Colombia’s Law 2101 of 2021 reduced the maximum working week from 48 to 42 hours, phased in over several years. The final step took effect in July 2026.
Why this is not just a payroll tweak
For an office operation running Monday to Friday, the reduction is absorbed by shortening the working day or the Friday. Salaries do not fall, so cost per hour rises, but the team structure does not change.
For an operation that has to cover wide windows —extended support, coverage across several time zones, weekend shifts— the effect is different. The hours that need covering did not fall; what fell is how many each person can contribute. The arithmetic is direct: covering the same window with fewer hours per head requires more heads, or more overtime.
The three decisions on the table
- Grow headcount. More agents covering the same window. Fixed and training costs rise, but no overtime premiums.
- Lean on overtime. Headcount stays, but every additional hour carries a premium, and the law caps how many can be worked.
- Redesign the shift pattern. Redistribute coverage according to real demand by time slot instead of keeping a flat roster. It is the cheapest option and the most work.
The third is almost always the right one, and almost always the one that gets postponed, because it requires hourly volume data that many operations are not collecting.
What it means for an outsourcing contract
If your Colombian provider quoted you before July 2026 with a shift structure calculated on 44 or 48 hours, that quote rests on an assumption that no longer holds. Two things are worth checking: whether the shift model was redesigned or is simply being absorbed with overtime, and whether the contracted hourly cost reflects the change or is being offset somewhere else.
The useful question is not how much the rate went up. It is how many hours of effective coverage you are buying for the same money, and whether that coverage sits where your demand is. That figure is rarely explicit: you have to ask for it, along with the rest of the quote's assumptions (how to read a BPO quote from Colombia).
This article describes the general framework and does not constitute legal or employment advice. Every operation should validate its case with its own adviser.