In the early days of his second term, President Donald Trump has worked to crack the code on America’s fertility drop and reverse falling birth rates. Describing himself as the “fertilization president,” the pronatalist Trump has reportedly floated everything from doling out $5,000 checks to mothers after delivery, to awarding a “National Medal of Motherhood” to mothers with at least six children, to lowering the cost of in vitro fertilization (IVF) drugs.
“We want more babies, to put it nicely,” Trump said at a Michigan event in October.
Future-of-work experts have a different idea. They’ve found evidence that one way to boost lagging fertilization is to cut commutes and have people work remotely. A new study led by Stanford University economists, including remote work expert Nick Bloom, found that from 2023 to early 2025, realized fertility (the number of children one has in a given period) was 14% higher when both partners worked from home one or more days per week compared with when neither did. The study used data from the Global Survey of Working Arrangements and U.S. Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes, analyzing more than 11,000 respondents between the ages of 20 and 45 living in 38 countries.
“Both datasets reveal clear evidence that realized fertility, plans for future fertility, and total fertility are greater for respondents who WFH at least one day a week,” the researchers wrote in the study.
Fertility rates in the U.S. dropped to an all-time low in 2024, according to federal data, with fewer than 1.6 children per woman, part of a global pattern of plummeting fertility. It’s largely a result of people getting married later, in addition to fear about the state of the economy and financial stability. The Congressional Budget Office warned last month that by 2030, for the first time in modern history, more Americans will die than be born, leaving immigrants as the only source of population growth. But Trump has actively tried to thwart immigration, and consequently, economists have warned of negative net migration leading to labor shortages, less consumer spending, and shrinking GDP growth.
Researchers see increasing work-from-home opportunities as a balm to falling fertility rates—and future economic woes associated with them for reasons beyond just couples spending more time together. (“‘You can’t get pregnant by email’ is the classic quote,” Bloom told Fortune.) Remote work makes planning childcare easier, and prospective parents can save money on commuting and housing, as they may not have to abide by moving to a place within a certain radius of their respective offices.
Meanwhile, work from home remains popular. Robert Half’s Remote Work Statistics and Trends for 2026 report published last month found only 16% of respondents reporting an in-office job prospect as their first choice, with a quarter saying they would consider pursuing a job requiring five days a week in office.
“It seems like just such an obvious thing to do,” Bloom said. “As an economist, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the more obvious win, win, win policy. Employees like it, it increases the birth rate, and it reduces pollution, commuting, etc.”
Finding real-life success
Other countries have already experimented with workplace flexibility and its impact on birth rates. In April 2025 the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, one of the country’s largest employers, began allowing employees to work just four days a week in an effort to shed the superlative of the world’s oldest population. It also implemented “childcare partial leave,” enabling parents to leave work a few hours early so they might better balance child-rearing with work.
“We will continue to review work styles flexibly to ensure that women do not have to sacrifice their careers due to life events such as childbirth or child-rearing,” Tokyo Gov. Yuriko Koike said in a speech during the Tokyo Metropolitan Assembly’s regular session in December 2024.
Bloom, however, takes issue with widespread implementation of a four-day workweek as a means to address fertility rates. To be sure, four-day workweeks have gained popularity in the U.S., with 22% of respondents to the American Psychological Association’s 2024 Work in America survey saying their employer offered a four-day workweek, up from 14% in 2022. However, Bloom cited early research on a four-day workweek in France indicating that even though employers didn’t cut wages for a truncated workweek, they did not increase wages over three years, which Bloom said was effectively a pay cut.
Increasing remote-work opportunities is also a cheaper solution to implement than cash incentives proposed by the Trump administration, according to Bloom. LendingTree data from 2025 reveals it costs nearly $300,000 to raise a child until age 18 in the U.S., and a United Nations report found one-time payments to new parents generally isn’t enough of an incentive to meaningfully increase fertility rates.
“I don’t think it’s realistic,” Karen Benjamin Guzzo, director of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told PBS, “to think that any amount of money that the government could plausibly give out would be enough to really address the costs of raising a child.”
