New data shows there was a decline in the frequency of working from home in Germany last year, but remote and hybrid work practices have become firmly entrenched in sectors of Europe’s largest economy more than four years after the pandemic.
The Federal Statistical Office said on Wednesday that 23.5% of all employed people worked from home at least occasionally in 2023. This was only marginally lower than in 2022 and 2021.
However, the survey data shows that office workers are increasingly coming into the office.
In 2023, 44% of employees who used a home office worked as often or more often in the office than from home. A quarter of people worked entirely from home.
In 2022, 39% of employees worked as much or more often at work than at home, and 31% worked exclusively from home. In pandemic-affected 2021, only 31% worked from home as much or less often than in the office, while 40% worked entirely from home.
In 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic, only 12.8% of employees in Germany worked from home.
Employees in the healthcare, retail and construction sectors rarely use working from home, because this is often not even possible. In contrast, opportunities are widespread among IT service providers, with 74.7% of employees working from home. Insurance companies and management consultancy firms also have high percentages.
The 2023 figures show that Germany is slightly above the home office average in the European Union, at 22.4% of all employees. The highest percentage was in the Netherlands, where 52% of the working population worked from home at least part of the time.
