The Great Shift to Remote Work Has Entered a New Normal
The number of big-city neighborhoods where lots of people work from home is still shrinking — just not as rapidly as before.
The great pandemic shift to remote work has settled into a new normal.
Photographer: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg
The share of US workers who worked primarily from home last year was 13.3%, according to US Census Bureau data released Thursday, down just a bit from 2023’s 13.8%. With recent monthly surveys from WFH Research showing the share of paid full days worked from home now holding nearly steady — at an average of 27.7% in the first eight months of 2025, compared with 27.9% over the same period in 2024 — it’s looking as if the great pandemic shift to remote work has settled into a new normal in which it is far more prevalent than before Covid-19 though still clearly a minority pursuit.
The share of US workers doing their jobs primarily at home was 2.3 times higher in 2024 than in 2019, while the percentage of workdays spent at home according to the WFH Research surveys is now 3.8 times higher, so hybrid work is a bigger part of this new normal than fully remote jobs. But the Census Bureau has been asking people about their primary means of transportation to work, the source of its WFH statistics, since 1960, and its annual American Community Surveys that pose the question — “How did this person usually get to work LAST WEEK?” — provide data of a geographical richness that no other survey can match. So it’s people who work primarily from home — a mix of hybrid and fully remote — that we’ll focus on here.