About 21.9 percent of US workers teleworked or worked at home for pay in September 2026, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s down from 22.6 percent in March 2026. Among US employees whose jobs can be done remotely, Gallup’s May 2026 reading is 52 percent hybrid, 26 percent fully remote and 22 percent on-site.
Whether working from home has the power to increase productivity is a separate question, and the randomized trials further down this page disagree with each other.
The statistics below come from two different kinds of source: government statistics agencies, and vendor surveys. This page now labels which is which.
The Most Recent Official Remote Work Statistics
Statistics agencies publish remote work figures on a monthly and annual cycle, and the newest ones are only weeks old. Each row below carries its reference period and its release date, because those two dates often sit a year apart.
| Statistic | Figure | Reference period | Released |
|---|---|---|---|
| BLS: US workers who teleworked or worked at home for pay | BLS reports 21.9 percent. | September 2026 | 2 October 2026 |
| BLS: the same measure six months earlier | BLS reports 22.6 percent. | March 2026 | 16 April 2026 |
| BLS: telework rate in financial activities, the highest of any industry | BLS reports 52.5 percent. | June 2026 | 29 July 2026 |
| BLS American Time Use Survey: worked at home on days worked | BLS reports 35 percent. | 2025 | 25 June 2026 |
| Census American Community Survey: worked from home | The Census Bureau reports 13.3 percent. | 2024 | Census schedules the 2025 estimates for 29 October 2026 |
| Eurostat: EU employed people usually working from home | Eurostat reports 8.8 percent. | 2025 | 11 June 2026 |
| Eurostat: EU employed people sometimes working from home | Eurostat reports 14.2 percent. | 2025 | 11 June 2026 |
| Statistics Canada: worked exclusively from home | Statistics Canada reports 11.4 percent. | May 2026 | 5 June 2026 |
| Statistics Canada: hybrid work arrangement | Statistics Canada reports 9.8 percent. | May 2026 | 5 June 2026 |
| ONS: hybrid working adults in Great Britain | The ONS reports 28 percent. | January to March 2025 | 11 June 2025 |
| Stanford SWAA: share of US paid days worked from home | The Stanford SWAA reports 26 percent. | July 2026 | 10 August 2026 |
These numbers measure different things, which is why they don’t line up. Eurostat separates usually from sometimes, the BLS asks about a reference week, and the Stanford figure counts days rather than people.
One of them isn’t an official statistic at all. The Stanford Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes is an opt-in online panel reweighted to census cells, so treat it as academic research.
Why Remote Work Statistics Disagree: What Each Source Divides By
Most remote work numbers that seem to conflict are measuring different populations. The denominator decides the answer, and most roundups never print it.
| Source | Figure | Period | What it divides by |
|---|---|---|---|
| BLS Current Population Survey | BLS reports 21.9 percent teleworked or worked at home for pay | September 2026 | BLS divides by all 158.5 million people at work in the survey week |
| BLS Current Population Survey, hours | BLS reports 15.0 percent of all hours worked were teleworked | September 2026 | BLS divides by total hours worked, so part-week teleworkers count partly |
| Gallup | Gallup reports 52 percent hybrid, 26 percent fully remote and 22 percent on-site | May 2026 | Gallup divides by remote-capable US employees only |
| Robert Half | Robert Half reports 87 percent of new postings fully on-site, 10 percent hybrid and 3 percent fully remote | Q2 2026 | Robert Half divides by the job postings it analyzed and doesn’t publish the count |
| BLS American Time Use Survey | BLS reports 35 percent did some or all of their work at home | 2025 | BLS divides by employed people on the days they worked |
Google’s AI Overview for this query says about 22.6 percent of US workers telework “as of 2026.” That’s the BLS March 2026 reading, and the September 2026 reading is 21.9 percent.
The same overview says roughly 27 percent of full-time employees worldwide work remotely. We couldn’t find that figure in the page it cites or in Gallup’s published data, and Gallup’s 26 percent covers US remote-capable employees only.
Gallup’s own page drops that qualifier in one sentence: “As of May 2026, 52% of U.S. employees work in a hybrid arrangement.” The rest of the page limits the figure to remote-capable jobs.
Where the Most Repeated Remote Work Statistics Come From
Five numbers dominate every remote work roundup online, this page included until today. None of them comes from a statistics agency or a peer-reviewed study.
| The claim | Who published it | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| CoSo Cloud: 77 percent of remote workers are more productive | ConnectSolutions, later CoSo Cloud, in a press release dated 17 February 2015 | CoSo Cloud measured self-reported perception. Its 77 percent is a share of the 39 percent who worked remotely at least monthly, so the real base is roughly 138 people. |
| Airtasker: remote employees work 1.4 more days a month | Airtasker, an Australian gig marketplace, in a September 2019 blog post | Airtasker surveyed 1,004 US employees recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk. It also disclosed undefined outlier adjustments. |
| Global Workplace Analytics: companies save $11,000 per remote employee | Global Workplace Analytics, a consultancy | A proprietary model rather than a survey. The figure is per half-time telecommuter and has been unchanged since at least August 2012. |
| Buffer: 98 percent want to work remotely | Buffer, in its State of Remote Work report | Buffer surveyed self-selected remote workers recruited through its own audience, so the result can’t describe workers generally. |
| Prodoscore: remote work raised productivity 47 percent | Prodoscore, an employee-monitoring vendor, on 19 May 2020 | Prodoscore compared its own activity score year over year across monitored users. There is no remote-versus-office comparison in it at all. |
The 77 percent figure also travels with a false attribution to Statistics Canada. The Statistics Canada page it points at contains only work-from-home prevalence figures, and the number 77 appears nowhere in that agency’s productivity paper.
What Randomized Trials Say About Remote Work and Productivity
The evidence points in three directions at once, which is why any single-number answer fails. Four studies with real designs disagree, and all four are worth knowing.
| Study | Design | Finding |
|---|---|---|
| Bloom and colleagues, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2015 | Randomized trial at Ctrip, call center staff | The authors report “a 13% performance increase,” about 9 points of it from working more minutes per shift. |
| Bloom and colleagues, Nature, June 2024 | Randomized trial, 1,612 graduate employees, two days a week at home | The authors report that “hybrid working did not affect performance grades over the next two years of reviews,” while quit rates fell by a third. |
| Gibbs, Mengel and Siemroth, Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics, 2023 | IT professionals, before and after lockdown | The authors report that “Hours worked increased, output declined slightly, and productivity fell 8% to 19%.” |
| Emanuel and Harrington, New York Fed staff report, 2023 | Call center workers | The authors report that “an 8 percent productivity gap persisted,” most of it explained by who chose remote work. |
The Nature trial holds the most useful single result in this literature. Managers’ surveyed productivity expectations moved from minus 2.6 percent before the experiment to plus 1.0 percent after it, while every objective output measure stayed flat. For managers moving from measurement to tooling, we compared which employee productivity tracking tools have a real free plan, and what three states require by law before you switch one on.
Perception moved and output didn’t. That gap is the reason survey-based productivity statistics and measured productivity statistics keep disagreeing.
Older Survey Figures, Kept With Their Original Sources
Earlier versions of this page listed dozens of figures from vendor and media surveys published between 2014 and 2021. We’ve kept every one that carried a source, below, and dropped the ones that didn’t.
Treat these as dated. Most come from self-selected samples, and none comes from a statistics agency.
- Data from the 2020 State of Remote Work by Buffer and AngelList (surveying 3,500 remote workers globally) reveals strong employee preferences for remote work.
- According to the OWLLabs State of Remote Work 2019 Report (1,202 US employees aged 22-65).
- From the Remote-how Remote Managers 2020 Report (594 global respondents, 529 with remote team management experience).
- 70% of remote workers feel “left out” of the workplace (source)
- 13% performance boost in the famous Stanford remote work study
- 20-25% more productive according to a JD Edwards study
- 77% of remote workers consider themselves more productive
- 83% of people don’t believe they need an office to be productive
- 82% of remote workers report less stress
- Why are remote workers more productive? 86% of people prefer to work alone, and 61% believe coworkers are their biggest distraction. According to Atlassian, 76% of workers want to avoid the office when concentrating on demanding projects.
- 72% of people prioritize email as a communication medium, which is perfect for remote work. For tips on managing your time effectively, see our comprehensive guide.
- 25% lower turnover for companies with remote work (OWL Labs)
- 33% faster hiring for companies with remote positions available
- $11,000 savings per employee per year possible through telework (Global Workplace Analytics)
- AT&T saved $150 million in extra productive hours and $30 million per year in real estate (source)
- According to Flexjobs research.
- 85% of millennials want to work remotely full-time (source)
- 69% of millennials would sacrifice other benefits to work from home (IWG)
- 72% of professionals agree workplace flexibility is important for future HR and recruiting (LinkedIn)
- Financial benefits for remote workers according to The Penny Hoarder and other sources.
- 30% of remote employees save $5,000+ annually on workplace-related expenses
- 115% growth in remote work over the past decade
- 7 million employees now work from home at least half the week (Global Workplace Analytics)
- 23% of people work from home at least some of the time (BLS)
Related Guides on Remote Work
To track employee productivity while a team works remotely, start with the guides below.
- Working from home tips scientifically proven to boost productivity
- 21 essential tools for remote teams
- How to know if your remote employees are working
- Creating a remote work policy
- How to ask your boss to work from home
- 23 ways to motivate employees
- The future of remote work
- thrive with full-time remote work
- 21 ways to reduce and relieve stress
- remote teamwork strategies
- remote work increases productivity
- managing your time effectively
- satisfied employees are more productive
- work from home setup
- productive employees
Official Sources That Disagree With Each Other
Three governments publish incompatible remote work numbers, and two of them admit it in print. Treat any single national figure as one methodology’s answer.
The United States runs three at once. The BLS household survey put telework at 22.9 percent for early 2024. Its time-use survey put working at home at 35 percent for 2025, while the Census American Community Survey put it at 13.3 percent for 2024.
Statistics Canada published 24.3 percent from its 2021 Census and 30.6 percent from its Labour Force Survey. The two reference weeks were seven days apart.
Statistics Canada’s own commuting reference guide still says the census and survey results “showed comparable results.” Its own numbers sit 6.3 points apart.
The Census Bureau documented its own gap in a working paper published on 15 June 2026. Home-based work came out at 15.1 percent in the SIPP against 17.9 percent in the ACS for 2021, with non-overlapping margins of error.
That paper adds a caveat worth carrying. The differences in how much each survey’s estimate changed “were not statistically different,” so the level gap is the real finding.
None of these surveys can tell you what your own team does. Our own Q3 2026 benchmark of 26,518,025 emails puts average work-hours response time at 4 hours and 17 minutes. You can see how team email activity gets measured on data you already have.
How Much Time Remote Work Saves on Commuting
Commuting is the one remote work benefit with a clean, peer-reviewed, 27-country number behind it. Aksoy and colleagues published it in AEA Papers and Proceedings in 2023.
“The average daily time savings when working from home are 72 minutes in our sample… Workers allocate 40 percent of their time savings to their jobs and about 11 percent to caregiving activities.”
Read the denominator carefully. Those 72 minutes are per day worked from home. The same paper’s forward-looking estimate is about one hour per week per worker once averaged across the workforce.
What the Research Says About Remote Work and Mental Health
The newest and strongest evidence here isn’t flattering. Emanuel, Harrington and Pallais published a difference-in-differences study of 588,322 people in Science in June 2026.
“We found that remote work increases time spent alone, worsens mental well-being across multiple measures, and increases the use of mental health services and prescriptions.”
Those effects concentrate among people living alone. The authors attribute about a third of the rise in isolation and mental distress between 2011 to 2019 and 2022 to 2024 to remote work.
A longitudinal systematic review in BMC Public Health, published 7 July 2026, reaches a more conditional verdict. Teleworking, its authors write, “is neither uniformly beneficial nor harmful.”
Dose matters as well. A study of 87,317 Household Pulse respondents reached a split verdict. It found that “working remotely 1-2 days per week was not significantly linked to loneliness,” while three to four days raised it.
What We Corrected on This Page
This page previously presented five vendor-survey numbers as settled findings. We’ve kept every original link and corrected the claims around them.
The biggest change is the productivity framing. Randomized trials disagree with each other, so a flat answer that remote workers are more productive isn’t available.
We also dropped the count from the title. The page mixes list items, summary lines and answers, and the old figure of 83 no longer describes what’s here.
In October 2026 we replaced the March 2026 BLS headline with the September 2026 reading and added a table of what each source divides by. We corrected Google’s AI Overview on both figures it states. We also collapsed ten sections of 2014 to 2021 vendor figures into one sourced list and removed a duplicate Article schema node.
Frequently Asked Questions
What percentage of employees want to work remotely?
98% of people would like to work remotely at least some of the time, according to the Buffer/AngelList 2020 State of Remote Work survey. Only 2% say they would never want to work from home, and 97% would recommend remote work to others.
Are remote workers more productive than office workers?
It depends on the study. Bloom and colleagues measured a 13% gain in a call center trial, while Gibbs, Mengel and Siemroth measured productivity falling 8% to 19% among IT professionals. The 77% self-report figure comes from a 2015 CoSo Cloud survey rather than from measured output.
How much can companies save with remote work?
Global Workplace Analytics models a saving of about $11,000 per half-time telecommuter per year, and that figure has been unchanged since at least August 2012. No statistics agency publishes a comparable number.
Are fully remote jobs declining?
Remote job postings are falling fast, while the share of people working from home is drifting down slowly. Robert Half’s share of fully in-office postings rose from 65 percent in Q4 2025 to 87 percent in Q2 2026. BLS measured 21.9 percent of workers teleworking in September 2026, down from 22.6 percent in March.
What percentage of jobs are 100% remote?
About 3 percent of new US job postings were fully remote in Q2 2026, according to Robert Half. Among existing employees whose jobs can be done remotely, Gallup measured 26 percent working fully remote in May 2026. The gap exists because postings and current employees are different populations.
Why are so many employers against remote work?
Managers expected hybrid work to cost output before they saw the data. In the 2024 Nature trial by Bloom and colleagues, managers predicted a 2.6 percent productivity loss beforehand. Afterward they predicted a 1.0 percent gain, while measured performance stayed flat.
Jayson is a long-time columnist for Forbes, Entrepreneur, BusinessInsider, Inc.com, and various other major media publications, where he has authored over 1,000 articles since 2012, covering technology, marketing, and entrepreneurship. He keynoted the 2013 MarketingProfs University, and won the “Entrepreneur Blogger of the Year” award in 2015 from the Oxford Center for Entrepreneurs. In 2010, he founded a marketing agency that appeared on the Inc. 5000 before selling it in January of 2019, and he is now the CEO of EmailAnalytics and OutreachBloom.
