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Edition of Thursday 12 November 2026

Business

Return to office in 2026: who is mandating it and how many actually go

More large employers now require staff in the office three to five days a week, but working from home has not disappeared. In the US, about a quarter of paid workdays are still done from home, and office attendance peaks mid-week.

By , Editor-in-chief

· 5 min read

Open-plan office with some desks in use and others empty beside tall windows over a city
Open-plan office with some desks in use and others empty beside tall windows over a city Illustration generated with AI.

Return-to-office mandates have spread since 2025, but hybrid work remains the norm for many office workers. In the US, about 26% of paid workdays were still worked from home in July 2026, and office occupancy in big cities was around 56% of pre-pandemic levels in late October 2026. Employers such as Amazon and the US federal government require five days in the office, while others, including Microsoft, have settled on three.

Which employers require staff back in the office?

A growing number of large employers now set minimum office days, and some require full-time attendance. The table below lists several high-profile policies and when they took effect.

Selected return-to-office policies
EmployerPolicyEffective
AmazonFive days a week in the office2 January 2025
US federal governmentAgencies told to end remote work and require full-time in-person work, with exemptionsMemorandum of 20 January 2025
Instagram (Meta)Five days a week for US staff; other Meta divisions remain hybrid2 February 2026
MicrosoftThree days a week for staff within 50 miles of an office, starting near SeattleEnd of February 2026, then other locations

Amazon's chief executive, Andy Jassy, announced the five-day policy in September 2024, saying the company had become more convinced of the benefits of in-person work after 15 months of at least three office days a week, according to Amazon's own announcement. On 20 January 2025, a presidential memorandum ordered heads of US executive departments and agencies to terminate remote work arrangements "as soon as practicable".

Instagram's US staff were told to return five days a week from 2 February 2026, while other parts of Meta such as Facebook and WhatsApp kept a hybrid schedule, Entrepreneur reported. Microsoft chose three days a week, rolled out first for employees in the Puget Sound area of Washington state, and linked the change to building AI products, saying it needed "the kind of energy and momentum that comes from smart people working side by side", according to the company's blog. We look at how AI is changing office software itself in AI agents in everyday software.

How many people actually work from home now?

Despite the mandates, working from home has settled at a stable level rather than vanishing. About 26% of paid workdays in the US were worked from home in July 2026, according to the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes run by economists including Stanford's Nick Bloom, published by WFH Research. In the past year, 62% of full-time employees worked fully on site, 26% were hybrid and 12% were fully remote, the same survey found.

The pattern is similar in Britain. More than a quarter of working adults in Great Britain, 28%, were hybrid working in autumn 2024, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Are offices full again?

No. Attendance has crept up, but it is concentrated from Tuesday to Thursday. Kastle Systems, which tracks keycard entries in 10 large US cities, reported a national weekly average occupancy of 56.5% of the pre-pandemic baseline in the week that included Tuesday 27 October 2026, according to its Back to Work Barometer. New York reached 72.2%, its highest weekly level since March 2020, and the national peak on Tuesday 27 October was 66.7%.

That gap between peak days and the weekly average shows how hybrid schedules cluster in mid-week, GCN noted in October 2026.

Does working from the office make people more productive?

The best evidence suggests that hybrid work does not reduce performance and improves retention. In a six-month randomised trial with 1,612 employees at a Chinese technology company, published in Nature in June 2024, Nick Bloom and colleagues found that working from home two days a week improved job satisfaction and cut quit rates by one-third. Statistical tests showed no effect on performance grades over the next two years of reviews, and no evidence of a difference in promotions.

Executives who favour office work point to benefits that are harder to measure: Amazon's Andy Jassy, for example, cited culture, collaboration, and teaching and learning from one another. The Nature trial tested a hybrid schedule with two days at home, so its results do not directly cover fully remote work. Employers are also experimenting with how much people work, not only where, as our explainer on four-day week trials shows.

Frequently asked questions

What percentage of people work from home in 2026?

In the US, about 26% of paid workdays were worked from home in July 2026, according to WFH Research's Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes. Measured by people rather than days, 12% of full-time employees were fully remote, 26% hybrid and 62% fully on site over the past year. In Great Britain, 28% of working adults were hybrid working in autumn 2024.

Which companies require five days in the office?

High-profile examples include Amazon, which moved to five days a week from 2 January 2025, and Instagram, which required its US staff to return five days a week from 2 February 2026. The US federal government also ordered agencies to end remote work in January 2025. Many other large firms, including Microsoft, require three days.

Is hybrid work less productive?

The strongest evidence says no. A randomised trial of 1,612 employees, published in Nature in 2024, found that working from home two days a week did not affect performance reviews or promotions, while it improved job satisfaction and reduced quit rates by one-third. Results may differ for fully remote work and for other types of job.

Are offices back to pre-pandemic occupancy?

No. Across 10 major US cities tracked by Kastle Systems, average weekly office occupancy was 56.5% of pre-pandemic levels in late October 2026. Attendance is much higher on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays than on Mondays and Fridays, with a Tuesday peak of 66.7% that week.

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