How Common Is Remote Work? What the Data Shows
A look at official US labor data on how many people work from home, broken down by education level and gender, with no product recommendations.
Remote work went from rare to common in just a few years, but exactly how common it still is depends heavily on who you ask and which year's data you look at. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics runs an annual American Time Use Survey (ATUS) that measures this directly, asking employed people whether they did some or all of their work at home on days they worked. The 2025 results, released in June 2026, give a clear, current picture.
The headline numbers
According to the BLS news release, in 2025, 35 percent of employed people did some or all of their work at home on days they worked, while 70 percent did some or all of their work at their workplace. These two figures add up to more than 100 percent because many people split a single workday between home and an office, or work different locations on different days of the survey period.
This 35 percent figure is specifically about working at home, not necessarily working fully remote. A person who worked two hours at home in the morning and then went into the office for the rest of the day counts in this "worked at home" statistic.
It is not evenly distributed
The BLS data breaks this down in ways that are useful if you're trying to understand your own situation relative to the broader workforce, rather than just a single national average.
By gender: Employed women were more likely to work at home than employed men, at 38 percent versus 31 percent, respectively.
By education level: This is the largest gap in the data. Among workers age 25 and older, 51 percent of employed people with a bachelor's degree or higher performed some work at home on days worked, compared with just 19 percent of those with a high school diploma and no college. That's a 32 percentage point difference, which tells you that "remote work" as a broad workplace trend is concentrated heavily in degree-requiring jobs, not spread evenly across the labor market.
The same group with more education was also simply more likely to work on an average day at all: 72 percent of people with a bachelor's degree or higher worked on an average day, compared with 63 percent of those with only a high school diploma.
What this does and doesn't tell you
This data answers "how many people worked at home" for the general U.S. workforce in 2025. It does not tell you:
- Whether someone worked at home by choice or because their employer required it.
- Whether a specific industry or company has a return-to-office policy (ATUS measures individual behavior, not company policy).
- How these numbers compare across other countries, since ATUS is a U.S.-only survey.
If you're trying to benchmark your own team or company against "the market," keep in mind that a 35 percent national average blends full-time remote workers, hybrid workers who are in office most days, and people who occasionally bring work home in the evening. None of those groups look identical even though they're all counted in the same statistic.
Why this matters if you're negotiating a remote arrangement
If you're asking your employer for a remote or hybrid setup, it helps to know where your request sits relative to the broader data. A request to work from home two days a week sits well within what over a third of the workforce already does in some form. A request to be fully remote, with zero in-office days, is a different and less common arrangement that the ATUS "any work at home" measure does not separate out from partial remote work, so citing the 35 percent figure by itself won't tell you how common fully remote work specifically is.
Key takeaways
- In 2025, 35 percent of employed people in the US did some or all of their work at home on a given workday; 70 percent worked some or all of their day at their workplace, and these overlap.
- Education level predicts remote work more strongly than almost any other factor in this dataset: 51 percent of bachelor's-degree-or-higher workers did some work at home, versus 19 percent of high-school-only workers.
- Women reported working at home somewhat more often than men (38 percent versus 31 percent).
- This data measures individual behavior in a single year, not company policy, industry norms, or international comparisons.