Working Hours Reform Initiative in Mexico

Galicia - On 3 December 2025, after various working groups and dialogue forums involving business leaders, workers, academics, international organisations, and local and federal authorities, the presidential initiative to gradually implement a 40-hour working week in Mexico (the ‘Initiative’) was presented to the Congress of the Union.

The Initiative involves a reform of the Political Constitution of the United Mexican States and the Federal Labour Law (the ‘LFT’), which is intended to come into force on 1 May 2026 and provides for a progressive reduction in working hours, with a decrease of two hours per year starting on 1 January 2027, according to the following schedule:

The planned reductions in working hours may not entail reductions in wages, minimum wages or benefits.
With regard to overtime, the Initiative establishes the following:

• Overtime is prohibited for minors.
• A maximum of 16 hours of overtime per week is established, with the first 12 hours to be paid at double time and the next 4 hours at triple time. Any overtime incurred in addition to this limit is in violation of the LFT.
• Overtime may not be incurred for more than 4 days per week or for more than 4 hours per day.
• The sum of regular and overtime hours may not exceed 12 hours of work per day.

Likewise, in order to monitor compliance with the new provisions, employers are now required to keep an electronic record of each worker’s working hours. The provisions applicable to this record will be issued by the Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare and will come into force on 1 January 2027.
It should be noted that, although this proposal is novel for Mexico, it is not the first country to promote a similar reform. According to the International Labour Organisation, 27 countries have a working week of 40 hours or less, including Australia, Belgium, Canada, Ecuador, Italy and Poland.

Although several countries in Latin America continue to top the list of maximum working hours, the trend towards reducing working hours has already been implemented by some Latin American countries, such as Chile, which in 2023 approved the reform known as the ‘40-hour law’, which involved a gradual reduction in working hours from 45 to 40 hours over a period of five years.
It is important to note that the Chilean legislation excluded certain groups of workers from the legal limit whose functions or industry do not allow for strict control of their working hours, or those who perform activities without immediate supervision, such as managers, administrators and proxies, as well as fishing vessel workers and professional athletes.

In Europe, the reduction of working hours is a practice that has been established for several decades. In Spain, a maximum limit of 40 hours per week has been in force since 1983, and France, for its part, reduced its working week to 35 hours in 1998.

One of the most significant impacts of the reduction in working hours has been the need to reorganise work shifts, and its implementation in some countries has been costly for many companies as it has led to an increase in labour costs.
It is advisable for employers to begin preparing for the changes that the working hours reduction initiative will bring to their organisations by conducting an advance assessment of the working hours implemented, with the aim of identifying areas that could be affected by the likely future implementation of the reform, especially in terms of work shift organisation and working hours management.

galicia.com.mx