Americans Like Work From Home So Much, They’ll Take a Pay Cut to Keep It: Study

A person works on their laptop from a home office in Los Angeles, Calif., on Aug. 13, 2021. Chris Delmas/AFP via Getty Images

Workers in the United States are willing to take a pay cut so that they can continue working from home, states a study published in August.

Work from home (WFH) was found to average 1.5 days a week worldwide, according to the study conducted by a team of international economists and other experts. The study, “Working From Home Around the World,” surveyed full-time workers from 27 nations as of mid-2021 and early 2022.

Workers were found to value the option of working from home for two to three days per week so much that they were willing to take a pay cut of 5 percent on average. In the United States, workers were willing to take a 5.7 percent pay cut for remote work options.

On average, workers across countries wanted 1.7 work-from-home days per week after the end of the pandemic. In the United States, the mean desired WFH days per week was at 2.1. However, the actual WFH days in the country was 1.6 while employers were only planning to offer 0.8 days for remote work.

Overall, 5.26 percent of employees working from home for one or more days per week were willing to quit their job if their employer wanted them to return to onsite work for more than five days. In the United States, this number exceeded 40 percent.

More than 8 percent of American employees working remotely were surprised by their productivity once they began to work from home.

Workers from Taiwan were the least willing to take a pay cut in exchange for remote work, at 0.6 percent. On the other side, employees from Ukraine were okay with a pay cut of 13 percent to work from home.

Women, who tend to be more likely to be primary caregivers for children, were more enthusiastic about the remote work option than men in most countries. Among married individuals, both men and women valued working from home when they have kids below the age of 14.

Fate of Cities, Future of Remote Work

In the United States, the risk that city-level fortunes will diverge due to work-from-home models is “more acute” than in other rich nations, the report noted.

“In part, because political decisions about the provision of local public goods are more decentralized in the United States, and local fiscal resources are more closely tied to local economic prosperity. These aspects of federalism give rise to more scope for a downward spiral in city-level fiscal resources and urban amenities.”

Compared to other countries, the United States also has more location options sharing the same legal system, cultures, language, etc. As such, if a city’s governance were to fail, it is easier to move to another similar but better-performing city, the report stated.

Last month, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released a report showing that many remote working jobs which popped up during the COVID-19 pandemic have remained open and are expected to remain open in the future.

In June 2021, 30 percent of work at service firms was being done remotely. In August 2022, this number declined to just over 20 percent, but was still more than double the pre-pandemic period, when only 10 percent of the work was remotely done.