Work From Home Is Here to Stay—Even if Some CEOs Don’t Love It

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Work From Home Is Here to Stay—Even if Some CEOs Don’t Love It

Big companies keep trumpeting return-to-office mandates, but the amount of time Americans work remotely is barely budging

By Justin Lahart, WSJ

June 15, 2026

Data indicate remote work has reached an equilibrium, with 26% of paid, full days worked from home in May, similar to two years earlier.

Work from home is hardly over. In fact, it’s probably here to stay.

The past couple of years have seen a drumbeat of big companies announcing, to great fanfare, that they were requiring employees to spend more time in the office. Home Depot, Target, Microsoft, 3M, Intel—the list goes on and on.

“I come in, and—where is everybody else?” complained JPMorgan Chase Chief Executive Jamie Dimon in a recording that leaked to Barron’s in early 2025. The bank required its employees to come back to the office five days a week starting in March last year.

But across the broader economy, the evidence suggests that the return to the office has stalled out.

An average of 26% of paid, full days were worked from home in May, according to a monthly work-from-home survey run by economists Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom and Steven Davis. That is down, but not by much, from the 27% registered two years earlier.

It was about 30% in 2022, when companies were transitioning away from the pandemic. But in 2019, before the pandemic struck, Labor Department figures show that about 7% of days were worked from home.

“The data does seem at odds with the Jamie Dimon story of the world, where remote work is dead,” said Emma Harrington, an economist at the University of Virginia who studies remote work.

Instead, remote-work rates appear to have reached a new equilibrium, with far more people working from home at least part of the time than before the pandemic.

Other data tell a similar story. Kastle Systems, a security company that tracks access-card swipes, puts average workplace occupancy across 10 major cities just slightly higher than a year ago. Cellphone data collected by technology company Placer.ai found that office visits in May were about 32% below May 2019 levels. In the same month last year, they were about 35% below that 2019 level.

The disconnect between the high-profile return-to-office mandates from some large companies and the broader data could in part be because, big as they are, those companies account for just a portion of the 163-million-strong U.S. workforce.

Of course, many people can’t work remotely at all. Factory workers, emergency-room nurses, cooks—they all have to come in. Nearly two-thirds of workers are on-site all the time, according to the work-from-home survey. Only about 1 in 10 are fully remote, with hybrid arrangements far more prevalent. Some employers are finding ways to nudge workers back to in-person work, such as promoting workers who show up more often, or requiring new hires to be in office.

But for others, work from home, apparently, works.

Bloom, a Stanford University economist, points out that many of the chief executives who run big companies are on the older side. In recent survey work, he and his co-authors found that employees at companies with young chief executives worked from home more frequently than companies with older executives at the helm.

“If you look at CEOs who were 40 or under during the pandemic, they’re far more likely nowadays to have at least hybrid in their companies,” Bloom said. “Older CEOs generationally are just less used to it.”

It is part of why Bloom thinks that in the future there will be more work done remotely, rather than less of it. Older bosses will, over time, retire, and be replaced by younger people who are more comfortable with employees working from home some of the time.

Nor is it just younger CEOs who are more receptive to work from home. The same is true of younger companies, noted Prithwiraj Choudhury, an economist at the London School of Economics. This matters because historically, job growth in the U.S. has been driven not by well-established companies but by smaller startups on their way to becoming tomorrow’s behemoths.

“These are the companies which are investing in management practices to make this model work, and some of these companies will scale up and become the next set of large companies,” he said.

Harrington, the University of Virginia economist, isn’t sure that work-from-home rates are destined to pick up substantially, but does imagine there could be a gradual rise, as technology that enables people to work remotely continues to improve.

That could benefit some groups. In research with economist Matthew Kahn, for example, Harrington has shown how work from home has enabled more women with children to remain on the job. Separately, Labor Department figures show that there has been a substantial increase in employment for people with disabilities since the pandemic, probably due at least in part to the flexibility of working from home.

But she also worries about some of the drawbacks that come with work from home’s benefits.

In research published in the journal Science this month, she and Natalia Emanuel and Amanda Pallais presented evidence that remote work has made Americans lonelier and more mentally distressed.

The three economists also have forthcoming research in the Quarterly Journal of Economics showing that younger employees benefit from working in proximity to more senior employees and presenting evidence that the rise of remote work might have hurt the job prospects of young college graduates.

Moreover, the benefits of work from home can show up right away, at least for workers—hours saved on commuting or the ability to run a load of laundry during the day. But the drawbacks take longer to manifest.

“You’re not building the skills that you would have in person, and that kind of slow burn can make people less productive in the long run,” said Harrington.