OECD countries, classroom teaching makes up about 43% of a teacher's total working time. Australian teachers spend 20.0 hours a week teaching inside a 46.5-hour week. The remaining time goes to lesson planning, marking student work, and administrative tasks that happen before and after the school day.
Not for most of it. In the US, teachers are contracted for 38.2 hours but work 53.3, so more than 15 hours a week is effectively unpaid. In Australia, contracts are built around face-to-face teaching loads, so planning and marking spill into evenings, weekends, and holidays rather than showing up as paid hours on a timetable.
Planning. Australian teachers spend 8.4 hours a week on lesson planning and preparation, compared with 5.7 hours on marking. The pattern holds across countries: preparation is the single largest non-teaching demand, and it is also the one teachers most often say they cannot do well because there is never enough time.
In Australia, yes. Between the 2018 and 2024 OECD TALIS surveys, weekly lesson-preparation time rose by 0.8 hours and marking time rose by 0.7 hours. Total reported hours remain well above the OECD average, and administrative work is now the most common source of workload stress named by Australian teachers, ahead of both marking and teaching.
Many do. Because contracted teaching loads do not include the full weight of planning, marking, and reporting, a large share of that work moves into evenings, weekends, and term breaks. Holidays are often when teachers program upcoming units and build resources from scratch, which is why headline weekly averages understate the true annual load for many teachers.
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