Experimental estimates from the Annual Population Survey for homeworking in the UK, including breakdowns by sex, full-time or part-time, ethnicity, occupation, industry, qualifications, hours worked, pay and sickness absence among others. Includes regression outputs on the different outcomes for homeworkers.

In 2020, approximately *** million people worked mainly from home in the United Kingdom, an increase of around **** million people when compared with 1998, when just *** million workers mainly worked from home. As a share of all workers in the United Kingdom, this was the equivalent of **** percent of the UK workforce, compared with **** percent in 1998. Rise of the hybrid workforce More recent figures on working location trends in Great Britain, indicate that as of June 2025, around ** percent of workers had worked from home exclusively in the last seven days, with a further ** percent only travelling to work. Just over a ******* of British workers, however, had both worked from home and traveled to work in the last seven days. Although less common than only travelling to work, hybrid working has generally been more popular than only working at home since around Spring 2022 and is possibly one of the most enduring impacts that COVID-19 had on the labor market. Demographics of homeworkers While advancements in internet connectivity and communication software have enabled more people to work from home than ever before, there are still obvious disparities in the share of homeworkers by industry. Over **** of the UK’s agriculture workforce in 2020 regularly worked from home, compared with just *** percent of those that worked in accommodation or food service. In the same year, the region with the highest share of people working from home was South West England at **** percent, while Northern Ireland had the lowest at just *** percent.

This dataset contains breakdowns of homeworkers by different characteristics using data from the Opinions and Lifestyle Survey (OPN).

Breakdowns of the prevalence of homeworking by industry, occupation, region, age, sex and ethnicity.

In June 2025, approximately 13 percent of workers in Great Britain worked from home exclusively, with a further 26 percent working from home and travelling to work, while 44 percent only travelled to work. During this time period, the share of people only travelling to work was highest in March 2022, at 60 percent of respondents, with the peak for only working from home occurring in June 2020. In general, hybrid working has become steadily more popular than fully remote working, with the highest share of people hybrid working in November 2023, when 31 percent of people advising they were hybrid working. What type of workers are most likely to work from home? In 2020, over half of people working in the agriculture sector mainly worked from home, which was the highest share among UK industry sectors at that time. While this industry was one of the most accessible for mainly working at home, just 6 percent of workers in the accommodation and food services sector mainly did this, the lowest of any sector. In the same year, men were slightly more likely to mainly work from home than women, while the most common age group for mainly working from home was those aged 75 and over, at 45.4 percent. Over a long-term period, the share of people primarily home working has grown from 11.1 percent in 1998, to approximately 17.4 percent in 2020. Growth of Flexible working in the UK According to a survey conducted in 2023, working from home either on a regular, or ad-hoc basis was the most common type of flexible working arrangement offered by organizations in the UK, at 62 percent of respondents. Other popular flexible working arrangements include the ability to work flexible hours, work part-time, or take career breaks. Since 2013, for example, the number of employees in the UK that can work flextime has increased from 3.2 million, to around 4.2 million by 2024. When asked why flexible work was important to them, most UK workers said that it supported a better work-life balance, with 41 percent expressing that it made their commute to work more manageable.

Data on working patterns and location of work of adults in Great Britain, including costs and benefits of homeworking and future expectations. Survey data from the Opinions and Lifestyle Survey (OPN).

In 2020, *** thousand people working in the professional, scientific, and technical industries in the United Kingdom worked mainly from home, the highest number of any sector. The industry sector with the highest percentage of homeworkers was agriculture, forestry, and fishing, with over half of that industry's workforce working from home.

An analysis of home working across the UK. Who these home workers are, where they are found, what they do and how this has changed over time. Some comparison at Local Authority and regional level and across the European Union.

Source agency: Office for National Statistics

Designation: Official Statistics not designated as National Statistics

Language: English

Alternative title: Characteristics of Home Workers in the UK

How workers spent their working day in 2015, and April and September 2020 based on data from the Time Use Survey. Includes start time and length and number of breaks. Disaggregated by those who work from home and those who work away from home.

In 2020, **** percent of male workers in the United Kingdom mainly worked from home, compared to **** percent of female workers. This type of working arrangement has become increasingly popular recently, with **** percent of UK workers mainly working from home in 2020, compared with **** percent in 2019.

In 2020, employees who mainly worked from home worked an average of **** hours a week, compared with the ***** hours worked in 2013. At the height of the first wave of the Coronavirus pandemic, in **********, almost half of UK workers were working from home, and just ** percent of people were traveling to work.

National and regional breakdowns of night-time workers by industry groupings, gender, working patterns, age groups, time of day usually worked, place of birth (UK or outside the UK), and whether or not they work from home.

Homeworking data from Labour Market Survey (LMS), split by age, sex, region, ethnicity and occupation, UK.

There were 788 thousand workers aged between 50 and 54 that worked mainly from home in the United Kingdom in 2020, which was the highest of any age group. When adjusted for the overall working population, the age group with the highest working from home rate were those aged 70 and over, with over 45 percent of this group mainly working from home.

These figures are experimental estimates of online job adverts provided by Adzuna, an online job search engine. The number of job adverts over time is an indicator of the demand for labour. To identify these adverts we have applied text-matching to find job adverts which contain key phrases associated with homeworking such as “remote working”, “work from home”, “home-based” and “telework”. The data do not separately identify job adverts which exclusively offer homeworking from those which offer flexible homeworking, such as one day a week from home.

Analysis of how working from home has affected individuals’ spending and how this differs by characteristics, Great Britain.