Remote work is the new normal, US Census Bureau says

While high-profile companies are making headlines worldwide with return-to-office demands, a new report from the US Census Bureau reveals that remote work is thriving and organizations are treating flexible work conditions as business as usual.

Newly released data from the US Census Bureau’s Business Trends and Outlook Survey, based on more than 150,000 employers between August 2024 and January 2025, show that 31% of US businesses had at least one employee working from home in the prior two weeks. Employees also spent an average of 1.04 days away from the office each week and are not expected to stray far from the 1.00-day mark until 2029.

Oversight over remote workers also remains lax, with 70% companies saying they do not track in-person attendance and only 4.1% with policies mandating office attendance. Instead, most of the respondents rely on informal arrangements aligned to projects and team needs, the report said.

One in four companies also has no monitoring technology in place to track people who work from home. For those that do, it’s mainly conventional tools used to track deliverables or verify participation in virtual meetings.

The survey also dismissed fears about widespread location-based pay cuts. For firms where salaries are tied to location, only one in six actually adjust pay accordingly. In contrast, most employers tie employee salaries to their contributions rather than their ZIP code, further underscoring how remote work has become intertwined with human resources.

The new data also skewers criticism of flexible work arrangements leading to loss of productivity, with only 15.6% of businesses reporting zero performance gaps between on-site and remote work. Roughly 6% say office work yielded better results, while around 2% pointed to higher output at home.

Most objections to remote work leaned towards the practical rather than cultural, with 61% of respondents citing tasks that cannot be done off-site, such as in manufacturing and healthcare. Productivity concerns ranked a distant second at 11.7%, followed by mentoring and teamwork issues at 9%. Constraints related to legal, regulatory, and security were in the low single digits.

“More than four years after lockdowns first pushed white-collar staff toward home offices, remote work has passed the most rigorous possible stress test: indifference,” Gleb Tsipursky, CEO of the consultancy firm Disaster Avoidance Experts, wrote in an op-ed piece. “Most organizations barely talk about it anymore; they simply fold it into everyday planning. It is settled, predictable, and embedded in their business models.”