Remote work now accounts for 26% of US working days — but what it means for birth rates is less clear

Nicholas Bloom, the Stanford University economist described as a leading authority on remote and hybrid work, has taken his research to managers at companies including Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Apple. For workers facing an average US commute of about 40 minutes each way, the question reaches beyond where a job is done.

The brief raises an estimate that remote work has lifted the US birth rate by 5%, yet the material available does not provide the underlying research, a publication date or an explanation of how working patterns may affect decisions about having children. It also leaves open which groups, if any, have seen the largest changes.

What is clear is the scale of the shift in work. Working from home stood at 7% in 2019, climbed to 62% in the early months of the pandemic, and has since settled at around 26% of all American work days. Without the pandemic, reaching today’s level of home working would probably have taken 40 years.

Bloom is the William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University, and was named to the 2022 Bloomberg 50. He gave a 2017 TEDxStanford talk titled “Go Ahead, Tell Your Boss You’re Working From Home”.

His earlier work focused on the commercial effects of flexible arrangements. A 2014 study of Ctrip, a NASDAQ-listed Chinese travel agency, found that work-from-home policies could cut attrition by 50 percent, lift productivity by nearly 22 percent and add roughly $2,000 in profit per employee.

In research published in Nature in 2024, Bloom found that employees working remotely two days per week recorded no measurable productivity drop compared with fully in-office workers, while attrition fell significantly.

Employers still face a difficult calculation over return-to-office policies. Gallup found that 64 percent of employees would search for new opportunities if required to return full-time, rising to 74 percent among workers under 35.

Gartner found that high performers’ intent to stay was 16 percent lower at employers with strict return-to-office requirements. Eight in ten companies report losing talent after their return-to-office rollout.

Workers’ own accounts point in the same direction: 84 percent of remote and hybrid workers say their productivity improves outside a traditional office setting. More than 70 percent of businesses are moving towards some form of hybrid model.

Those findings establish remote work as an issue for employers and workers alike. The evidence supplied here does not establish whether the same change is reshaping family planning or the US birth rate.