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How to Ask to Reduce Your Hours

Every other ask on this site — a rise, a promotion, training budget, remote days, more time on a deadline — leaves your contract exactly where it was, and your manager can usually settle it alone. This one changes the contract, so payroll, HR and a budget holder are in it, and at least one of them will read it having never met you. It’s also the only ask here where you’re proposing to be paid less— so the money question isn’t the headline figure, which is just arithmetic. It’s everything attached to it: pension, holiday, sick pay, notice, bonus, anything with a threshold. This page will never work any of that out for you, because it depends on your employer and your scheme — it gives you the six things to have confirmed in writing before you agree. You get the five things to settle first, a forwardable proposal under 200 words that names what stopsas well as which days, and the four replies you’ll need — including “it wouldn’t be fair on the team.” It never treats the reduction as something you can simply undo later, and never lets you propose fewer hours without saying what leaves with them.

Sample request

Generated for: Practice manager, full time over five days — wants four days with Mondays off from January. Runs the rota, the supplier contracts and month-end. Manager said informally it “should be fine”; nothing written and HR have not been asked

What you are actually asking for — This is not a favour your manager grants. It changes your contract, which is why it will be read by payroll and by somebody in HR who has never met you and is deciding on paper whether the work still gets done. That is why the pattern goes in the first line and the reason goes last. The headline pay figure is arithmetic and nobody is negotiating it; what is attached to it is the part that gets missed. And a reduction is permanent and one-way by default — nothing here can tell you what your contract, your scheme or the law where you work provides.

The real one is written against the pattern you want, what you actually own, and who has to approve a contractual change where you work. The first one is free — no card. After that, $9.99 for a single credit or $49.99 for ten.

First one is free — no card needed.

Credits

— credits available

State it the way it would appear in a contract: how much, which days, and from when. This is the line the whole proposal opens with, because the person who approves it is reading on paper and hunting for exactly that. “Fewer hours” can’t be approved by anybody. Leave it blank and the proposal is written generically.

Used to describe the change, never to price it. Nothing here will work out what you’d be paid, or tell you what happens to your pension, holiday, sick pay, notice or bonus — every one of those depends on your employer, your scheme and where you work, and a confident wrong answer is one you’d plan a household around. You get them as a named list to have confirmed in writing instead.

These aren’t the same request. Health and caring responsibilities can route to a different process entirely in a lot of places — so that branch tells you to ask which one applies before the informal conversation, not after. Returning from leaveis the strongest moment, because nothing’s been rebuilt around you yet. And asked before and was turned down is worthless unless something has visibly changed in the first two lines. Nothing here tells you what any law or policy provides.

This decides which section gets written. Make sure the work shrinks too is the one most granted requests fail on: the hours are arithmetic, the scope is a decision, and if nobody makes it you do the whole job in less time for less money. And keep a route backisn’t a guarantee — nobody gives one. It’s three questions answered in writing before you agree.

Four things carry this box, and your reason is not one of them. What you actually own, because that’s what has to stop, move or be handed over — a proposal that names only days is the one that gets granted and then eaten. Who has to approve it, which is almost never just your manager once pay is involved. What’s already been said, since a corridor yes that payroll never heard about is not a change to your contract. And when you need it to start. We never invent a colleague, a day, a date or a policy, so anything you don’t supply comes back as a bracketed placeholder. Refer to people by role, no names — this gets forwarded to HR. You don’t need to put a diagnosis or your family circumstances in here; one factual line is all the proposal will ever use.

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Also explore:

Asking to Work Remotely →Saying No to Extra Work →Telling Your Boss You’re Burned Out →Asking for a Raise →