First post-Covid decline in remote working

The number of people who usually work from home decreased by approximately 4,100 in the 12 months to Q4 2024, according to the Labour Force Survey by the Central Statistics Office (CSO) published in February 2025.

Demonstrating a pivot away from the full-time work from home model, the number of people who do not work from home increased by 29,200 although the number of hybrid workers has increased by 83,100. However, the number of days this cohort works from home is not included in the data.

Of those surveyed, 19 per cent said they usually work from home, down from 20 per cent in Q4 2023. Data also shows that 16 per cent said they sometimes work from home, up from 14 per cent in 2023.

The trend marks a departure to attitudes to the remote work both during and immediately after the Covid-19 pandemic, with the previous Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael-Green Party coalition having viewed he expansion of working from home as an economic and environmental opportunity.

Writing in eolas Magazine in October 2022, former Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said that the pandemic “changed the world of work forever”. “Millions of people and businesses around the world moved overnight from the office to home working. This shift might have taken decades if it had been planned”.

Varadkar, who was also Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment between 2020 and 2022, introduced a remote work strategy in 2021, which outlines a goal of 20 per cent of public sector workers being fully remote. This was backed up by the introduction of legislation which gives workers a right to request remote work.

Former Green Party leader Eamon Ryan told eolas Magazine in August 2022: “If we can reverse volume of travel, and adopt remote working patterns in a way that works for everyone, then we can make transport more sustainable.”

The ending of lockdown restrictions was met with a number of prominent billionaires calling for an end to remote work. James Gorman, the former CEO of Morgan Stanley, called for an end of the practice in 2022, stating: “If you can go into a restaurant in New York City, you can come into the office.”

This was backed up by Tesla and X (Twitter) CEO Elon Musk, who says: “Remote work is no longer acceptable… If you want to pretend to work, go somewhere else.” Musk subsequently threatened noncompliant employees with termination.

CSO Statistician with the Labour Market Division Colin Hanley says: “When it comes to remote working, almost 540,000 worked more than half their week at home in Q4 2024. This is the lowest reported figure since the onset of the pandemic and equates to an almost 20 per cent decline in people mainly working from home compared with Q4 2020. This was driven by a 5.3 per cent drop in males usually working from home.”