There is a culture of unpaid overtime in our industry and often it seems like people are in a competition to see how late they can stay at work, almost like it is a failure or weakness to leave first or on time as if you are not committed to your role / the business. It does happen and I think it is total BS. It wouldn’t be as bad if you were regularly awarded for your hard work, i.e regular bonus or meals / trips etc, but I’m sure most of the time it doesn’t happen. It didn’t for me and I don’t think I really got a thanks as it was almost expected!
I used to totally minimise the amount of extra work I did if I wasn’t getting paid. Why should I work for free? I firmly believe as long as I work my ass off while working my normal hours I shouldn’t be obliged to work any extra and don’t feel bad about being the first to leave at 5.30 as I knew that I worked hard all day. I did find myself working the occasional night until about 8 or even 9 pm because there was a pitch the next day and of course someone agreed it would be good to aim to do a weeks’ worth of work in 2 days! So I did take one for the team when they really did need the extra resource.
It’s all about the work / life balance and if you are working silly hours then it’s not good for you. Our Creative Director seemed to expect people to put in the extra work as did he, yet his sickness record was fairly poor. It would probably be more productive to therefore not work yourself to death at every available opportunity.
Anyway, in my job now I not only get paid for every single hour of overtime I do, I get paid x1.5 for it also, which is amazing and probably puts me in the 0.01% of designers / developers in our industry that get paid for every hour they work. Overtime pay FTW!!!
Anyway, to answer your post I work about 40-45 hours per week, occasionally it has reached 50 - 60 hours when there was some really urgent work on. 40 hours is my contracted hours.