Remote Work Isn't Dying. It's Crossing Borders.

US employers now offer remote or hybrid work in a smaller share of job ads than employers in any of the seven countries Indeed tracks, while the UK's share hit its peak in January. That looks like the decline of the American remote worker and the rise of the British one, and neither holds up. So is remote work declining?

Americans work from home at about the same rate as in 2024, and British home working has been flat since 2023. Inside rich countries, employers are pulling staff back while workers hold their ground.

The growth is across borders, in Argentine software exports, Egyptian offshoring and Latin American platform workers selling their time to foreign clients. Remote work is turning from a perk inside wealthy economies into an export.

The short version

• US workers: The US telework rate was 21.6% in August 2026, a level that has held in a narrow band for more than a year.
• US employers: Just 8.5% of US job ads on Indeed offered remote or hybrid work in August, the lowest of seven countries, while 7.8% of US job searches sought it, the highest.
• Everywhere else: National surveys show home working flat or slipping, with Canada's fully home-based share down to 11.4% from 18.7% in 2022.
• Across borders: Argentina exported a record $9.6 billion in software, IT and professional services in 2025, and Egypt earned $5.2 billion from digital-services offshoring.
• Governments: Britain curbs employers' grounds for refusing flexible work from 2027, while Argentina repeals its telework law and Nigeria taxes residents' foreign pay.

American workers didn't leave. Their employers did.

Workers are holding steady

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) found 21.6% of US workers teleworked in August, about 33.6 million people: 11.0% for some hours and 10.6% for all of them. The rate was 19.5% in August 2023 and held between 21.5% and 23.0% over the year to March 2026.

BLS time-use data agree: 35% of employed people did some or all of their work at home on days they worked in 2025, up from 33% in 2024. WFH Research's survey puts about 26% of paid full days worked from home in July 2026, down from about 30% in 2022 but far above 7.2% in 2019. Its own slides say patterns have been stabilizing since about 2023.

The gap is on the employer side. In surveys from September 2025 to August 2026, 28.4% of full-time workers able to work from home wanted five days at home and 13.3% had it. Employers offer fewer fully remote jobs and more fully onsite jobs than employees want, the survey's slide title says.

The office mandates

Five-day or near-five-day office mandates arrived in a wave. Amazon's took effect Jan. 2, 2025, and a presidential memorandum ordered the federal executive branch back on Jan. 20, 2025.

AT&T, JPMorgan and Dell followed by March 2025, and Truist, Paramount Skydance, Instagram and Home Depot's corporate staff by April 2026. On Sept. 2, 2026, Uber moved to three office days and capped fully remote staff at under 1% as it announced 3,300 layoffs.

The Flex Index found 24% of Fortune 500 companies required full-time office work in the second quarter of 2025, up from 13% in the fourth quarter of 2024; that data is now a year old. Buildings still aren't full: Kastle's 10-city average office occupancy was 56.3% in the week ending Sept. 16, 2026.

Job ads and job searches

In August, 8.5% of US job postings on Indeed mentioned remote or hybrid work, the lowest of the seven countries tracked. That's 82% of the US peak of 10.4% in February 2022, the furthest below peak of any of them. Indeed classifies postings by remote keywords in each language, so levels across countries are rough; trends within a country are more reliable.

Source: Indeed Hiring Lab remote tracker, raw data through Aug. 31, 2026.

Demand runs the other way. Remote work made up 7.8% of US job searches on Indeed in August, more than double the share in any other tracked country.

Source: Indeed Hiring Lab remote tracker, remote share of job searches and postings, August 2026.

Nomads with day jobs

MBO Partners counted 18.5 million US digital nomads in 2025, up 2.2%, as nomads with traditional jobs rose from 10.2 million to 11.2 million and independent nomads fell from 7.9 million to 7.3 million. Nomad headcounts are rough, but the growth in this one came from salaried workers.

The office push is global

Continental Europe

A Mercedes-Benz works agreement signed Sept. 24, 2026, sets four office days and one home day for full-time office staff in Germany. The chief executive had pushed for five, and about 33,000 staff protested July 3.

Société Générale cuts telework to one day a week from Oct. 1, 2026, down from about two, despite a June 27 strike. Ubisoft moves to five office days in October as part of a cost-cutting plan, and its staff struck too.

British banks tie attendance to pay

Barclays requires at least three office days from October, up from two, despite a staff open letter opposing it. HSBC UK staff were warned in May 2025 that missing 60% office attendance can cut variable pay. Across the market, Indeed found in December 2025 that 56% of UK hybrid postings required at least two to three office days, up from 43% two years earlier.

India's IT majors

TCS requires five office days and cuts variable pay below 85% attendance, to zero below 60%. In January 2026 it froze appraisals for staff who didn't comply.

Infosys moved to four days a week in March. Wipro set three days with a six-hour daily minimum for about 234,000 staff from Jan. 1, 2026.

Japan

LY Corp, the company behind LINE Yahoo, ended fully remote work in April 2025 and requires three office days from April 2026. A Persol Research Institute survey of 30,614 people in July 2026 found 24.6% of workers under a "principally in the office" order, the second yearly rise.

Is remote work declining outside the US? Mostly it's flat

National statistics offices define home working differently, so these figures can't be ranked against one another. Each tracks one country over time, and most of those lines have gone flat or slipped.

Sources: ifo Institute (Germany), Statistics Canada, Persol Research Institute (Japan), Banco de la República from DANE data (Colombia), Australian Bureau of Statistics, IBGE (Brazil), Statistics Denmark, Office for National Statistics (UK), INE (Portugal) and INSEE (France).

Europe

• UK: Hybrid workers were 26.3% of working adults in January through August 2026, against 25.8% in 2023, with fully remote at 13.2% (Office for National Statistics).
• UK offices: Occupancy hit a post-pandemic high of 44.1% in late January 2026, against pre-pandemic norms of 60% to 80% (Remit Consulting).
• Germany: Employees working at least partly from home fell from 32.3% in March 2021 to 24.9% in August 2026, with no significant change for years (ifo Institute).
• France: Teleworkers rose to 19.7% of employees in 2025 from 18.2%, but the share teleworking three or more days fell 2.1 points (INSEE).
• Portugal: Teleworkers were 21.3% of employed people in the second quarter of 2026, up from 20.9% a year earlier (INE).
• Denmark: Frequent home working held at 7% in the second quarter of 2026, the pre-COVID level, and 34% worked from home occasionally (Statistics Denmark).
• Netherlands: Employees able to work remotely stayed at 61% in 2025, unchanged since 2022 (Statistics Netherlands).
• Italy: Smart workers numbered 3.575 million in 2025, about flat since 2022 and down from a pandemic peak of about 6.5 million (Osservatorio Smart Working, Politecnico di Milano).

The Americas

• Canada: The share working exclusively from home was 11.4% in May 2026, down from 18.7% in May 2022 (Statistics Canada).
• Brazil: The share working mainly from home slipped to 7.9% in 2024, from 8.4% in 2022 and 8.2% in 2023 (IBGE).
• Colombia: Home working peaked at 13% of salaried workers in late 2020 and early 2021 and held near 6% for the two years to early 2025 (Banco de la República, from DANE data).

Asia-Pacific

• Japan: Persol's telework rate for regular employees fell from 28.5% at its February 2022 peak to 21.4% in July 2026.
• Australia: The share usually working from home fell from 40.5% in 2021 to 36.2% in August 2025 (Australian Bureau of Statistics).
• South Korea: About 2.3% of wage workers worked from home or remotely in August 2025, roughly flat (national statistics office).

The 40-country survey

The cross-country anchor is a survey of college-educated full-time workers in 40 countries, fielded between November 2024 and February 2025 and published in PNAS in July 2025. It found an average of 1.2 work-from-home days a week, led by Canada at 1.9, the UK at 1.8 and the US, Germany and India at 1.6.

Japan, China, Greece and South Korea sat at 0.7 or lower. The authors say the retreat has "largely bottomed out," but samples run to a few hundred respondents per country and cover graduates only.

The growth is across borders

Countries exporting services

Argentina sold a record $9.6 billion in knowledge-economy services abroad in 2025, up 8.1%. Software, IT and professional services now make up 53% of the country's service exports, and the sector has more than 285,000 formal jobs.

Egypt's government IT agency, ITIDA, reported $5.2 billion in digital-services offshoring revenue for 2025. Its target for 2026 is $6 billion.

Freelancers and platform workers

An International Labour Organization survey of 1,153 web-platform workers in 21 Latin American and Caribbean countries, published in April 2025, found 53% work for clients outside their own country. Of those who knew where the client was, 90% said outside the region, mainly the US and Canada; median pay was $2.57 an hour.

The World Bank's "Working Without Borders" report estimated in September 2023 that there are 154 million to 435 million online gig workers, 4.4% to 12.5% of the global labor force. On the largest platform, job postings from Sub-Saharan Africa grew 130%, against 14% in North America.

Offshore offices

India's 2,117 global capability centers, the offshore arms of foreign firms, employed 2.36 million people and earned $98.4 billion in fiscal 2026, according to Nasscom and Zinnov. The Philippines' IT-BPM industry had 1.9 million workers and $40 billion in revenue in 2025.

Both are mostly office work, not work from home. They still sell what a remote freelancer sells: work done in one country for a company in another.

Where companies hire

Deel's own client data shows well-funded startups, 55% of them headquartered in the US, sending cross-border hires most often to the UK (12.2%), then Canada (11.9%), Germany (8.8%), Australia (5.8%) and Spain (5.2%). Smaller companies hire more in Mexico, Colombia, the Philippines and India.

No national statistics office counts people employed remotely by foreign firms. This growth is measured only through trade data, platforms and vendors.

Governments are pulling in opposite directions

Protecting flexible work

Britain's Employment Rights Act 2025, which received Royal Assent Dec. 18, 2025, will let employers refuse a flexible-working request from autumn 2027 only where refusal is "reasonable." The government says the law creates no entitlement to work flexibly; employees have had a day-one right to request since April 2024.

Since Oct. 1, 2025, Japan has required employers to offer parents of children aged 3 to school age at least two of five flexible options, one of them telework for 10 or more days a month. Singapore's Tripartite Guidelines on flexible work requests took effect Dec. 1, 2024, and about 94% of flexible-work requests were approved in 2024, the Ministry of Manpower reported in May 2026.

Repealing, taxing or stalling

Argentina's labor-modernization law, Ley 27.802, repeals the 2020 telework law (Ley 27.555) from Jan. 1, 2027, with no replacement. Nigeria's 2025 tax law, in force since January 2026, taxes residents' worldwide income, pay from foreign employers included.

On Sept. 26, 2023, the Dutch Senate rejected a bill that would have given employees a right to request home working. The European Union still has no telework or right-to-disconnect law; the issue sits in consultation for a planned Quality Jobs Act.

Courting nomads

South Korea made its F-1-D digital nomad visa permanent on June 30, 2026. Stays now run up to three years, and applicants aged 18 to 34 who live outside Seoul need income of just 1x GNI.

What it means for nomads

Where remote jobs are listed

Irish, British and Australian listings on Indeed mention remote or hybrid work more often than US ones, and on Deel the UK and Canada are where startups hire across borders most. For nomads with the right to work in Ireland or Britain, that means a larger pool of remote-friendly employers, though Barclays and HSBC UK show attendance rules tightening there too.

Who gets nomad visas

Nomad visas remain small, and most go to wealthy passports. Japan's program issued 646 nomad visas in 2025, up from 257 over nine months of 2024, led by the US (240), Australia (114), Canada (46), Germany (39) and France (29).

Costa Rica received 683 applications in 2022 through 2024, 61% of them from the US, Canada and Russia. Croatia breaks the pattern: its approvals for January to September 2024 went to Russians (105) and Ukrainians (88) ahead of Americans (51) and Britons (12).

Spain is the exception on scale. Its nomad visa had 15,950 active authorizations at March 31, 2025, or 32,578 counting family members, up from 9,568 in 2023. South Korea issued 743 nomad visas from January 2024 to May 2026, before the June changes to its F-1-D rules.

Tax and currency

In Argentina, 93% of workers on Deel's platform take their pay in US dollars, so exchange rates decide what that pay is worth locally. Nigeria's new rule is the one to check elsewhere: before staying anywhere long enough to become tax resident, nomads on foreign pay should confirm whether that country taxes worldwide income.