ANALYSIS — Former President Donald Trump’s working hours in the White House were the shortest for any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Trump averaged six hours and two minutes of work each day from his first appointment to his last while in office.
As measured from the start of his presidency to June 30, President Joe Biden’s presidential office hours are the third-shortest since 1933, averaging six hours and 48 minutes. Harry S. Truman had the second-shortest average at six hours and 43 minutes. The averages come from a Roll Call Factba.se analysis of presidential schedules from FDR to Biden. (See methodology and notes below.)
Biden’s presidential office hours have peaked in 2024. From Jan. 1 to June 30, Biden averaged nearly eight hours between his first and last appointments each day. Biden’s average presidential office hours have stayed steady or increased over his 3.5 years in office. During 2021, his first year in office, he averaged seven hours and 16 minutes from his first to last appointment.
Trump’s presidential office hours were the longest in his first year, 2017, averaging six hours and 53 minutes. During his last year of office in 2020, Trump’s office hours were down to an average of six hours and 27 minutes.
George H.W. Bush had the longest average presidential office hours, lasting 14 hours and 54 minutes. However, it’s important to note that his average time was determined from 414 days of his 1,461 total days in office. Bush’s presidential library has not published his entire Daily Dairy online.
On average, Biden’s first appointment starts at 9:44 a.m., which is the third-latest start time after Trump and Truman.
Trump’s presidential office hours started the latest of any president since 1933, with his average first appointment at 11:11 a.m., which is more than an hour later than the second-latest average start time of 9:55 a.m.
Biden’s average last meeting time is 4:32 p.m. That is the second-earliest last appointment time after Dwight D. Eisenhower’s, at 3:47 p.m.
Trump’s average last appointment was 5:13 p.m., making it the sixth-earliest. George H.W. Bush had the latest average end time at 10:44 p.m.
Tracking weekday public events, and lack thereof
From Inauguration Day to June 30, 2024, Biden had 37 weekdays with no scheduled public events, or 2.9 percent of his weekdays while in office. Biden is currently averaging 10.6 weekdays without a public event annually.
For the same period during his presidency, Trump had 60 weekdays with no scheduled public events, or 4.8 percent of his weekdays. From Inauguration Day to the end of his term, Trump had 87 weekdays without a public event, or 6 percent of all his weekdays during his presidency. Trump averaged 21.9 days a year without a scheduled public event.
This counts the number of days the president was listed as not having any public events scheduled for any weekday (Monday through Friday). Vacation dates such as Thanksgiving and Christmas were included for both.
You can view a 2018 Factba.se post on the presidential office hours here. The post offers details about the types of schedules used to determine each president’s average and what they mean.
Methodology
View or download all the data used in this analysis and the methodology in a Google Sheet.
All times are adjusted to local time, based on where the president was at that particular time, so first and last meetings are based on where the president was on that day/time vs. Eastern time.
Days with no public schedule or diary, due to either redaction or vacation where no data was available, were excluded from the calculations.
In cases where the Factba.se platform could not discern a time or date automatically with a high degree of accuracy, the day in question was excluded from the calculation. The percent coverage is noted below in “Notes.”
For simplification, any day that ended after 11:59 p.m. was rounded to 11:59 p.m. in the evening. So if the last item on the schedule was 1:15 a.m., it was calculated at 11:59 p.m. for the purposes of the analysis.
For some earlier presidents, we used a “Daily Diary” (available from presidential libraries) that includes more presidential events outside of just appointments to determine their presidential office hours. For other presidents, including Trump, Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, we used the “Daily Schedule” that’s released to the press pool. (Daily Diary is not currently available for these presidents.)
You can view the list of sources used to determine each president’s office hours in this tab of the Google Sheet.
Notes
George H. W. Bush’s schedule is not available online from his presidential library at present.
Obama’s schedule begins on July 12, 2010, on his archived White House website. There are a number of days missing from the blog posts that listed his daily schedule and vacation days with no public schedule posted.
The George W. Bush Presidential Library has 338 days of his 2,922 days available online. This is a large enough statistical sample to estimate average first and last meeting times.
Data from the John F. Kennedy Library is available for the following dates: Jan. 25, 1961, through Nov. 20, 1963.
Data from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library was mostly handwritten, resulting in fewer firm matches by the platform.
Alex Angle is a Roll Call Factba.se presidential campaign research fellow.
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