The old normal: Work-from-home rates are dropping... in some states more than others

The old normal?

‍Nature is healing... at least from the perspective of employers looking to push return-to-office mandates. The share of Americans working from home has fallen below 26% according to new Census data, the lowest level since the pandemic began.

At the peak of the WFH boom in March 2021, some 37% of us were logging on remotely at least once a week, as employees settled into routine Zoom meetings and workdays without the commute. By comparison, there are now only 7 states in the US where more than a third of the workforce have weekly work-from-home days.

The overall figures mask a serious regional deviation: just 13% of people surveyed in Wyoming reported anyone working from home in their household, while their neighbors to the south in Colorado reported nearly triple the rate — similar to the more densely populated states of the North East.

Despite the new Census data, questions being raised about the productivity of remote workers, and an ever-growing cacophony of calls to return to the office from companies across the US, there’s still a lot of debate around the pandemic-born trend. Only 2 days ago, for example, a Stanford economics professor argued that remote work is “here to stay” and declared the 5-day office work week “dead” in an opinion piece for the NYT.