Six years after the pandemic forced an abrupt experiment in remote work, working from home has settled into a durable feature of urban economies. In the United States, roughly 26 per cent of paid working days in mid-2026 were worked from home, a level that long-running survey data show the pandemic raised permanently [1]. Public debate about this shift has been dominated by productivity and corporate control. However, its wider consequences, for carbon emissions, household energy, the use of time and the health of workers, have received less sustained attention, though each has a growing evidence base.

This essay argues that working from home does not so much eliminate the costs of work as relocate them: from the road to the residence, from the office meter to the household bill, from the commute to the kitchen table. Whether that relocation is beneficial depends less on remote work itself than on the conditions into which it is relocated, above all the form of the city and the quality of the home.

Working from home and the carbon footprint

One of the most detailed estimates of the climate effect of working from home comes from a 2023 study by researchers at Cornell University and Microsoft, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It found that fully remote workers could have a carbon footprint 54 per cent lower than onsite workers, and that hybrid workers who spend two to four days a week at home could reduce theirs by between 11 and 29 per cent [2]. By contrast, a single day at home each week cut the footprint by only about 2 per cent [2].

The mechanisms behind these figures are revealing. For onsite and hybrid workers, travel and office energy use were the main sources of emissions, while the additional use of computers, phones and internet services by remote workers had a negligible effect [2]. Yet the savings were partly offset by changes in behaviour. Hybrid workers tended to commute farther, reflecting different housing choices [2], and remote workers made 1.6 times as many non-commute trips as onsite staff, so that such travel accounted for 79 per cent of their footprint [3]. Remote work, in other words, reshapes travel rather than abolishing it, and the city in which it takes place determines how much is saved.

From office energy to household energy

Working from home also transfers energy demand from commercial buildings to homes, and the net effect depends on context. The International Energy Agency estimated in 2020 that working from home is likely to reduce the carbon footprint of people who commute by car more than about 6 kilometres each way; for short car commutes, or for commuters who use public transport, it may increase emissions because of additional residential energy use [4]. Across an average year, however, the IEA found that the energy saved from reduced commuting was around four times larger than the increase in residential consumption [5].

The balance shifts with climate, fuel and building stock. For instance, the IEA noted that in China the net reduction in energy demand translates into only a small fall in emissions, particularly in winter, because of the carbon intensity of the power sector and the reliance on coal for heating [4]. Similarly, a 2021 analysis by the UK’s Carbon Trust found that urban German workers who commute by train in winter generally have lower emissions in the office than at home, because of the energy needed to heat individual dwellings [6]. The environmental case for remote work is therefore inseparable from the energy performance of housing: a well-insulated home on a clean grid makes working from home a climate gain, while a draughty home heated by coal can make it a loss.

Working from home and the redistribution of time

For workers themselves, the most tangible effect of working from home is the return of time. Drawing on surveys of workers in 27 countries, Aksoy and colleagues estimated average savings of 72 minutes on each day worked from home [7]. They also traced where that time went: about 40 per cent was reinvested in paid work and around 11 per cent in caregiving, with people living with children devoting more to care [7]. A further 34 per cent went to leisure, and in households with young children women allocated slightly more of their saved time to caregiving than men [8].

Consequently, the notion of “quality time” requires qualification. Working from home does create time for family, rest and care, but a substantial share flows back into work, and the distribution of the remainder reflects existing patterns within households. The time dividend is real, yet it is not automatically a dividend in wellbeing.

Health: retention, stress and the sedentary home

The strongest experimental evidence on hybrid work comes from a randomised controlled trial of 1,612 graduate employees at Trip.com, published in Nature in 2024. Allowing staff to work from home two days a week reduced resignations by one-third and raised job satisfaction, with no detectable effect on performance or promotion [9]. For many workers, therefore, the flexibility itself appears to be a source of wellbeing.

The clinical literature, however, points to costs that accumulate quietly. A 2025 systematic review of teleworking and health found associations with higher stress, poorer mental health, more musculoskeletal disorders and visual problems [10]. Earlier syntheses reported marked reductions in walking and overall physical activity among home-based workers [11], alongside sedentary behaviour, loneliness, sleep disturbance and musculoskeletal pain [12]. After all, the home, designed for living rather than working, rarely offers the ergonomics, daylight, movement and social contact that a well-designed workplace can provide.

Working from home and the home as infrastructure

Read together, these strands suggest that working from home is less a single phenomenon than a transfer of responsibility from the employer’s building to the worker’s dwelling. The carbon saved on the road depends on the travel that replaces it and on the city that shapes it. Likewise, the energy saved at the office depends on the insulation and fuel of the home. The time saved from commuting depends on how work and care are divided. Finally, the health benefits of flexibility depend on whether the home can serve, for several hours a day, as a workplace fit for the body and mind.

For urbanists, this makes housing quality and neighbourhood design central to the remote-work question rather than peripheral to it (see our essay, Beyond Shelter: Housing Quality as a Determinant of Urban Health). A city in which many people work from home is one in which the dwelling, the local street and the nearby park have quietly become part of the economy’s infrastructure. Whether that arrangement lowers emissions, frees time and improves health will be decided, in large part, by how well those places are built.

Connect with the author, Asesh Sarkar, on LinkedIn, and follow Urban Frontier Insights on LinkedIn.

References

Carbon and energy

Time and health

Cover image: Silhouette of a man working on a laptop by a window. Photo by Theo Decker on Pexels.