The share of “full paid days worked from home” has been declining by only about 1 percentage point per year.

By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.

To get people to return to the office (RTO), companies have been using all kinds of pressure tactics, reprimands, threats of termination, ultimatums, and actual terminations. And they have been using carrots too, such as fancily remodeled or gorgeous new office palaces. The Trump administration issued a memorandum in January 2025 that required employees to return to the office full-time “as soon as practicable” — those employees that it hasn’t fired yet. And state and local governments have issued similar requirements to get their far-flung people back into office buildings.

But despite all these efforts, progress over the past three years has been minimal. The share of “full paid days worked from home” as a percent of total days worked rose to 26.9% in March, in the range where it had been in 2024, and just a couple of percentage points below March 2023, according to data by Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, Shelby Buckman, and Steven J. Davis, published by WFH Research. A full day is defined as working 6 or more hours that day.

The trend has been down, but very slowly, with the share of Working from Home (WFH) declining at an average rate of only around 1 percentage point per year, despite all the efforts to force it to happen.

And the share of “full paid days worked from home” remains very high, nearly four times the share in 2019 (around 7%). In the 1960s, it was close to 0%.

Clearly, WFH has become entrenched. Hybrid models are now common and functional, companies and workers have figured out how to be productive that way, and RTO languishes.

During the pandemic in May 2020, the share of days worked from home spiked to 62%, in part because office workers switched to WFH, but also because other employment collapsed, such as in accommodation and food services, giving the working-from-home workers a larger share of the collapsed total days worked. As these laid-off workers returned to their jobs, the share of WFH plunged and by early 2023 hit 28%. And that range is where it kind of got hung up and further progress has been minimal since then.

Office attendance also shows RTO is languishing.

Kastle’s “Back-to-Work Barometer” measures office occupancy by how many people enter an office building for which Kastle provides the electronic access system. It measures office occupancy by people entering these office buildings as a percentage of the baseline before Covid. If office occupancy returns to pre-Covid levels, the barometer would return to “100%.”

The barometer’s Top 10 Cities Average was 54.9% in early April (red line in the chart below). Since the start of 2023, it has edged up from 50% range to the 55% range. The plunges are holiday periods. The top gridline (100%) denotes the pre-Covid baseline.

Of those top 10 cities, Austin is an outlier, at around 80%. Philadelphia is at 42%. And the epicenter of WFH, San Francisco, is at around 44%. Chicago and New York City are in the middle at 53% and 56% respectively.

In super-premium class A+ office buildings, representing only 2.3% of the buildings in Kastle’s Barometer, the office occupancy rate is about 20 percentage points higher than the 10-City Average, at 74.5%. Some of the Big Tech and Finance palaces might fall into that category.

How much WFH workers want and how much they get:

The first chart below shows how many days per week of WFH workers actually have: 61.6% of workers have zero days of WFH, up from 60% last year (brown bars).

The second chart shows how many days a week workers want to WFH: only 28.5% of workers want to have zero days of WFH (blue bars). Charts via WFH Research.

By industry: These four industries have the smallest fully-on-site working arrangements, with hybrid and full WFH dominating:

1. Information: 30% fully on site, 21% full WFH, 49% hybrid.
2. Finance & Insurance: 35% fully on site, 24% full WFH, 41% hybrid.
3. Real Estate: 42% fully on site, 16% full WFH, 42% hybrid.
4. Professional & business services: 44% fully on site, 20% full WFH, 35% hybrid.

In case you missed it: Weak demand for labor and job destruction at federal & state governments should push up unemployment. But the supply of labor has plunged. Read… This is the Weirdest US Labor Market I’ve Ever Seen

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