Labor participation rates in European countries for men, but especially for women, have undergone several profound changes in the last decades. This includes the continuous increase in women´s participation, different economic cycles, but also changes in the length of working time (increasing education attainment, early retirement policies) that have shaped the time spent working across different cohorts. The analysis of these changes appears to be crucial given the current concerns on the sustainability of social security systems relying on workers’ contributions. In our study, we aim to compare how the average length of working life at the age of 15 has change across time using the EU-LFS by constructing working life tables using the Sullivan method to estimate life expectancies of active, inactive and employed individuals adding a decomposition analysis of the change over time of these averages. We follow individuals from 1986 to 2015, and focus on differences according to gender within a specific country on the one hand, and differences on women’s working life in several contexts on the other.