Since the pandemic, working from home has become more common in the euro area.[1] According to Eurostat, the share of employees aged 20-64 who at least sometimes worked from home doubled between 2019 and 2024, from 11.7% to 22.4%.[2] Among respondents to the ECB Consumer Expectations Survey (CES), working from home was even more common than this, as in May 2024, 33.6% of employees reported working at least two days per week from home. This discrepancy could be attributable to methodological differences and, given that the CES is conducted online, to potential sampling differences. The CES also shows that these remote working patterns seem to have become well established, having remained broadly stable from 2024 to 2025. Non-wage benefits – including remote working possibilities – are often offered by firms as an alternative to higher wages. Previous international research on this question has often found that employees would be willing to forgo a part of their wages in exchange for being able to work from home (Aksoy et al., 2022, Nagler et al., 2024 and Cullen et al., 2025). This box analyses how much euro area employees value having the option to work from home.
According to the CES, a hybrid working pattern remains the most common and preferred option among employees who work remotely. In 2025, 55.7% of employees did not work from home at all, 11.9% worked from home around one day per week, 21.9% worked from home between two and four days per week (“hybrid working”) and 10.6% worked from home five or more days per week (Chart A).[3] Comparing employees’ actual remote working patterns with their desired remote working patterns reveals some significant differences. The largest gap is observed for employees who currently work from home one day per week, followed by those who never work from home and then those who work fully remotely. Overall, a hybrid working pattern appears to be the preferred remote working option, with most hybrid workers (84%) expressing satisfaction with their current arrangement. Interestingly, 43% of employees who work fully remotely would prefer to spend fewer days working away from the office. This suggests that remote working may be driven more by necessity or employer requirements than by preference.[4]
Chart A
Actual remote workdays per week and desired remote workdays
(bars: percentage of employees; dots: percentage of employees in each bar)
Source: ECB Consumer Expectations Survey (CES).
Notes: Results from the CES annual labour market module completed in May 2025 for employees aged 20-64. These results are based on the following questions: “How many days have you tended to work from home in a typical week over the last three months?” and “Looking one year ahead, how often during a typical week would you like to have paid workdays at home?”.
Employees are not willing to give up a large share of their wages for a hybrid working pattern, despite their high satisfaction with their current working from home arrangements. In May 2025, CES respondents were asked to assume their employer did not allow working from home and indicate what level of pay cut they would be willing to accept (as a percentage of their current pay) in exchange for the option to work from home two or three days per week. Results show that 70% of employees would not be willing to accept a pay cut to work from home. However, 13% of employees would accept a pay cut of between 1% and 5%, while 8% would accept a reduction of between 6% and 10% (Chart B, panel a).
Chart B
Willingness to accept a pay cut in exchange for hybrid working pattern
a) Share of employees willing to accept a pay cut
(x-axis: percentage of current wage; y-axis: percentage of employees)
b) Average acceptable pay cut for hybrid working pattern
(percentage of current wage)
Source: ECB Consumer Expectations Survey (CES).
Notes: Results from the CES annual labour market module completed in May 2025 for employees aged 20-64. The results in panel b) are based on the following question: “Imagine your employer did not allow its employees to work from home. Hypothetically, how much of a pay cut would you be willing to accept (as a percentage of your current pay) for the option to work from home two or three days a week?”. The results exclude workers with a job that cannot be done remotely.
The average pay cut that employees would accept to work two or three days per week from home is 2.6%. This is significantly lower than other estimates in the empirical literature. Barrero et al. (2021) estimate that US workers would accept a pay cut of 7% to work from home two or three days per week. Nagler et al. (2024) estimate that workers in Germany are willing to give up 7.7% of their earnings to work fully remotely and 5.4% to work remotely two days per week. Focusing on the tech sector in the United States, Cullen et al. (2025) estimate that workers are willing to forgo around 25% of their total pay to take up a remote position instead of one that is fully in-person.
We find a large variation in the willingness to accept a pay cut across the different working from home patterns. Employees who currently work from home more frequently tend to be willing to accept a higher pay cut to preserve this working arrangement (Chart B, panel b). Employees who work fully remotely are willing to accept a pay cut of 4.6%. By contrast, those who currently work from home one day per week would accept a pay cut of only 1.6%. Among those willing to accept a pay cut, the average acceptable pay cut is much higher (8.7%). This suggests that while most employees are not very willing to give up their pay to work from home, it is a valuable non-wage benefit for some.
Personal and job characteristics influence how much employees value the option to work from home (Chart C). Younger workers tend to value remote working more highly than older workers. Employees with children in their household tend to value remote working highly (see, for example, Aksoy et al., 2025), as do those with longer commutes. By contrast, income, education level and gender appear to have little impact on how much employees value remote working.
Chart C
Willingness to accept a pay cut: regression results for personal and job characteristics
(percentage of current wage)
 |  |
Sources: ECB Consumer Expectations Survey (CES) and ECB staff calculations.
Notes: Results from the CES annual labour market module completed in May 2025 for employees aged 20-64. Coefficients and 95% confidence bands from a linear regression with heterogeneity-robust standard errors. Omitted benchmarks are “Never” and “1 day per week” (for working from home status), “20-29” (for age), “0-15 min” (for commuting time) and “Low” (for income level). Income groups are defined as terciles of trimmed hourly wages in April 2025. The results exclude workers with a job that cannot be done remotely. Example for illustrative purposes: workers with a hybrid working pattern (2-4 days from home per week) are, on average, willing to accept a pay cut of an estimated 0.5 percentage points higher than workers who rarely or never work from home. There is a 95% probability that the true value of this estimate lies between 0.1 and 0.9 percentage points, i.e. it is likely larger than zero.
Several other factors may influence these results. Remote working comes with challenges such as social isolation, fewer opportunities to connect with colleagues and concerns about visibility at work. This may explain why many employees are not willing to accept a pay cut in exchange for hybrid working possibilities. However, for some employees – particularly those with children or long commutes – working from home is highly valued, as it can help them balance their work and personal life. It can also enable workers facing specific external circumstances to participate in the labour market or accept jobs that they would otherwise not be able to do, for instance by reducing commuting costs or facilitating caretaking responsibilities. Remote working flexibility can therefore play a role in attracting and retaining workers, especially in tight labour markets where skilled staff are scarce.
References
Aksoy, C. G., Barrero, J. M., Bloom, N., Davis, S. J., Dolls, M. and Zarate, P. (2022), “Working from Home Around the World”, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, The Brookings Institution, pp. 281-330.
Aksoy, C. G., Barrero, J. M., Bloom, N., Davis, S. J. Dolls, M. and Zarate, P. (2025), “Working from Home in 2025: Five Key Facts”, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, Stanford University, 14 April.
Barrero, J. M., Bloom, N. and Davis, S. J. (2021), “Why Working from Home Will Stick”, NBER Working Paper, No 28731, April.
Bick, A., Blandin, A., Caplan, A. and Caplan, T. (2025), “The work from home divide: Insights from six US surveys”, VoxEU column, 4 March.
Cullen, Z., Pakzad-Hurson, B. and Perez-Truglia, R. (2025), “Home Sweet Home: How Much Do Employees Value Remote Work?” AEA Papers and Proceedings, Vol. 115, pp. 276-281, May.
Dias da Silva, A., Georgarakos, D. and Weissler, M. (2023), “How people want to work – preferences for remote work after the pandemic”, Economic Bulletin, Issue 1, ECB.
Nagler, M., Rincke, J. and Winkler, E. (2024), “Working from home, commuting, and gender”, Journal of Population Economics, Vol. 37, Art. No 58, 8 June, pp. 1-23.
In this box, “working from home” and “remote working” are used interchangeably to refer to work done away from an office or other traditional workplace, whether at the employee’s place of residence or at another location of their choice.
These shares refer to workers aged 20-64 who are not self-employed. Additionally, while the current share of employees working from home is higher than in 2019, it is lower than in 2021 and 2022, in line with the evidence for the United States (Bick et al., 2025). See Dias da Silva et al. (2023) for an analysis of developments in remote working in the euro area during the pandemic.
The aggregate figures conceal substantial differences across occupations according to the feasibility of working remotely, as shown in Dias da Silva et al. (2023).
Only half of the employees who reported working fully remotely in May 2024 still had this working pattern as of May 2025, compared with 74% for those with a hybrid working pattern and 88% for those rarely/never working from home. This suggests that working fully remotely is not a persistent working pattern.