Number of employees that work from home in the UK 1998-2020

In 2020, approximately 5.6 million people worked mainly from home in the United Kingdom, an increase of around 1.69 million people when compared with 1998, when just 2.9 million workers mainly worked from home. As a share of all workers in the United Kingdom, this was the equivalent of 17.4 percent of the UK workforce, compared with 14.2 percent in 1998. 

Rise of the hybrid workforce

More recent figures on working location trends in Great Britain, indicate that as of June 2024, around 14 percent of workers had worked from home exclusively in the last seven days, with a further 41 percent only travelling to work. Just over a quarter of British workers, however, had both worked from home and travelled to work in the last seven days. Although less common than only travelling to work, hybrid working has generally been more popular than only working at home since around Spring 2022, and is possibly one of the most enduring impacts that COVID-19 had on the labor market. 

Demographics of homeworkers

While advancements in internet connectivity and communication software have enabled more people to work from home than ever before, there are still obvious disparities in the share of homeworkers by industry. Over half of the UK’s agriculture workforce in 2020 regularly worked from home, compared with just 5.6 percent of those that worked in accommodation or food service. In the same year, the region with the highest share of people working from home was South West England at 18.3 percent, while Northern Ireland had the lowest at just 9.4 percent.