Disabled and older adults have lower employment rates than other workers. Policymakers increasingly point to remote work as a way to keep these groups attached to the labour market. This column uses the pandemic-driven rise in working from home in the UK as a quasi-experiment to explore remote work’s impacts on employment and other outcomes such as commute times, hours worked, and wages. A one percentage point increase in working from home raises full-time employment of people with a physical disability by about 0.9%, close to estimates for the US, and raises full-time employment of workers aged 50 to 64 by about 0.4%.
People are living longer, and the resulting pressure on public budgets is large. The Office for Budget Responsibility projects that UK state pension spending will rise from about 5% to around 9% of GDP over the next 50 years (OBR 2026). Keeping more people in work for longer is one way to ease that pressure. As governments debate how to reduce economic inactivity and extend working lives, remote work is increasingly being discussed as a low-cost way to help disabled and older workers remain attached to the labour market. At the same time, employers’ return-to-office decisions may have unequal effects across workers, especially for those facing commuting, health, or caring constraints. Disabled and older adults have substantially lower employment rates in the UK. In 2024, 57% of the working-age population who reported a work-limiting health condition were not working (Mayfield 2025a), and more than a quarter of those aged 50 to 64 were not working (Jendrzejewski and Briedis 2025). The government-commissioned Keep Britain Working review argues that remote work can promote labour force attachment by reducing physical, commuting, health-management, and caring barriers (Mayfield 2025b). A recent employer survey found that 28% of employees with health conditions worked from home as an adjustment, and 19% wished they could do so more often (House of Lords Committee 2026).
The issue is not uniquely British. In the US, for example, many older people who have stopped working say they would return if jobs offered more flexibility (Ameriks et al. 2018). Yet it is unclear whether greater access to remote work brings people into employment or simply changes where existing workers perform their jobs.
US evidence suggests that remote work can raise employment among disabled workers in occupations with greater remote potential (Ne’eman and Maestas 2023, Tseng and Webber 2025). Bloom et al. (2025, 2026) estimate that a 1 percentage point increase in working from home raises full-time employment of people with a physical disability by about 1%. The evidence for older workers is thinner. Survey evidence suggests that remote work reduces the desire to retire (Sanzenbacher 2025), but causal estimates for people nearing retirement are scarce.
There are several reasons to expect remote work might have a smaller effect in the UK. Disabled workers there are disproportionately represented in occupations with lower remote-work feasibility, such as retail (Schur et al. 2021, Ameri et al. 2023). Hoque and Bacon (2022) show that disabled employees in the UK are less likely than non-disabled employees to have access to homeworking, largely because they are underrepresented in higher-paid and managerial roles where such flexibility is most available. Additionally, UK surveys measure disability more comprehensively than US surveys, so the marginal disabled worker may differ across the two countries for purely definitional reasons (DWP 2025). Finally, the UK furlough scheme paid the wages of workers who could not work during lockdowns. Disabled workers were disproportionately placed on furlough, which may have buffered them from sharper employment losses (Jones 2022). On the other hand, between 2019 and early 2023 the share of job postings offering remote work rose by a factor of five or more in the UK, compared with a little over three in the US (Hansen et al. 2023a, 2023b). This faster growth may have left more room for employment in remote-friendly jobs to expand.
In a new paper (Burn et al. 2026), we test whether the rise in remote work raised employment for disabled and older workers in the UK. We use the Quarterly Labour Force Survey and compare 2018-2019 with 2023-2024. Among full-time workers, the share who mainly work from home rose from about 12% to 32% for non-disabled workers, with similar increases for disabled, younger, and older workers (Figure 1). The measure captures workers whose main job is done mainly at or from home, rather than occasional remote days.
Figure 1 Share of full-time workers who mainly work from home, UK
Following Bloom et al. (2026), we compare employment growth across about 90 occupations that saw larger or smaller increases in working from home. Two features of the design address the concern that remote work opportunities and employment may influence each other. First, we measure the change in working from home among non-disabled workers (or younger workers, when studying older workers), since disabled workers may request remote work as a reasonable adjustment. Second, we isolate the part of the rise in working from home that was predicted by whether the occupation could be done remotely before the pandemic. We do this using the Dingel and Neiman (2020) index of remote-work feasibility, adapted to UK occupations by De Fraja et al. (2021). This isolates changes in working from home that come from the nature of the job and not from the choices of individual workers or firms. We also account for changes in the composition of each group and for occupation-level labour market tightness.
We find that a 1 percentage point increase in working from home raises full-time employment of people with a physical disability in an occupation by about 0.9%, relative to the occupation’s pre-pandemic level (Figure 2). This is remarkably close to the US estimate, despite the many institutional differences between the two countries. The result holds when we include cognitive conditions, focus on work-limiting disabilities, or split the sample by sex or age. The effect is smaller when part-time workers are included, consistent with WFH growth being concentrated in full-time jobs.
Figure 2 Effect of a 1 percentage point increase in working from home on full-time employment
A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the estimate could account for much of the rise in disabled full-time employment, from 34.4% to 37.6%. Because the analysis is at the occupation level, these gains may reflect both net entry and movement toward occupations where remote work expanded. A more conservative specification gives an estimate of 0.37, still enough to account for about 77% of the increase.
We then extend the analysis to workers aged 50 to 64. Older workers have received less attention in causal studies, even though many face health constraints or caring responsibilities that make regular workplace attendance difficult. A 1 percentage point increase in working from home raises their full-time employment by about 0.4%, relative to the occupation’s pre-pandemic level, roughly half the effect for disabled workers. The estimates are consistent when we include part-time workers, extend the age range to 75, or split the sample by gender or disability status. The effect is concentrated among older workers without a university degree, who were less likely to be in remote-capable jobs before the pandemic.
The interpretation for this group differs from that of the disability sample. Aggregate full-time employment among older workers did not rise between the two periods. The occupation-level effect is therefore more likely to reflect retention, delayed labour force exit, or movement toward occupations with expanding remote work than substantial net job creation.
Remote work changed where people worked more than how much they worked. The rise in working from home cut average commute times by roughly 29% for disabled workers and 23% for older workers, about four to five minutes a day. Usual weekly hours did not change for either group.
Hourly wages fell slightly, by about 0.17% for each percentage point increase in working from home for both groups. Work from home availability could decrease or increase wages depending on the mechanisms at play. Lower commuting and workplace costs may reduce the wage a worker needs to accept a job, and firms recruiting nationally for remote roles would see more applicants. Access to a wider set of employers, better matches, and lower accommodation costs push in the opposite direction, potentially increasing wages. Our estimates suggest the first set of forces dominated, which fits the conclusion of Bloom et al. (2026) that remote work increased the supply of disabled workers. These estimates do not imply that every remote worker earned less. Rather, they suggest that in occupations where working from home expanded more, wage growth for these groups was slightly lower. The wage estimates also rest on fewer occupations and should be read with some caution.
The similarity between the UK and US estimates for disabled workers suggests that the barriers remote work removes are not specific to one labour market. That matters for governments across Europe and elsewhere deciding how strongly to support flexible and remote working as a route to higher employment among people with health conditions. The results for older workers point in the same direction and are relevant for countries trying to extend working lives.
These gains have limits: many disabled and older workers are in jobs that cannot be done from home, and some workers appear to accept slightly lower pay for remote arrangements. Remote work can raise employment for these groups, but closing their employment gaps will require policies that reach workers whose jobs cannot move home. Decisions about return-to-office policies and rights to request flexible working are likely to affect disabled and older workers more than most. Treating remote work only as a perk risks missing its role as an accommodation and retention tool.
Source : VOXeu
Spending on public pensions through Social Security and on elderly healthcare through Medicare accounted for…
Nominal interest rates increased significantly in the US and euro area following the post-pandemic inflation…
Official development assistance fell by 23% in 2025, the largest drop on record. Aid disbursements…
EU debt has become a noticeable feature of Europe’s fiscal architecture. However, EU fiscal rules…
The European banking sector is known for high regulatory complexity, market fragmentation, and uneven implementation…
Driven by national security concerns, a growing number of countries screen foreign investment in an…