The paper examines the role of collective agreements in regulating working time within the EU and Hungarian legal framework. It points out that although EU law provides collective agreements with considerable leeway to specify rules on working time and, in certain cases, to deviate from the working time directive, Hungarian labour law differs significantly from this approach. According to domestic research, collective agreements have low coverage, and in many cases the content of existing agreements is merely a literal repetition of the statutory rules. The study also analyses the collective agreement for the electricity industry which has extended scope for the whole sector. Overall, the author concludes that the Hungarian legal environment does not sufficiently encourage collective bargaining in the area of working time regulation and recommends a review of the regulatory framework.