The June update of the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes, the monthly series run by Barrero, Bloom, Buckman, and Davis, puts work from home at 25.7% of paid full days in May 2026. That is the headline, and the useful part is how little it moves. The same measure was 28.3% in May 2023, 26.6% in May 2024, and 27.2% in May 2025. After the fall from the 2022 highs, the series has been within a couple of points of a quarter of all workdays for three years.
Among full-time workers in May, 61.8% were fully on site, 27.1% were hybrid, and 11.1% were fully remote. The information sector, which is where most of us in software are counted, works from home at well above the average rate.
I think the flatness is the point. Return to office mandates make news, and each one is reported as the turn of a tide. The tide has not turned. The national average has absorbed three years of mandates and barely moved, which tells me that where a company lands on this is a company decision, not a market trend it is responding to.
For a team spread across continents, that leads me somewhere specific: hybrid is the permanent baseline, not a transition, and the rituals that hold a team together, the demos, the written decisions, the deliberate overlap hours, should be designed for it rather than for an office that is coming back.
Has your team's working pattern actually changed in the last three years, or just the announcements about it?
Photo source: https://photos.robertstowe.com/new-zealand