Remote and flexible work remain firmly embedded in the U.S. labor market, with roughly 51 million wage and salary workers working from home at least occasionally during 2024 and 2025, according to new Bureau of Labor Statistics data. About 57% of workers were also able to vary when they started and ended their workday, showing that flexibility extends well beyond employees who regularly work from home.
The numbers provide one of the broadest government looks yet at how working arrangements have settled after the pandemic disrupted traditional office schedules. About 37% of wage and salary workers, or nearly 56 million people, had jobs that could be performed from home, while 34% actually did so at least occasionally. Twenty-eight percent of all wage and salary workers had days when they worked exclusively from home, and more than one-third of that group worked exclusively from home five or more days per week.
For employers and investors, the report suggests flexibility has evolved from an emergency workplace response into a persistent feature of labor competition, particularly in higher-paying professional industries. It also shows that the benefits are distributed unevenly: workers with higher earnings, more education and jobs built around information rather than physical presence remain far more likely to have access to remote work.
The BLS figures are averages from surveys conducted during 2024 and 2025, rather than a snapshot of conditions in September 2026. They therefore say more about the structure of the post-pandemic workforce than about the latest month-to-month movement in hiring or labor demand.
Remote Work Has Expanded, but the Comparison Is Not Perfect
The shift from the pre-pandemic workplace is substantial. In the comparable 2017-18 BLS survey, 25% of wage and salary workers said they worked from home at least occasionally, while 15% had days when they worked exclusively from home. The share reporting flexible start and stop times, however, was already 57%, the same headline percentage reported for 2024-25.
Those figures should not be treated as a perfectly continuous time series. BLS says the 2024-25 questionnaire was very similar to the earlier survey but included several changes, including an interviewer instruction telling respondents to count other remote or off-site locations where they chose to work. Some questions were also added, removed or modified. The contrast nevertheless points to a workplace in which location flexibility is substantially more common than it was before the pandemic, while flexibility over starting and ending times was already widespread.
Remote work is also more likely to represent a normal paid work arrangement than occasional after-hours work. Among employees who worked from home in 2024-25, 89% were paid for that work. Roughly one-third said working remotely was required by their job, while 31% cited personal preference and 12% said they did so to coordinate work with family or personal needs.
A separate Federal Reserve survey reinforces the broader picture, though its methodology is different. In 2025, 39% of workers surveyed by the Fed said they had worked from home at least some of the time during the previous week, including 17% who worked entirely from home and 23% who used a hybrid arrangement. The measures should not be compared directly with the BLS figures, but both surveys indicate that remote work remains a significant part of the workforce rather than a temporary pandemic-era practice.
Flexibility Is Heavily Skewed Toward Higher-Paid Work
The divide becomes much larger when earnings and occupations are considered. Among full-time single-job workers in the lowest earnings quartile, just 12% worked from home at least occasionally. That climbed to 29.6% in the second quartile, 44.6% in the third and 66.7% among workers earning above the 75th percentile. Nearly 58% of workers in the top earnings quartile had days when they worked exclusively from home, compared with less than 9% in the bottom quartile.
Education shows a similar pattern. Among workers age 25 and older, 57.1% of those with at least a bachelor’s degree worked from home at some point, versus 15.3% of high-school graduates without college experience. Management, business and financial occupations had a 67.8% work-from-home rate, while only 6.5% of service workers did so. Financial activities had one of the highest industry rates at 76.2%, compared with 7.2% in leisure and hospitality.
That split matters economically because workplace flexibility increasingly resembles another form of compensation available disproportionately to higher-paid employees. Companies competing for professional and technical talent may therefore have more than wages and traditional benefits to consider when deciding how aggressively to require office attendance. At the same time, businesses dependent on physical locations — restaurants, retailers, transportation companies, healthcare providers and many manufacturers — have much less ability to use remote work as a recruiting or retention tool.
Control over working hours is broader than remote work, but it is not evenly distributed either. Seventy-one percent of workers in the highest full-time earnings quartile could change their starting and ending times, compared with 47.5% among workers in the lowest quartile. Workers who could work from home were particularly likely to control their schedules: 78% had flexible start and stop times, compared with 44% of employees whose jobs could not be performed remotely.
Schedule predictability remains another dividing line. Nearly 59% of workers knew their schedule at least four weeks in advance, but 9% received one day or less of notice. Construction workers faced some of the greatest uncertainty, with about 30% learning their schedules no more than a day in advance, while leisure and hospitality workers were much more likely than most industries to receive only a week or two of visibility.
The Productivity Question Remains Open
The BLS report does not measure whether flexible or remote workers are more productive, and the data should not be used as evidence that working from home caused changes in economy-wide output. Recent productivity figures, however, show that the broader U.S. economy has continued generating stronger output per hour than during the previous expansion. Nonfarm business productivity was 2.2% higher in the second quarter of 2026 than a year earlier, while productivity has grown at a 2.1% annualized rate since the fourth quarter of 2019, compared with 1.5% during the previous business cycle.
Federal Reserve research published in 2025 found evidence that industries with greater technological ability to perform work remotely experienced productivity benefits over longer periods, although that research focuses on remote-work capability rather than simply counting how many employees stayed home. The findings are consistent with a more complicated picture than either “remote work increases productivity” or “office work increases productivity”: the economic result depends on the type of work, technology, management and how the arrangement is implemented.
For investors, the BLS data make one point difficult to ignore: the U.S. workforce has not returned to a single pre-pandemic model. Remote work is concentrated in many of the economy’s highest-paid and most knowledge-intensive industries, while schedule flexibility has become a meaningful component of job quality across a wider portion of the labor market.
The next question is whether those arrangements survive if labor-market bargaining power continues to shift between employers and workers. August payrolls increased by 162,000 and unemployment held at 4.1%, leaving the labor market neither severely constrained nor obviously weak. The August Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, due September 29, will provide the next major reading on openings, hiring and quits, while third-quarter productivity data in November will offer another check on whether businesses continue generating output gains as workplace models keep evolving.