Ranking office workers—the top 5 most productive countries in the world
Main takeaways
- Spain was the most productive country in the world in 2025, with an average employee productivity of 95.18%.
- Ukraine breaks into the top 5, sitting at #4 with an average of 94.03%.
- Pakistan is the least productive, with an average of 83.2%.
- The US ranks 9th most productive globally, while India sits at #13.
- This year, we’ve substantially raised the minimum user threshold for inclusion—from 100 to 400—resulting in a tighter, more statistically reliable sample.
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The 2025 edition
Year after year, we dig into DeskTime’s global user data to answer a question: which countries are the most (and least) productive?
The world of work in 2025 looked different from the years before it—but then again, it always does. Three forces stood out as particularly likely to shape productivity patterns this year.
AI tools, which moved from “interesting experiment” to baseline expectation at remarkable speed, continued reshaping how knowledge work actually gets done—compressing some tasks, eliminating others, and raising the bar for what a productive workday looks like.
Meanwhile, Gen Z’s continued entrance into the workforce brought new expectations around flexibility, output-based performance, and the blurring of professional and personal time.
And against this backdrop of transformation, economic headwinds—persistent uncertainty, ongoing layoffs in tech and adjacent sectors, and tightening budgets—reminded us that external pressure has always been one of the most powerful modulators of how hard people work.
How we collected the data
This year, we’ve made a significant change to our methodology: we raised the minimum user threshold from 100 to 400 users per country, and required at least 40 hours of tracked data per paid user per year, on average.
The reason is simple. With a lower threshold, a handful of highly productive—or highly unproductive—individuals in a small user base would skew a country’s average dramatically. Raising the bar to 400 users meaningfully reduces that noise and gives us more confidence in what the data is actually telling us.
It means some countries that appeared in previous editions are no longer included, and some new names enter the picture. That’s not a sign that those countries became more or less productive—it’s a sign that the data is now held to a higher standard.
Russia and Belarus remain excluded from the rankings. As of March 9, 2022, DeskTime is no longer available in those countries.
All DeskTime studies are fully anonymous.
What is productivity at DeskTime?
DeskTime is a time tracking and productivity analytics app used by thousands of businesses of all sizes all over the world. It automatically monitors how employees spend their time at the computer—logging which apps, programs, and websites they use, and categorizing that time as productive or unproductive based on each company’s settings.
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At DeskTime, productivity is defined as time spent on productive websites, programs, and apps—the time actually doing work-related things—divided by the total time spent at the computer, expressed as a percentage.
For example, if you were at work for 8 hours and spent 4 hours on work tasks, and 4 hours on Facebook, your productivity would be 50% (4/8 *100).
With all caveats out of the way, let’s get into the data.
The most productive countries in the world in 2025
Here are the five most productive countries in the world in 2025, compared to the 2023 top:
| 2025 | 2023 | |
| #1 | Spain (95.18%) | Albania (96.4%) |
| #2 | Guatemala (94.99%) | Guatemala (95.2%) |
| #3 | El Salvador (94.06%) | Nicaragua (94.8%) |
| #4 | Ukraine (94.03%) | Uruguay (92.9%) |
| #5 | Albania (92.48%) | El Salvador (92.7%) |
Spain’s arrival at the top of the global rankings is the headline story of 2025. In 2023, Spain ranked 12th globally with an average productivity of 88.1%. This year, it’s jumped to first place at 95.18%—a gain of more than seven percentage points. That’s a remarkable shift, and one that may reflect the maturation of hybrid work practices in Spain, where flexible arrangements have been increasingly codified into both policy and workplace culture over the past two years.
Guatemala and El Salvador continue what has become a multi-year tradition of Central American nations at the top of the global productivity rankings. Guatemala holds essentially steady from 2023 (95.2% to 94.99%), while El Salvador improves by 1.4 percentage points to reach the top three for the first time.
The most striking result, though, may be Ukraine. After ranking 29th globally in 2023 with an average of 84.5%, Ukraine has climbed to 4th place globally at 94.03%—a massive increase of nearly 10 percentage points. It is an extraordinary data point. Whatever the causes—economic necessity, the particular focus that comes with adversity, or structural changes in how Ukrainian businesses operate—the numbers speak for themselves.
The US ranks 9th most productive globally in 2025, with an average productivity of 88.65%.
Albania, which topped the global rankings in 2023 at 96.4%, slips to 5th place at 92.48%. That’s a meaningful decline, though it’s worth noting that even at 92.48%, Albania would have ranked in the top three in any previous edition of this study.
The least productive countries in the world in 2025
A note that bears re-emphasizing: because we’ve substantially raised the user threshold this year, this list looks quite different from previous editions—and that difference is primarily methodological. Countries that previously appeared at the bottom of the rankings, like Iran and Mongolia, no longer meet the 400-user threshold and are therefore not included.
The countries below represent the lowest performers among a more statistically robust sample.
| 2025 | 2023 | |
| #1 | Pakistan (83.2%) | Iran (29%) |
| #2 | Great Britain (83.45%) | Mongolia (38.2%) |
| #3 | South Africa (84.49%) | Cambodia (48.5%) |
| #4 | Colombia (85.84%) | Nepal (56.3%) |
| #5 | Mexico (86.57%) | Slovenia (59.5%) |
The first thing worth noting is how compressed this list is compared to previous years. The gap between the least productive country in 2025 (Pakistan at 83.2%) and the fifth least (Mexico at 86.57%) is just 3.37 percentage points. In 2023, the equivalent gap between Iran (29%) and Slovenia (59.5%) was more than 30 points. The higher threshold has filtered out the extreme low-end outliers, and what remains is a group of countries that are, in absolute terms, reasonably productive—they simply trail the rest of the sample.
Great Britain is perhaps the hardest done by by our new methodology. In 2023, the country ranked as the 35th most productive with an average productivity of 82.9%. Now, despite a marginal improvement to 83.45%, it sits at the top of the least productive list.
Mexico and Colombia appearing in the least productive countries list contrasts with Nicaragua and El Salvador being on the opposite end of the spectrum, driving home the point that productivity in Latin America is far from monolithic—and that regional proximity is no guarantee of similar outcomes.
What will 2026 bring?
The 2025 productivity rankings tell a story of movement—Spain’s dramatic rise, Ukraine’s extraordinary resilience, Central America’s continued dominance. But there’s also some stability—the same regions and countries keep showing up near the top: the Americas, parts of Europe, a handful of African and Southeast Asian nations.
What’s changing is the quality of the data we’re working with. The move to a 400-user threshold is the most significant methodological shift in this study’s history, and we believe it makes the findings more meaningful and more actionable. Fewer countries, better data.
As we move through 2026, the trends worth watching are already visible: AI is compressing certain types of work while creating demand for new skills, economic pressure is pushing some teams to do more with less, and the Gen Z cohort is bringing different assumptions about productivity to the table—assumptions that don’t always align with the metrics we’ve traditionally used to measure it.
One thing that doesn’t change: you can’t manage what you don’t measure. If you want to understand how productive your team actually is—not just how busy they look—DeskTime gives you the data to find out.
Our experts would love to hop on an intro call with you to talk about how DeskTime can help your company move the productivity needle. You can book one here.
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