Ask HN: What % pay cut would you be willing to take for a 4-day work week?

I took a 70% pay cut to work 4 days a week. I wasn't happy, and I was constantly angry and burned out. I felt I worked too much and for no reason other than to make somebody else rich.

But I quit to work 100% on my own business, 4 days a week, so there's also that. :)

0%. I would like to make more money, not less. I'm not in a place (geographically or in my career) where I make enough to start voluntarily giving up a % of my salary.

On the other hand, if anyone is offering a 20%+ raise for a 6-day workweek, I would seriously consider it.

I think this depends. Do I have the same workload as my 5 day week, but expected to do it in 4 days? If so, 0% reduction. If my workload is reduced 20%, then anything up to a 20% reduction may be appropriate.

A really good way to do reduce your hour and actually increase your pay is to become a contractor.

For the past 3 years I’ve been working sub 30-hour weeks while increasing my post-taxes pay by 30-40%. The contracts are long (3-24mo), you can deduct equipment, courses and conferences and the boring stuff (bookkeeping, taxes, sales) can be outsourced for a fraction of your billing. A nice bonus is you don’t have to participate in all the meta-work (team building, internal trainings and all-hands).

0% because I think it will increase my productivity overall.

10% seems fairly reasonable given a hypothetical scenario. I would expect staying more refreshed would result in net higher productivity even with reduced hours on the clock. Usually the biggest risk going below 40 hours is benefits. Personally I do want to push for a 4 day work week in the future as it is a substantial increase in free time (2->3 days free a week is a huge leap).

I work 80% of the time, I get 80% of the money. Throw in the benefit of fulltime employees (ie; vacation weeks, dentals etc) and we got a deal.

I once negotiated instead of a raise, I would rather work four days for the same pay, and it got approved. That was a fun day :)

Not in the same job anymore, but maybe that is something people could try, reduce from 100% to 90% with the same pay and then to 80% over like 2-3 years.