Builders’ Working Time in Eighteenth Century Madrid

This paper provides the first estimates of the number of days worked per year in the construction sector in Madrid between 1740 and 1810. Using a database of 389,000 observations with over 2.15 million paid days, we demonstrate how the length of the working year in the second half of eighteenth century was very close to the modern standard of 300 days, and that, by the end of the century, building workers—both skilled and unskilled— actually worked around 280 days, a far higher number than suggested by the current estimates for Spain or the figures proposed recently for northern Europe.