How much of your life do you spend sitting?

This sitting time calculator adds up the hours you spend in a chair at work, on the way there and in front of a screen at home, and turns them into hours, days and weeks a year. The NHS notes that many adults spend more than 7 hours a day sitting down, at work, on transport or in their leisure time (NHS). Your own figure may be higher than you think.

What the sitting time calculator adds up

It counts three kinds of sitting:

• Work. The hours you sit on a working day, times your working days a week, times the weeks you work in a year.
• Commuting. Time sitting in a car, bus or train, both ways together, counted on working days only. If you only travel on some days, enter an average.
• Screens at home. TV, phone, games and the laptop on the sofa, as an average over all seven days, counted on every day of the year.

Two defaults sit behind the result. The year has 46 working weeks, because almost all UK workers are entitled to 5.6 weeks of paid holiday (GOV.UK). And the day has 16 waking hours, based on 8 hours of sleep, the middle of the 7 to 9 hours the NHS says most healthy adults need (NHS). You can change both.

The calculator then divides the yearly total by 24 for full days, by 168 for full weeks, and by your waking hours in a year for the share of your waking life spent sitting.

With the default inputs, 7 hours at a desk, five days a week, an hour of commuting and 3 hours of screens at home, that comes to 2,935 hours a year: 122 full days, about 17 and a half weeks, and half of your waking hours. Spread over the year, it is 8 hours a day.

It leaves out meals, reading, waiting rooms, evenings out and weekend driving, so for most people the true total is higher still. Our post on how much of your year you spend sitting sets out the same arithmetic for work hours alone.

How good is your estimate?

The result is only as good as the hours you type in, and people are not good at guessing their sitting time. A review that pooled 123 studies with 55,199 adults found that self-reported sedentary time was, on average, about 1.74 hours a day lower than device measurements. Work was the exception: people reported about 40 minutes more sitting at work than the devices recorded. Single questions such as “how long do you sit a day?” did worst, while longer questionnaires and diaries did better (Prince et al., 2020).

That is why the calculator asks about each part of the day separately. Two things make your answer better: think through a typical recent day rather than a general impression, and if you are unsure about work, use a reference point. When 50 office workers wore activity monitors for a week, they were sedentary for 82% of their working hours (Parry & Straker, 2013), roughly six and a half hours of an eight-hour day.

Does all sitting count the same?

The calculator treats an hour as an hour. The research doesn’t always.

• Work. In a review of 79 studies, self-reported sitting at work was linked with higher odds of low back pain (about 1.5 times) and of neck and shoulder pain (about 1.7 times). Evidence on leisure-time sitting was too thin to judge (Dzakpasu et al., 2021).
• Screens. In a review of neck pain covering 25 studies, phone use was linked with the highest odds of pain, followed by computer use. TV was not clearly linked (Meng et al., 2025).
• TV and overall health. In pooled data from more than a million adults, long daily sitting was not linked with higher mortality in the most active quarter of people. Watching TV for 3 hours or more a day was, except in that most active group, where the link appeared only from 5 hours a day (Ekelund et al., 2016).

So the total gives you the overall picture, and the breakdown tells you more about where to start.

What the total does not tell you

There is no safe number of hours to compare yours with. The WHO’s 2020 guidelines recommend reducing sedentary behaviour for everyone, but found the evidence too limited to set a threshold (Bull et al., 2020). The UK Chief Medical Officers say the same, and advise adults to minimise time spent sedentary and to break up long periods with at least light activity (UK CMOs, 2019).

Nor is your total a pain forecast. Most of the links between sitting and back or neck pain come from snapshot studies, where the review authors could not rule out that pain leads to more sitting rather than the other way round (Dzakpasu et al., 2021). A review of 41 earlier reviews found no consensus that posture, sitting or other physical exposures cause low back pain (Swain et al., 2020). For what does seem to matter, see lower back pain from sitting and neck pain from desk work.

What to do with your number

Start with the biggest bar in your breakdown.

• If it is work, the hours are often fixed, but how you split them is not. In one trial in a Cochrane review, short breaks of one to two minutes every half hour cut sitting at work by about 40 minutes a day compared with two 15-minute breaks, though it was a single study with low-quality evidence (Shrestha et al., 2018). Our guide to microbreaks looks at how often to move, and Is two minutes of exercise enough? looks at how little still counts. The desk height calculator helps you set up a sit-stand desk.
• If it is the commute, there may be less you can change. If you drive for a living, see our page for drivers.
• If it is screens at home, that is usually where you have the most choice about when to get up.

Then look at the rest of your week. WHO recommends 150 to 300 minutes of moderate activity a week for adults, and says some activity is better than none (Bull et al., 2020). If you run a team, changes to the workplace itself, such as sit-stand desks, had the clearest effects in the Cochrane review, and our page for teams covers that.

Change one thing, then run the calculator again to see what it adds up to over a year. Bavelu’s desk routines of two to four minutes, guided by your AirPods, are designed and filmed by physiotherapists for the breaks in between.