Despite a wave of high-profile return-to-office mandates from America's largest corporations, the share of paid workdays done from home has barely budged in two years.
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Remote work stabilizes at 26% as office return mandates stall
Despite a wave of high-profile return-to-office mandates from America's largest corporations, the share of paid workdays done from home has barely budged in two years.
The share of paid full days worked from home stood at 26% in May, virtually unchanged from 27% two years earlier, according to a monthly survey by economists Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom and Steven Davis. That is nearly four times the 7% recorded in 2019, before the pandemic rewrote workplace norms.
"Claims that remote work is dead are quite different from the actual data," said Emma Harrington, an economist at the University of Virginia who studies remote work. "The data does seem at odds with the Jamie Dimon story of the world."
Office occupancy tracked by Kastle Systems across 10 major U.S. cities sits only slightly above year-ago levels, while cellphone data from Placer.ai shows average office visits in May remained 32% below the same month in 2019 — a modest improvement from the 35% deficit a year earlier. About two-thirds of U.S. workers remain fully on-site, with only one in 10 fully remote and hybrid arrangements accounting for the remainder, the WFH survey shows.
The disconnect between corporate mandates and aggregate data reflects a generational divide in leadership. Younger chief executives who were 40 or under during the pandemic are far more likely to maintain hybrid policies, said Stanford's Bloom, suggesting remote work could grow rather than shrink as older executives retire. That trajectory carries implications for commercial real estate demand, urban transit revenue and the long-term productivity of a workforce that has rebalanced between home and office.
The plateau comes despite a concerted push by some of the largest U.S. employers. JPMorgan Chase made five-day-a-week office attendance mandatory in March 2025, while Home Depot, Target, Microsoft and Intel have all announced policies requiring more in-person time. Yet those companies, for all their size, represent a fraction of the 163-million-strong U.S. workforce, many of whom work for smaller firms or startups where hybrid arrangements have become standard.
Generational Shift Reshapes Workplace Norms
Bloom's survey work found that employees at companies with younger chief executives work from home more frequently than those at firms run by older leaders. "If you look at CEOs who were 40 or under during the pandemic, they're far more likely nowadays to have at least hybrid in their companies," he said. "Older CEOs generationally are just less used to it."
That pattern extends to company age as well. Younger firms are investing in management practices designed to make remote work sustainable, said Prithwiraj Choudhury, an economist at the London School of Economics. "These are the companies which are investing in management practices to make this model work, and some of these companies will scale up and become the next set of large companies," he said. Historically, job growth in the U.S. has been driven by startups on their way to becoming tomorrow's behemoths, not by well-established incumbents.
The Productivity Trade-Off
Remote work has delivered measurable benefits for certain groups. Harrington's research with economist Matthew Kahn showed that working from home has enabled more women with children to remain in the workforce, while Labor Department figures show a substantial increase in employment for people with disabilities since the pandemic, likely aided by workplace flexibility.
But the drawbacks are becoming clearer. In research published this month in the journal Science, Harrington, Natalia Emanuel and Amanda Pallais presented evidence that remote work has made Americans lonelier and more mentally distressed. Forthcoming research in the Quarterly Journal of Economics from the same team shows that younger employees benefit from working in proximity to more senior colleagues, and the rise of remote work may have hurt job prospects for recent college graduates.
"You're not building the skills that you would have in person, and that kind of slow burn can make people less productive in the long run," Harrington said.
The benefits of remote work — hours saved on commuting, greater flexibility — are immediate and visible, while the costs accumulate slowly. That asymmetry may explain why the equilibrium has held even as some of the country's most powerful executives push for a full return.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
