Picture a barista who finds out her shifts for the coming week only a day or two in advance, or a retail clerk whose hours swing from 15 one week to 40 the next. The paycheck matters, of course. But there is a quieter cost too: the difficulty of planning a doctor’s visit, arranging childcare, or simply knowing what next Tuesday will look like. A study published in Social Indicators Research looks at whether this kind of uncertainty is linked to how happy people say they are with their lives.
The short answer the researchers offer is yes. Workers who reported more unstable hours and less predictable schedules tended to report lower overall wellbeing. And the size of that link was comparable to, or in some cases larger than, the link between happiness and family income.
The question behind the research
A lot of research has examined how the sheer number of hours people work relates to their wellbeing, especially very long hours. Less attention has gone to a different feature of modern work: not how much you work, but how erratic and unpredictable that work is. The research team, led by Lonnie Golden of Penn State-Abington along with Rubia Valente of CUNY-Baruch College and Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn and Ebshoy Mikhaeil of Rutgers University, set out to fill that gap.
The authors point to a shift in how schedules get made. Scheduling software now lets businesses match staffing to customer demand in close to real time, calling workers in and sending them home as needs change. The researchers argue that this practice tends to push the risk of uncertain demand onto workers, who absorb it through swinging hours and last-minute schedules. By their estimates, somewhere between 17% and 24% of the US workforce faces irregular, on-call, or rotating shifts, while only a small slice of workers can freely set their own hours.
To understand why this might matter for happiness, the authors lean on a few ideas from psychology and economics. People generally prefer predictable events to unpredictable ones, and a stable schedule offers a sense of control and security. Economists usually model a worker’s wellbeing as a function of income and free time. The researchers add another piece: it matters not just how much you work and how much money you make, but whether the timing and amount of work line up with what you can plan around.
How they studied it
The team used data from the 2016 US General Social Survey, a long-running, nationally representative survey conducted through face-to-face interviews. That year included a special module on work orientations from the International Social Survey Program, which asked detailed questions about scheduling that rarely appear together in one survey.
The researchers kept only respondents working full-time or part-time. They excluded the self-employed, reasoning that those workers usually choose their line of work partly to gain control over their time, and the military, who typically have no say over their schedules. The final samples ran to several hundred respondents.
To measure wellbeing, they used a standard happiness question: whether people described themselves as “very happy,” “pretty happy,” or “not too happy.” To capture instability and unpredictability, they built five separate measures. Some compared the fewest and the most hours a person worked in the past month against their usual hours, which gives a sense of how much hours bounced around. Another measure looked at how far in advance people knew their schedule. A final one asked whether their working schedule was regular, changed regularly, or was decided at short notice.
The analysis controlled for a long list of other factors that shape happiness: age, gender, marital status, education, self-reported health, race, family income, household size, occupation, region, the number of hours worked, whether someone was paid by the hour, and even who set the schedule. The goal was to isolate the relationship between scheduling uncertainty and happiness from these other influences.
What the analysis found
Across the different measures, a consistent pattern emerged. When a person’s longest week stretched well above their usual hours, their reported happiness tended to be lower. A combined “instability index,” measuring the gap between someone’s busiest and slowest weeks relative to their usual hours, showed the same thing: more swing, less happiness.
Short advance notice was also linked to lower wellbeing. People whose schedules never changed reported the highest happiness, while those who learned their schedules only a few days ahead reported less. One result puzzled the authors: workers with the very shortest notice, a day or less, did not show as large a drop as those with a few days’ to a week’s notice. The researchers suggest this might reflect some workers, particularly men, who welcome extra overtime hours even when they arrive unpredictably, but they note this is a question for future study.
The measure tied to having “daily working times decided at short notice” showed an especially large association, by one estimate roughly twice the size of the link between happiness and family income. By contrast, simply having an irregular shift, such as working nights or rotating times, showed a smaller and statistically weaker relationship. The authors read this as a sign that unpredictability and instability weigh more heavily on wellbeing than irregularity by itself.
One finding the authors highlight is that these patterns held even after accounting for who controlled the schedule. When they excluded workers who set their own hours to isolate the effect of flexibility imposed from outside, the relationships mostly faded. The authors note this shows the results are sensitive to whether flexibility is externally constrained or under an employee’s control.
Important caveats
The researchers are careful about what their data can and cannot show. Because the survey captures a single moment in time rather than following the same people over years, it cannot firmly establish that unpredictable schedules cause unhappiness. The authors argue that the causal direction most likely runs from schedules to wellbeing, since few people would willingly choose an unpredictable schedule, and scheduling is usually presented to job applicants as a take-it-or-leave-it condition. Still, they acknowledge that factors like personality could shape both a person’s happiness and the kinds of jobs they end up in.
The samples were also small, which limited the team’s ability to break results down by industry, income level, or family situation. And the authors flag a statistical concern of their own: some of their control variables, especially family income and being paid by the hour, may be so closely tied to scheduling that including them muddies the picture. They report that one of their strongest findings rests partly on the income control, and they advise reading it with caution.
What it might mean for workplaces and policy
The authors suggest their results add weight to the case for more stable and predictable scheduling. They note that several US cities and a few states have adopted “Fair Workweek” laws, which can require employers to give advance notice of schedules and to pay a small penalty when they fail to do so. They argue that more stable schedules could improve wellbeing at relatively low cost to employers, and may help with retention and performance, though those downstream effects were not directly tested in this study.
For individual workers, the takeaway the authors point to is more modest: when people have a choice, the character of a job’s hours, not just the pay, is worth weighing. A predictable schedule, the researchers suggest, can save time and money by letting people coordinate work with the rest of their lives.
