Working from home became an order for many of us during the Covid pandemic. Some, of course, worked from home before anyway. But for many, COVID was the accelerant that led to an ability to request to work remotely.
It has its pros and cons, of course. Loneliness, more time spent indoors, and less ability to collaborate face-to-face are among the challenges that those working at home face permanently. But for many, working from home helps them gain back time that would’ve been spent commuting and spend less on travel.
We wanted to know what the latest data around working from home looks like right now, so we surveyed a panel of 2,019 people in the UK, looked at Google search data around remote job searches in the UK and the USA and assessed global studies by others. The result is this - our 2024 round-up of work-from-home statistics.
Here for the fast facts? Here are what we consider the most important work-from-home facts and figures in 2024. You can find all the details and context within.
To determine whether people want to work from home, from an office or a combination of the two, we surveyed 2,109 people in June 2023.
We asked them: Ideally, where would you like to work from if it were your choice?
We know some roles don’t facilitate remote working (i.e. roles in hospitality where you have to physically be at a venue or teaching roles where you have to be in a school). So we gave people the option of telling us that doesn’t apply to their roles.
19.51% of people (394 respondents in 2019) told us that the option of working location doesn’t apply to their role.
We removed those respondents from our dataset to get a better idea of the people for whom the option applies. Of the respondents remaining 1,625 respondents, this is where they’d like to work from:
We found that:
We delved into the data in a bit more detail to take a look at variations in responses from different demographic groups when it comes to working exclusively from home.
Of course, working from home has its appeal. Not commuting saves time and money, for example. But some may also find it isolating. And while some people thrive in productivity terms while working remotely, others find they get more done in an office environment.
So, who are 27% of people who want to work remotely or at home exclusively?
There are very clear differences between age groups here.
Less than 1 in 5 of those aged 16 to 24 would choose to work exclusively (19.76%). At the other end of the scale, 32.9% of those aged 55 and over would choose to work exclusively at home. Ultimately, amongst no age group, the majority wish to work from home or remotely.
We also found there were some variations in the desire to work exclusively from home between men and women.
Women are likelier to say they want to work at home or remotely than men are.
A potential hypothesis for this is that it’s still the case that women generally deal with more things like childcare, for which work-from-home flexibility is, of course, incredibly important.
So age greatly affects where people want to work, and gender does, too, to a lesser extent. However, one of the things we were not expecting was variation in responses based on the region in which people live. Across different regions of the UK, the proportion of people who would prefer to work exclusively from home varied quite widely from a low of 23.14% (Greater London) to a high of 33.6% (South West).
The final demographic breakdown we dove into was the sector in which people work. Here’s our sector breakdown:
We’ve excluded those who said their jobs don’t facilitate work at home, so these are just people in roles where flexibility is feasible.
The variation is significant. Around a third of those working in sales, media and marketing and around a third of those in arts and culture would like to work exclusively from home. But under half of those in manufacturing and utilities would like the same.
If such a relatively low proportion of people want to work exclusively from home, does it mean we need to get our staff permanently and exclusively in the office?
Well, that’s a hard no.
Fewer people (just 17% overall) said they would want to work exclusively from an office or work premises.
We saw some variation here by age as well, but perhaps not to the degree we saw with the preference to work exclusively from home.
Ultimately, the under 45s are the least likely to want to work exclusively from an office, while the 55 and overs are most likely to.
But frankly, it’s a pretty unpopular option amongst everyone.
We saw little variation by gender here, but region definitely influenced preferences.
In the North East, more than 1 in 5 would choose to work exclusively from an office or work premises. At the other end of the scale, in London, just 14.9% would choose this option.
There were wild variations in responses here.
In legal, just 7.41% of people would choose to work just from the office. In travel, 34.85% would. And there’s incredibly wide variance across the board here.
So what’s incredibly evident is that people generally don’t want to work exclusively from home or from an office.
We gave three different hybrid options here:
Just over half of respondents chose one of these three hybrid options.
There’s not much in it between the three options overall:
But we did see variation by age again here.
With over 60% of 16 to 34 year olds preferring hybrid, there’s a real challenge in attracting talent in this age group now for companies who still do not allow any remote working.
As a rule, our statistics show that the younger you are, the likelier you are to want hybrid working. But even amongst the over 55s, more than a third (37.63%) would choose this form of working, combining the flexibility of remote with the collaborative and social workplace environment.
We saw less variation here from region to region but still saw some variation across sectors.
At least 40% of people in all sectors want some form of hybrid working. But in HR, this rises to 67.5%, and in legal, 66.67%.
So again, we can clearly see industries in which attracting talent is likely to depend on some form of location flexibility for employees.
With so much clear preference for some form of flexibility in working location, it’s no surprise that searches for remote or work-from-home jobs have increased dramatically globally. We used kwfinder.com to find out how many searches are made in Google across the world for the following queries:
We looked at the numbers of searches for 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 in Google globally and then specifically in the USA, Canada, UK and Australia.
These queries didn’t even specify job roles or industries. In other words, for millions of people all over the world, the primary thing they’re searching for is a job is remote or work from home - irrespective of the nature of the role.
We then looked at searches for different types of jobs where the searcher is looking for remote roles. You can read more about the types of queries we looked at in the methodology at the end of this article.
But here’s the data we found:
Across the board, there has been a phenomenal surge in search volume for people searching for remote jobs since 2016. Of course, we saw increases in covid, but those increases continued beyond.
In other words, although we’re no longer required to work from home as the result of COVID-19, having done so appears to have contributed to a long-term change in how we want to work.
Across all of our top 10 sectors for remote work, we’ve seen phenomenal increases in demand.
As of January 2024, there are over 292,000 job listings that include the term “work from home” on Jooble.
There are a further 657,000+ that include “hybrid working.”
There are over 7,000 UK job listings containing “work from home” in the title or description on Indeed.
Every month in the USA, Stanford University releases figures on work from home.
Their latest data suggests that:
This research also shows that 29% of workers want to work fully from home in the USA (not too dissimilar to our UK survey findings). Despite this, just 11.9% do.
And while 58.8% of employees are based fully on site, only 34.1% said they would want to work 5 days per week on-site.
So, there is still some discrepancy between how and where employees want to work and what is being offered.
There is plenty of data now to show that most people don’t want to be in the office or in a workplace full-time. Equally, though, most see the benefit of at least some time in the office. So, hybrid working is a flexible solution that combines the best of remote working convenience with the collaborative and social benefits of an office environment.
With so many of the youngest members of the workforce declaring a preference for hybrid, we expect to see it become almost essential for employers to offer some form of flexibility if they want to attract and keep employees in the future.
We commissioned market research specialists, Censuswide, to acquire our data for the survey element of our remote working statistics research. This is because they’re experts in market research and apply ESOMAR principles to ensure that survey data is as accurate as possible. We surveyed a demographically representative panel of 2,019 people in the UK aged 16 and over in early June 2023.
The raw data is available on request by emailing irina@boundlesshq.com
For our keyword research, we used kwfinder.com.
For the keyword data in the “Demand for Remote Jobs”, we combined the volumes of the following three generic search terms:
We acquired global data for all of the above searches and 4 other English-speaking countries: USA, UK, Canada and Australia.
For the keyword data In the “Demand for remote jobs by Industry”, we compiled a list of jobs from various industries using The Guardian jobs listings as a guide. We selected jobs from industries on this section of their site where there would likely be demand for remote working. We then used kwfinder.com to get the search volumes for each role and added them together. The keywords we looked for were:
From our initial list of 60 or so roles, we then ordered them based on the total number of searches in 2022 to get our top 10 list, as outlined in this section.
For expanded insights, download our Work From Home 2023 ebook.
Master the complexities of global employment and ensure a seamless employment experience for your team.
Talk to us
