Data show we can expect 30% to 40% of workdays to be remote, long after the pandemic is over.
In the second-to-last week of December, 42.4% of U.S. workdays were worked from home. That’s according to a monthly survey commissioned by a trio of economists studying remote work, who couldn’t get the answers they needed from government data. It’s probably the best measure we have of how entrenched working from home has become since the arrival of Covid-19.
Before the pandemic, WFH accounted for about 5% of U.S. paid full workdays, Jose Maria Barrero of the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, Nicholas Bloom of Stanford, and Steven Davis of the University of Chicago estimated on the basis of a government survey conducted in 2017 and 2018. That share catapulted past 60% in spring 2020, according to their Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes, and has held remarkably steady at a bit above 40% since May 2021, not long after vaccines became available to all working-age Americans.
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