DEV Community: Studies Multiverse

How many hours can international students work? 38 countries side by side

Studies Multiverse — Tue, 03 Nov 2026 10:36:23 +0000

A part-time job is how many international students pay their rent. It is also one of the most common ways students lose their visa: the limit is a condition of the permit, and going over it can end your studies.

Every government sets its own number, and several count it differently (per week, per fortnight, per year, or only during term). We collected the weekly limits that governments publish, each from the official page, and put them in one table.

The short version

Most hours during term: Chile, Finland, Hungary and Spain (30 hours a week), then Japan (28) and New Zealand (25).
The most common limit: 20 hours a week, in 22 countries, including the UK, the US, Germany, France, Ireland and Italy.
The tightest: South Korea and North Macedonia (10 hours a week).
24 more countries publish no weekly figure, or do not let students work at all.

Weekly limits during term

Hours a week	Countries
30	Chile, Finland, Hungary, Spain
28	Japan
25	New Zealand
24	Australia, Canada
20	Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Malta, Norway, Qatar, Serbia, South Africa, Taiwan, United Kingdom, United States
16	Netherlands, Singapore
15	Albania, Luxembourg, Sweden, Switzerland
10	North Macedonia, South Korea

Figures as published by each government and checked in September 2026. The rules change, so always open the official source before you take a job.

Three things the number does not tell you

Holidays are often different. Most countries allow full-time work in the official university holidays. Some do not.
The unit matters. Australia counts 48 hours a fortnight, Germany counts 140 full days a year, and the US limit is for on-campus jobs only. The weekly figure above is the equivalent the government gives.
Your level of study can change it. Some countries give different limits to language-course students, or none at all.

Where the full rules are

The complete table, with each country's exact wording, the official source and the date it was checked, is here: How many hours international students may work, country by country.

It is part of Studies Multiverse, a free site for finding what and where to study, with official course and institution data for 224 countries.

I built a free study-abroad database from 62 governments' official pages. First dataset: proof of funds for a student visa

Studies Multiverse — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 11:54:49 +0000

Studies Multiverse is a side project: a free guide to studying abroad where every figure comes from an official source and carries the date it was checked. It runs on Cloudflare Workers and D1, with about 31,000 institutions from national registers and 62 country guides.

The first dataset I'm publishing on its own is the one students ask about most: how much money a student visa asks you to prove you have.

36 of the 62 countries publish a fixed yearly amount; for the other 26 the guide explains what the embassy asks for instead. The spread is 13x: Iceland asks for about EUR 22,900 a year, Indonesia about EUR 1,800 (USD 2,000).

The table, with a link to each government page and the date checked: https://studiesmultiverse.com/guides/proof-of-funds-by-country/

The data is CC BY 4.0 and there is a JSON API at https://studiesmultiverse.com/api/v1/ if you want to build on it. Corrections welcome: every figure links to its source, so they are easy to check.

Crawlers found 50,000 pages on my free side project. Here's what it did to my database bill.

Studies Multiverse — Sun, 18 Oct 2026 09:39:58 +0000

Studies Multiverse is a free study-abroad directory: 31,000 institutions in 224 countries, course lists, and tools for costs, post-study work rules and scholarships. It runs on Cloudflare Workers and D1 (SQLite), server-rendered, in 7 languages.

Last week the D1 dashboard showed 5 billion rows read in a day. Real visitors were a tiny fraction of that.

What was reading them

Meta's crawlers (meta-externalagent, meta-webindexer) were walking every directory listing in all 7 languages.
Applebot and others found the filtered URLs: every subject x city x page combination is a new address.
50,000 course pages each ran a "same course at other places" query that read about 2,600 rows.

Three fixes

Make the index usable. My list query had optional filters written as (?2 IS NULL OR e.kind = ?2). SQLite can't use an index through that, so every page counted the whole table. A fast path that builds the WHERE clause from only the filters in use dropped the main listing from ~30,000 rows to a few hundred.
Add the missing indexes. Two composite indexes on the course table, (country_slug, search_key) and (country_slug, entity_id), turned the heaviest query into an index lookup.
Don't serve crawlers what they can't index. Filtered lists are noindex and canonical to the plain list anyway, so crawlers now get a 301 to the plain list. Course detail pages (noindex for now) return a short 403 to crawlers. People see everything as before.

Takeaways

Check rows read, not request counts. A cheap-looking page can be the expensive one.
"Optional filter" SQL patterns quietly disable indexes. Run EXPLAIN QUERY PLAN.
If a URL is noindex, crawlers have no reason to fetch it at all.

The site: https://studiesmultiverse.com. Feedback welcome.