Remote work is far from dead — it’s just learned to live in the shadows.
Think of a big-name company, and there’s a good chance it’s rolled out a return-to-office mandate in the past couple of years. Amazon, AT&T, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Paramount Skydance have adopted a five-day-a-week office mandate, while Microsoft, Intel, and Starbucks have tightened their hybrid policies.
As of the second quarter of 2025, a majority of Fortune 100 employees were subject to a full-time office mandate — up from just 5% two years prior — according to Placer.ai, a location intelligence and foot traffic data firm. Over the same period, the average number of required in-office days a week at these companies rose from 2.6 to 3.9, according to real estate consulting firm JLL.
However, data reflecting how many US workers are actually in the office tells a different story, said Nick Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University who studies remote work.
Bloom said actual work-from-home rates have remained fairly stable in recent years. He referred to it as “work-from-home dark matter” — a nod to the invisible material that makes up much of the universe. Like dark matter, remote work appears to be widespread, Bloom said, but may often be procured through special exceptions or flying under the radar.
“We keep hearing endless stories of companies pushing employees to return, but we just don’t see much of this in the survey, swipe-card or cellphone tracking data,” he said.
For companies, the apparent disconnect between rising return-to-office mandates and actual office attendance raises questions about whether employees and managers are complying with RTO policies. For workers, it suggests there may be more opportunities to work from home than they realize.
Off-the-record exceptions are quietly sustaining remote work
Bloom’s research, published on the WFH Research website he co-founded, shows that the share of work-from-home days in the US has held fairly steady over the past two years — fluctuating between roughly 25% and 30%. Bureau of Labor Statistics data backs this up.
Bloom pointed to a few potential explanations for why work-from-home rates have remained resilient. One is that while fully remote arrangements have declined sharply since the height of the pandemic, hybrid setups — with employees splitting time between home and the office — have been adopted by many employers.
Additionally, Bloom hypothesized that some employees have secured exceptions that allow them to work from home more frequently than their company’s official policy permits. He believes many of these arrangements are “off the record” — granted by individual managers without formal company approval.
Bloom said one reason some managers might allow these exceptions is that they’re often evaluated based on their team’s performance. If a manager is concerned that top employees will quit or become less productive under stricter in-office requirements, they may decide to offer more flexibility.
“Managers are allowing employees extra days at home because they are high performers or hard to replace in their jobs,” he said, adding, “Managers ultimately care about their team performance.”
One of these off-the-record exceptions was granted to a Wisconsin-based mother of three who works in a corporate role at a manufacturing company. When her employer announced a five-day-a-week in-office policy in 2023, she worried a two-hour round-trip commute would make it difficult to manage her childcare responsibilities. After an “off-the-record” conversation with her manager, she was told that as long as she came in a few days a week — especially for key in-person meetings — they wouldn’t give her any trouble.
“If I need to work from home for whatever reason, whether it’s work or personal reasons, then that’s OK,” she said.
Read more about people who’ve found themselves at a corporate crossroads
Some WFH flexibility is out in the open
Not every work-from-home exception is off the record. After struggling to make it into the office following day care drop-off, Georg Loewen, a senior director of digital marketing at a public relations agency, said his manager formally exempted him — for the time being — from the company’s three-day-a-week in-office policy.
“If drop-off ran long or parking didn’t work out, I’d just work from home,” said Loewen, who’s in his 30s and lives in New Jersey.
Loewen said he sometimes worries about how his arrangement might be perceived by coworkers who don’t have the same flexibility, but that he has consistently felt supported.
Bloom said he often hears about West Coast employees who are granted additional work-from-home flexibility because they have regular calls with colleagues in China or India that take place outside standard business hours. He also cited a case in which the head of a department at a Fortune 500 company was allowed to work remotely so his son, who had a health issue, could live near a specialist hospital.
Smaller businesses have embraced remote work
The survival of remote work isn’t just about individual exceptions. While large employers have made headlines with return-to-office mandates, many smaller businesses and startups have quietly continued to offer flexibility.
A report published last year by Flex Index, a platform that tracks flexible work policies, found that as of the third quarter of 2025, businesses with fewer than 500 employees were much more likely to offer flexible arrangements than Fortune 100 companies. And according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about half of US private-sector workers are employed at companies with fewer than 500 employees.
Leslie Snipes is among the workers who have benefited from the flexibility of working at a small business. Snipes, a director of marketing at a Los Angeles-based creative agency with around 15 employees, said her 60- to 90-minute commute through LA traffic quickly took a toll during her first few months on the job. After speaking with her manager, she received formal approval to work almost exclusively remotely. She said she typically goes into the office once or twice a month to “show face” and connect with colleagues.
“I feel less stressed, since I’m not spending hours sitting in traffic,” said Snipes, who’s in her 30s. “It’s a setup I wouldn’t have unless I asked.”
Some workers are circumventing RTO policies
In addition to the explanations mentioned above, lower office attendance may also reflect limited desk availability at some offices.
Some employees, however, have simply ignored RTO policies without their managers’ approval — a move made easier, in some cases, by geographically distributed teams. Others have turned to “coffee badging,” the practice of swiping into the office, grabbing a coffee, and leaving shortly afterward to meet attendance requirements.
If a weaker job market persists and companies increasingly use attendance-tracking tools, more workers may be compelled to return to the office. On the flipside, a rebound in the labor market could empower workers to push for greater flexibility.
Amid this uncertainty, Bloom said he’s confident in the long-term outlook of remote work.
“Work from home is here to stay,” he said. “But it’s mostly hybrid, and it seems it’s mostly off-record.”
Juliana Kaplan contributed to this story.
Read the full article here
