COVID's Impact: Post-pandemic work from home solidifies

Five years since a pandemic pushed the remote work trend into hyper speed, calls for employees to return to the office have quieted, and the home office appears to be a permanent and prominent feature of the American workforce.

US workers have spent about 28% of working days at home on average since the start of 2023, according to the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes, a monthly report run by researchers at four universities. That share spiked above 60% during the height of the pandemic before falling below 30% by summer 2022.

While well below pandemic peaks when mandates kept most employees at home, remote work in the US has stabilized at new highs. There also appears to be little reason for the trend to reverse anytime soon, experts said, absent a major shock to the economy or labor market.

"For now, it's a trend that is pretty well established," said Howard Chernick, a professor of economics at Hunter College, City University of New York. "It may fluctuate a bit up and down, it may change by city, but it's not going away."

Despite several high-profile employers including Amazon.com Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Starbucks Corp. launching efforts to bring employees back to the office, the share of US workers working remotely has remained stable since early 2023, said Jose Maria Barrero, a finance professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico and a member of the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes team.

"This looks like a new normal," Barrero said.

A global survey that Barrero's team conducted earlier this year, collecting data from more than 16,000 college graduates across 40 countries, found that while work-from-home levels fell from 2022 to 2023, they have since stabilized. Employees worked from home an average of 1.27 days per week in 2024 and early 2025, down from 1.61 days in 2022 but in line with the 1.33 days average in 2023, according to the global survey.

In the US, the level was slightly higher at 1.5 days per week. These levels of remote work are unlikely to move much in coming years, Barrero said.

"I'm skeptical continued efforts will do much to move the needle either way," Barrero said.

Despite its relative staying power, remote work remains concentrated in certain fields, such as finance, information, and scientific and technical work.

The phenomenon remains prevalent in large cities and among major employers, particularly in white-collar sectors, but is not common among most employers, said Peter Cappelli, a management professor and director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

While many prominent employers made headlines by demanding their workers return to the office, the more lasting move is enforcing so-called "anchor days," which are designated days when all or a portion of a company's workforce is required to be in the office, Cappelli said.

Worker power

Remote work is widely viewed as a worker benefit and a sign of worker bargaining power amid a robust labor market where the demand for workers continues to outpace supply.

"I think there is worker power in the sense that employers don't want to irritate employees too much," Cappelli said. "That is likely more a function of how irritating the change is rather than any underlying power employees have now."

If the labor market starts to slow, with joblessness rising and labor supply outpacing demand, this remote work dynamic could shift.

"Certainly, in an economic downturn, more employers will push more workers back to the office, given that employers are more inclined than employees to want to be back in the office," Cappelli said.

An economic downturn, along with weakness in the labor market, could cause a slowdown in remote work as workers will have fewer jobs to choose from and will be less willing and able to bargain for them, said Chernick with Hunter College.

"It will certainly not go back to where it was before the pandemic," Chernick said. "Too many people on both sides of the market have gotten used to this arrangement."

The share of full-time office workers will likely never return to 2019 levels as the pandemic revealed that remote work can be done well and is seen as an employment positive for workers, Barrero said.

Still, even the best work-from-home environment lacks in-person interaction and socializing, as proponents of office work point out.

Advancement in technology could ultimately remedy this, Barrero said.

"Technological advances are likely to make that stuff easier over time," said Barrero. "Imagine in 10 years we don't do video calls on a screen but in metaverse or augmented reality form that makes it much easier to interact and collaborate. Our bet is that in the long term those technological advances will enable more work from home than we see now."