It's grossly inaccurate. Hour reporting in residencies is largely a large stakes box-checking exercise to give the appearance of rule compliance. Usually hours are under-reported. Your best information is going to come from PGY3 and PGY4 residents that are on their way out of the program. There are usually a few straight shooters in every program that will tell you how it is in the program if you are easy to get along with. You can stop reading here if that's all you want to know.
But FREIDA is garbage regarding work hours and I'll tell you why:
There is too much pressure on programs to stay within the rules, who then pressure residents in a variety of ways subtle and not so subtle to under-report hours, even in psychiatry. Attendings and program directors will say things like "Make sure you are very accurate in reporting your hours online, and we NEVER work more than 80 hours a week in our program. We will need to investigate if you report more than 80 hours." This generally means investigate why you say you work more than 80 hours, not why you actually worked more than 80 hours. Also, if you do work more than 80 hours it's not because you had 10 admissions to inpatient every night in a busy psych hospital, it's because you are probably inefficient. That's how it works.
There are a variety of consequences residents face if they report actual worked hours over 80 on average over four weeks. Some are:
1. In the long term, if you residents report that they in fact work an average of 90 hours a week every week in PGY1, then eventually your program will get put on probation, and could eventually lose it's accreditation. Which then makes the residents graduates of a non-accredited program.
2. In the short term, most residency programs are no where near big enough to allow any sort of actual anonymity in hour reporting. Think about it - in the average size psychiatry residency program, a program director is going to see around 150 residents over a 20 year career (6 new PGY1 residents per year, times 20 years, plus a few more). There are generally only about 6 PGY1's at a time in most programs. Your program director and attendings and colleagues can and will find out who is not "with the program" on making sure hours are reported as being under 80 hours on average per week over four weeks. Like with any job, there are a variety of legitimate looking ways of dealing with non-team players. It's hard to move on to another program even if you are a team player and well thought of in your program.
You can see the double bind that residents are put in regarding work hour reporting.
If residents had the job mobility that attending's have you wouldn't see this happen as much, in my opinion.
Ok, enough negativity. In psychiatry, in PGY4 and often PGY3 it is rare to work more than 40 hours in most places. And I will say that in fellowship some may have over-reported hours a little bit so we look busy, such as this week after New Years, when there were no consults and it snowed and there were a lot of clinic cancellations due to weather, and we worked maybe 30 hours that week each year. It didn't fool our Program Director at all, but again, it's all about appearances. An educational excercise in institutional politics, if you will.