Anyone scanning recent headlines could be forgiven for believing that remote work is on life support. High-profile companies and governments have ordered employees back to headquarters, and talking heads repeatedly pronounce the death of work-from-home. Yet beneath the noise, most organizations are treating flexible work not as an experiment but as a routine feature of corporate life.

Fresh data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Business Trends and Outlook Survey, drawn from more than 150,000 firms between August 2024 and January 2025, confirm that remote work has settled into a durable equilibrium. Thirty-one percent of U.S. businesses had at least one employee work a full day from home during the prior two weeks, and the average employee spent 1.04 days of each workweek away from the office. Employers see no reason to alter that cadence. Their five-year forecasts point to virtually the same figure: 1.00 remote day per week in 2029.

Stability at this scale signals that remote work is no longer a pandemic detour; it is an ordinary fixture of corporate life.

Most arguments about remote work lean on scattered data. Household questionnaires such as the American Community Survey and the Current Population Survey interrogate individual workers, not managers, and they reveal little about company policies. Private polls like the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes collect roughly 10,000 worker responses a month — useful, but far from exhaustive. Even the respected Business Response Survey reached only about 23,000 firms in its last wave, while the Atlanta Fed’s Survey of Business Uncertainty taps just a few hundred........

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