The 996 working hour system means working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. That is 12 hours a day and 72 hours a week, close to two standard 40-hour jobs, plus one day off for sleep, laundry and remembering what your family looks like. You will also see it written as 9-9-6. It has nothing to do with the Porsche 911 that carried the same code, although car people may need a second.
The name comes from the Chinese tech industry. In the 2010s this schedule became the official or unofficial norm at many companies there, and the system even has its own Wikipedia entry.
I first wrote about 996 in April 2019, when it set off a global row. In 2026 I went back to see what happened next, and a lot did. China declared the schedule illegal, and a few years later American startups began treating the 72-hour week as something to boast about.
Where did the 996 system come from, and what is 996.ICU?
Chinese labor law does not provide for a 72-hour week. The standard is eight hours a day and 40 a week, and overtime is capped at three hours a day and 36 hours a month (China Briefing). A 996 employee racks up about 32 hours of overtime a week, so the monthly limit is gone early in the second week. Companies dealt with this simply. Officially nobody was forced to stay. Unofficially, anyone who left at 6 p.m. clearly didn’t believe in the project.
On March 26, 2019, a repository called 996.ICU appeared on GitHub. The name was no accident: ICU stands for intensive care unit. The project listed companies that ran 996, explained what Chinese labor law said about it, and signed off with the slogan “Developers’ lives matter.” It passed 100,000 stars within four days. By April 9 it had 200,000 and was the second most-starred repository on GitHub. Browsers run by Tencent, Alibaba and Qihoo 360 blocked the site, and employees of Microsoft and GitHub set up a repository in support of the campaign.
Jack Ma and the “blessing” of a 72-hour week
The real storm began when Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, weighed in. According to Bloomberg, he told an internal meeting that Alibaba had no use for people who wanted a standard eight-hour office day. In the version quoted around the world, being able to work 996 was “a huge blessing.” The remarks were posted on the company’s official social media account, and the internet reacted exactly as you would expect.
Ma soon clarified on Weibo that companies should not force anyone into 996, and that he was not defending the system but paying tribute to people who strive. Around the same time Richard Liu, the head of rival JD.com, said that he did not impose 996 either, but that slackers were not his “brothers.” The world drew its own conclusion: Chinese billionaires were praising a schedule they insisted was voluntary.
The West criticizes 996, but did it ever work 40 hours?
Europe and America were quick to condemn 996. One of the loudest critics of long hours is David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails and co-founder of Basecamp. With Jason Fried he even wrote a book on the subject, It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work.
In 2019 I called this hypocrisy, because big companies are rarely built on 40-hour weeks. Bill Gates has said that in his twenties he “didn’t believe in weekends” or in vacations. In November 2018 Elon Musk tweeted that “nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week” and gave his own figure: about 80 hours sustained, sometimes more than 100. Half the self-help shelf sells some version of this story, which is why I keep a short list of the motivational books worth reading.
I owe one correction, though. Back then I wrote that DHH hadn’t kept to 40 hours either when he built Rails. I checked, and it was the other way round. On his company’s podcast he said that when they started building Basecamp, the product Rails was later extracted from, he had 10 hours a week for it. One of the most popular web frameworks came out of a constraint, not a marathon.
I also missed a more important difference. Gates, Musk and Ma were working for themselves, so every extra hour raised the value of their own shares. An employee on 996 gets a salary, and the profit from his exhaustion goes to someone else. For a founder such a schedule can be an investment. For an employee it rarely is.
How much can you get out of 72 hours of work?
The Stanford economist John Pencavel analyzed records from British munitions factories during the First World War. Up to about 49 hours a week, output rose in step with hours. Beyond that each extra hour added less, and 70 hours produced roughly what 56 did. The last 14 hours of a 70-hour week were mostly spent being present.
Then there is health. According to a joint analysis by the WHO and the International Labour Organization published in 2021, working 55 hours a week or more is linked to a 35% higher risk of stroke and a 17% higher risk of dying from ischemic heart disease, compared with a 35 to 40-hour week. In 2016 long working hours contributed to 745,000 deaths worldwide. Whoever named the project 996.ICU knew what they were doing.
My three weeks of nonstop work
I suspect most entrepreneurs have had weeks like that, and I am no exception. I remember the stretches when I worked around the clock with real fondness. One of my businesses grew out of a website I built in three weeks of almost uninterrupted work. What I remember from that time is focus and the joy of seeing something work. The exhaustion I have somehow edited out.
I don’t work like that anymore. In the long run it wouldn’t hold, and I would probably end up in that ICU. A sprint you choose, with a finish line you can see, is a different animal from a schedule someone else imposes on you every week of the year.
What has changed since 2019? The 996 system in 2026
China declared 996 illegal
On August 27, 2021, China’s Supreme People’s Court and the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security published ten model labor cases. In one of them a courier company had fired an employee for refusing to work 996, although the schedule was written into its company rules. Labor arbitrators ruled against the company and ordered it to pay the employee 8,000 yuan. The message was plain: the schedule breaks the law. A few months earlier, in January 2021, China had been shaken by the death of a 22-year-old Pinduoduo employee, which the media linked to extreme overtime.
Young Chinese lay down
In April 2021 a former factory worker named Luo Huazhong posted an essay titled “Lying flat is justice.” The phrase tang ping, a deliberate refusal to join the race of overtime and overachievement, became one of the ten most popular memes on the Chinese internet that year, according to a center affiliated with the Ministry of Education (Wikipedia). Some commentators see it as an inspiration for the Western “quiet quitting” of 2022.
Jack Ma vanished and came back
In the autumn of 2020 Ma criticized Chinese regulators and accused state banks of a “pawn shop mentality.” Shortly afterwards, on November 3, 2020, the authorities halted the $37 billion stock market debut of his Ant Group, which would have been the largest IPO on record. He largely withdrew from public view for the next few years, and in January 2023 he lost control of Ant Group. The reconciliation was sealed only in February 2025, when he attended a symposium hosted by Xi Jinping. My impression is that the man who called 996 a blessing found out for himself who has the last word in China.
Chinese companies send people home
In March 2025 the fight against “involution,” exhausting competition that produces nothing, made it into the premier’s annual government work report. Officially it targets companies and local governments rather than office hours, but some firms took the hint. As KrASIA reported, since February 2025 managers and HR at DJI’s headquarters in Shenzhen have been clearing staff out of the office at 9 p.m. sharp. Midea set the leaving time at 6:20 p.m. and banned after-hours meetings, along with PowerPoint for internal communication.
America discovered 996
Just as China was backing away from it, American AI startups picked it up in 2025. Rilla advertised for a software engineer willing to work “70 hrs/week in person” in New York. Cognition expected new staff to put in 80-hour weeks, and its CEO, Scott Wu, wrote in an email: “We don’t believe in work-life balance.” Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt supplied the justification on a podcast: “we’re up against the Chinese.”
Europe tested the opposite
In 2022 about 2,900 employees at 61 British companies tried a four-day week without a pay cut, and 56 of the companies kept it after the trial. A year later at least 54 were still working that way. The world clearly can’t decide which direction to go.
Is 996 legal in the EU and the US?
The two systems approach the question from opposite ends. The EU caps hours and leaves pay to national law. American federal law caps nothing and makes long hours expensive instead, but only for some workers.
| 996 | EU Working Time Directive | US federal law (FLSA) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hours per day | 12 | no cap as such, but 11 hours’ rest in every 24 | no cap |
| Hours per week | 72 | average of 48, including overtime | no cap |
| Overtime | about 32 hours a week | pay set by national law | time and a half after 40 hours, non-exempt staff only |
| Daily rest | 12 hours | at least 11 hours | not regulated |
| Weekly rest | about 36 hours | at least 24 hours on top of the 11 hours’ daily rest | not regulated |
| Paid vacation | not specified | at least 4 weeks a year | not required |
Sources: European Commission, US Department of Labor.
In the EU, 996 oddly fits the rest rules. There are 12 hours between 9 p.m. and 9 a.m., and 36 from Saturday night to Monday morning. What breaks it is the 48-hour cap. Because that cap is an average over a reference period (usually up to four months, longer under collective agreements), a few 72-hour weeks can be legal if quieter weeks balance them out. As a permanent schedule, 996 is illegal for an EU employee. The exceptions are the fine print: member states may let a worker opt out of the 48-hour limit if he agrees, and they may exempt managing executives and others who genuinely set their own hours.
In the US, federal law sets no limit at all on the hours of anyone 16 or older. A non-exempt employee can legally work 996, as long as 32 of his 72 hours are paid at time and a half. That makes the week cost the employer the equivalent of 88 normal hours, which is a strong argument against it. Salaried executives, administrators and professionals who earn above a pay threshold and pass a duties test are exempt, and so are many software engineers, under a separate computer employee exemption. For them a 72-hour week can be perfectly legal at the same salary as a 40-hour one.
California, home to many of those AI startups, is stricter than federal law. Overtime starts after eight hours in a day, with double time after 12. Yet its software exemption covers anyone paid at least $58.85 an hour in 2026, about $122,600 a year. In other words, the people being asked to work 996 in San Francisco are precisely the people the overtime rules leave out.
Founders and the genuinely self-employed are another story everywhere, because nobody counts their hours. A “contractor” who spends 72 hours a week in the boss’s office on the boss’s schedule, however, may well turn out to be an employee in the eyes of the law, with the overtime rights that come with it.
My take: 996 is like climbing a mountain
In 2019 I wrote that the 996 system is like drugs: unhealthy and not for everyone, but worth trying if you want to experience life and achieve something. Even then I added a correction underneath, and today I stand by it more firmly. The drug comparison was wrong. Drugs carry risks that deserve far more respect than a throwaway line, as the history of Pervitin and the Wehrmacht shows.
996 is more like climbing a high mountain in bad weather. You test your limits and find out whether you can do more than other people. But if you climb that mountain every week, sooner or later something will happen to you and you will end up in the ICU. And when the person sending you up every Monday is a boss who stays behind in the lodge with a cup of tea, it isn’t mountaineering anymore. You are just working overtime for his shares.
Questions people ask
What is the 996 working hour system?
It is a schedule of work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week, also written as 9-9-6. That adds up to 12 hours a day and 72 hours a week. The name comes from the Chinese tech industry.
Is 996 legal in the United States?
Federal law sets no limit on hours for adults, but non-exempt employees must get time and a half for every hour over 40 in a week. Many salaried professionals, including many software engineers, are exempt, so for them a 996 week can be legal with no extra pay.
Is 996 legal in the EU?
Not as a permanent schedule for an employee. The Working Time Directive caps the average week at 48 hours including overtime, unless a member state allows the worker to opt out and he agrees.
Is 996 still used in China?
Officially it is illegal, as China’s Supreme People’s Court and labor ministry made clear in August 2021. Long hours still happen, although since 2025 some large companies have been sending staff home in the evening.