In which European countries did working from home stick after the pandemic?

Like this map and want to support Landgeist? The best way to support Landgeist, is by sharing this map. When you share this map, make sure that you credit Landgeist and link to the source article. If you share it on Instagram, just tag @Land_geist. On X / Twitter tag @Landgeist.

A while back, I made a post about the share of workers that work from home in 2021, during the midst of the pandemic. Recently, Eurostat released data for 2023. I thought this was a great opportunity to make another map about working from home.

In every country, the share of workers that work from home at least half of the days worked, has decreased compared to 2021. Only in Croatia, where it increased slightly. Of course it makes sense the share of people working from at least half of the days worked will drop after the pandemic. Either because they have to work full-time at the workplace again, or because they still work from home, but less than 50% of their working hours.

Finland (22.2%) and Ireland (21.8%) are the only countries where more than 20% of workers still work from home more than half the hours worked. Romania (2.4%) and Bulgaria (2.8%) are still firmly at the bottom when it comes to people working from home regularly.

Compared to 2021, Greece, Bulgaria, Denmark, Luxembourg and Romania have seen their share of people working from home half the hours worked, drop by more than 50%. Luxembourg had the second highest share in 2021 (28.4%) and dropped down to 13.0% two years later. Romania and Bulgaria’s share was already the lowest in Europe, but still saw some of the biggest decreases compared to 2021.

This map does only shows people that worked from home at least half the time. The Eurostat dataset only differentiates between employed people that worked at home at least half the time, some time, or never. To be considered someone that works at home sometimes, you’d have to work from home at least one hour in a four-week reference period. One hour is an extremely small amount and this means that the group of people that work from home ‘sometimes’, can’t be considered people that work from home on a regular basis. And that’s exactly what I’m interested in for this map. I want to show how common working from home on a regular basis has become. This would mean at least one day every week from my point of view. One hour in a four-week period is not enough. In that case, the share of employed persons that worked from home at least half the time, gives a more reliable view than the percentage that worked from home sometimes (even if it’s just an hour).