What percentage of European employees work from home at least sometimes?

How to get close to this number

Bound it by what jobs allow. Most European employment is in retail, healthcare, manufacturing, hospitality and construction, none of which can be done from home. Only a minority of jobs are desk jobs at all, so even universal remote working among those who can would produce a figure well under half.

The change is the story rather than the level: roughly doubled since 2019. That is an enormous shift in a labour statistic over four years, and it is one of the few structural changes from that period that persisted rather than reverting — the Zoom question on this site shows the same pattern from the other side.

The national variation is large and systematic. Northern European countries run well above the average and southern and eastern ones well below, driven by industry mix, housing size, management culture and broadband quality rather than by policy. An EU average here describes a range of national figures that differ by a factor of four.