More striking than the slim variation across professions in a sleep survey published this week is the headline result: Germans get quite a lot of it.

The research, carried out in Germany for newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, with data from the Berlin-based Institute for Economic Research, found that no one got fewer than six hours and 16 minutes a night. This is below the recommended minimum of seven hours, but not by enough to keep us, well, awake at night (the average fell just shy of seven hours).

Can you guess who gets the least amount of sleep among the 100 professions surveyed? Security guards, that’s who. Unsurprising, perhaps, given the rigours of shift work. Similarly, delivery workers and bakers reported nights of less than six and a half hours.

And the best-rested workers? Shop assistants, who reported an average of seven hours and 10 minutes a night. They were closely followed by – and this will raise some eyebrows among the people bringing these words to you – journalists. Actors did well, too.

To the extent that we can take seriously self-reported time counts, these results seem positive in the age of distracting smartphones and brain-grinding anxieties. The average person in the UK reported getting 6.8 hours a night in a survey for the Royal Society for Public Health last year. Again, not far off the magic seven hours, albeit some way short of the 7.7 hours respondents felt they needed.

But sleep surveys rarely take professions into account. Perhaps the biggest comes from the US, where, last March, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published sleep data in its morbidity and mortality weekly report. Analysing phone surveys of almost 180,000 working adults in 29 states, they calculated the percentage of people who got fewer than seven hours a night across various demographics, including profession. Overall, 36.5% of people reported not getting enough sleep, rising to a high of 58.2% among “communications-equipment operators”. By category, production workers (including food processors and steel workers, for example) got the least amount of sleep on average. Again, you may not find that surprising, but it is worth noting that all such surveys show that sleep deprivation rises as wages fall – challenging the assumption about highly paid bankers burning the midnight oil.

Before we put this subject to bed, let us consider a survey conducted by mattress company Sealy earlier this month. Again, it found that transport, communications and construction workers get bad sleep (more than 20% reported sleeping for fewer than five hours a night). However, it included a role not featured elsewhere that happened to come out worst – more than a quarter got fewer than five hours of sleep a night. The job? “Mother.”