White collar workers are losing the work-from-home battle as available high-paying hybrid jobs plunge 40%

There’s no doubt that today’s employees want remote and hybrid options when it comes to where they work. And although some CEOs have reversed course on their RTO mandates, and the C-suite in general is realistic about how long it will take to get staffers back into the office, new data shows just how rare those positions are becoming—even for workers making good money. 

The proportion of available hybrid jobs with a salary of $100,000 or higher decreased by 40% between Q4 of 2023 and Q1 of this year, according to a new report from Ladders, a job search platform. Remote positions over six figures weren’t safe from RTO either, decreasing 33% over the same time period, while in-office opportunities rose by about 7%.

John Mullinix, head of growth marketing for Ladders, tells Fortune that the findings were a shock as researchers expected the numbers to stay relatively flat. He attributes the drop to bosses who made concessions to workers early on in the work-from-home wars, but have run out of patience. Currently, about 89% of all six-figure opportunities are fully in-person, while only 9% are remote and 2% are hybrid. 

“I feel like hybrid was hit harder, because the companies that were hybrid never really wanted to be remote companies in the first place,” Mullinix says.

It’s not just the $100,000-and-up salary jobs that are being phased out of flexible work arrangements. In 2020, about 62% of all U.S. office jobs were remote, which crashed down to 12% by 2023, according to a report earlier this year from Ringover, a British telecom firm.

“The competition is fierce for remote and hybrid jobs, because everybody wants it. And really who’s changing the narrative are the businesses from the top down. It’s not the job seekers,” says Mullinix.

Looking forward, he predicts that hybrid jobs will become virtually obsolete as employers divide themselves into two camps—a small fraction who offer completely remote jobs, with everyone else requiring workers to come back into the office.

“I’m pretty confident that remote jobs are not going to disappear,” he says. “Hybrid jobs might decrease into nothingness, where we won’t see them that much.”

Emma Burleigh
emma.burleigh@fortune.com

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