Arlington Named ‘Hardest-Working City in America’

Arlington County is the hardest-working “city” in the United States, at least according to a new set of rankings.

The financial website SmartAsset has Arlington ranked No. 1 on its list of the “hardest-working cities in America.” The website ranked 113 U.S. cities by labor market data on the average number of hours worked in a week and the average number of weeks worked per year.

The four hardest-working cities after Arlington were Anchorage, Alaska; Lincoln, Nebraska; Plano, Texas; and Virginia Beach, Virginia. Detroit ranked last on the list

People in Arlington work an average of 41.5 hours per week and 40.15 weeks per year, according to SmartAsset. The company said that Arlington benefitted from steady employment at the Pentagon and other federal government offices.

Thanks in part to a large federal government presence, the Arlington, VA economy is largely immune to the economic shocks which sometimes rock the rest of the country. Government agencies like the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security are headquartered here. In fact, the Pentagon where the Department of Defense is headquartered is the largest office building in the world.

In Arlington people work an average of 41.5 hours per week. This figure is the highest in the country and a big reason Arlington comes in as the hardest-working city in America.

The largest private companies (in terms of employees) in the city are Deloitte and Accenture. Other large private companies owe their presence to the nearby Department of Defense, like Lockheed Martin. All in all, workers in Arlington work an average of 1,431 hours per year.