What Percentage Of People Work From Home?

It’s worth noting that there is no perfect count of remote workers and that while there are many estimates of the numbers of people in remote work, they may or may not be entirely accurate.

Fortunately, there is enough accuracy for us to determine that working remotely is no longer unusual and that working from home or from a remote location is becoming ever more popular.

Here’s what you need to know.

Working Remotely In A Post-Covid World

There’s no doubt that the Covid-19 pandemic changed the world of remote work, forever. (If you’re not sure what remote work is – see our definition and remote work glossary for some assistance).

Employers who had been highly reluctant to use remote workers suddenly decided that working from home might be a lesser evil when compared to the risk of catching a deadly disease.

And for many people, working from home or working remotely became their standard working life during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Surprisingly, however, when the pandemic drew to an end, work from home did not. In fact, workers now had a taste for remote work and many were prepared to find new employment if their employers were not prepared to allow them to continue to work remotely at least some of the time.

What Percentage Of Jobs Are Remote Work?

According to Owl Labs, which is one of the leading research organizations involved in remote work, in the United States, 4.7 million people are working from home or remotely, for at least, 50% of their working week.

This is roughly 3% of the total workforce of around 165 million people.

However, the same research shows that 16% of American companies now only hire people to work from home or remotely!

This is in line with global research from the same company, which shows that 16% of businesses worldwide have their workers working remotely and that around 62% of workers say they can work remotely sometimes, even if it’s not a full-time remote gig.

Are Remote Workers More Productive?

Workers seem to think so. When the Becker Freidman Institute for Economics at the University of Chicago talked to a number of people (10,000) who could work outside of the workplace/office, nearly 3,000 of them insisted that their work-life performance had improved and that work done from home made them more productive than ever before.

Another report by Owl Labs showed that only one-third of workers think that being full-time in an office is the best way to work. U.S workers in that same survey insisted that they worked remotely more often than they worked from the office in 55% of cases.

If You Work Remotely, Will You Be Happier?

So, statistics around white-collar employees are clear, they want the option to work from home and they are prepared to sacrifice an employer and even, potentially, some income to get it.

But does working off-site lead to a genuine increase in personal happiness?

Another Owl Labs survey conducted with the remote workforce suggests that workers self-report that they are happier when working remotely. In fact, they are 22% happier than their on-site counterparts.

And if your boss won’t consider letting you work outside of the workplace, you might want to check out these awesome remote work job boards – after all, you only have one life, and it should be a happy one, right?

Statistics say that remote work is here to stay and that many American companies are starting to get on board with this.

Not every employer is going to allow their employees to work from home or another location other than the office but the percentage of employers that will is growing daily.

Employees want a say in where they work and how they work and we suspect that in the near future, most employees will get that say, because, employers that don’t adapt to remote working, will get left behind.