If you want to keep working from home and all the benefits that come with it—naps, homemade lunches, and the ability to catch up on laundry in-between emails—you’ll probably have to suck up earning less than you could if you worked from an office.
That’s because bosses are so desperate to get workers back at their cubicles five days a week that they are sweetening the sour deal with a pay boost.
The average salary advertised for in-office workers was $59,085 in 2023, according to ZipRecruiter data.
But as businesses across the board, from JPMorgan Chase to Boeing, roll out rigid return-to-office mandates, the salary for workers willing to oblige appears to have ballooned by more than 33%.
Today, companies in the U.S. are offering on average $82,037 for fully in-person roles.
In comparison, the average wage of a hybrid employee as of March 2024 is around $22,000 lower at $59,992. Meanwhile, fully remote roles pay $75,327 on average.
“Employers who cannot compete on flexibility will have to compete more aggressively on pay,” Julia Pollak, ZipRecruiter’s chief economist, told the BBC.
The data shows that workers who swapped from fully remote to fully in-office setups last year received a 29.2% bump in their pay, as employers make up financially for the loss of flexibility.
Ultimately, as long as there are still remote-work options available, bosses who want their workers in the office will need to pay a premium for that luxury, and that trend does not appear to be waning anytime soon.
ZipRecruiter’s data shows that over a third of professional and business-service roles in the U.S. are advertised with hybrid or remote working.
Meanwhile, research from the job sites LinkedIn and Flexa has highlighted that working from home (on a part-time basis) isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. In the U.K. the number of job ads listed as hybrid on LinkedIn has actually been increasing every month.
“The conclusion is that people demand higher pay increases for fully in-office jobs,” Pollak added.
“An employer offering flexibility can negotiate the overall compensation package with nonmonetary incentives, while an employer wanting teams on-site five days a week can only offer financial terms—a dollar value is placed on time spent in the office.”
Why do remote workers outearn hybrid workers?
Perhaps surprisingly, remote workers command more money than hybrid workers. Although on the surface, it seems instinctively counterintuitive and unfair—after all, they’re still having to fork out for commuting-related costs—previous research explains why that may be.
According to new data from LinkedIn, the share of remote positions posted on the job site has plummeted in the past 12 months. Yet, around two out of five job applications on the platform are for remote roles, with little change from early in 2023—creating a supply and demand mismatch.
CEOs like Coursera’s Jeff Maggioncalda and Tumblr-owner Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg have already told Fortune that they had been able to hire the best by not constraining their search to those willing (and close enough) to commute into an office.
For flexible employers, the shrinking pool of remote roles means that they have access to literally the world’s top talent—and that might come with a slight premium.
Plus, fully remote companies aren’t trying to pull the wool over workers’ eyes. Whereas employers who are offering only hybrid or in-office roles may be penalizing those who work from home to make trekking into the office look more appealing.
