A guide to the night, not an app.

When night work starts, country by country, and who works these hours. What nights do to the body, the habits that help you eat, stay alert, drive home and sleep, and the signs of shift work disorder. What the law owes night workers in the EU, the UK, Germany and France, with the United States for contrast.

There is no app, no account, no members and no mailing list, and nothing on the site asks for your personal details.

Facts come from the texts themselves: laws in force and the official guidance on them, official statistics from Eurostat and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the guidance of the UK Health and Safety Executive, the evaluations of the International Agency for Research on Cancer, and, on shift work disorder, the patient guidance of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and a peer-reviewed study. Each one is cited where it is used, with the date of the document, or the day its current version was read.

This is general information, not legal or medical advice. If you spot an error, write to [email protected] and it will be corrected.

Every photograph comes from Wikimedia Commons and is shown resized, cropped on screen, without other changes. The share images that set a photograph beside a title are released under the same licence as that photograph.

• Road closure on Globe Lane, Chatham, Kent, 24 November 2025, 22:04. Photo: OathOn, CC BY-SA 4.0.
• A baker on the night shift, Valletta, Malta, 20 July 2019, 01:27. Photo: Renata Apan, CC BY-SA 4.0.
• Metro drivers at Kropotkinskaya station, Moscow, 15 May 2011, 03:24. Photo: Mikhail (Vokabre) Shcherbakov, CC BY-SA 2.0.
• Canal workers at the Gatún Locks, Panama, 12 January 2020, 19:59. Photo: David Brossard, CC BY-SA 2.0.
• The intensive care night shift aboard USNS Comfort, 23 April 2003. Photo: Shane T. McCoy, U.S. Navy, public domain.

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