Home sweet home: 40% of US workers willing to take pay cut to work remotely

Remote work: Should we? Shouldn’t we? The question has remained a hot topic ever since the pandemic left us with no choice but to embrace it. In the US, megacompanies like Amazon and Dell have pushed strict return-to-office mandates, while government workers have been told to return to their desks or leave. However, remote work is here to stay – and a staggering 40 per cent of workers surveyed in a new study said they would be willing to take a 5 per cent pay cut to be able to work from their homes. 

The research was carried out by the non-profit, non-partisan organization, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working with researchers at Harvard, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Illinois main campus.

It surveyed a total of 1,396 US tech works, as well as employer ratings from Glassdoor and “cost-of-living and quality-of-life measures based on job location.” 

It found that as much as 40 per cent of workers said that they would take a 5 per cent pay cut in order to work from home. However, nearly 10 per cent would take a cut of up to 20 per cent  if this meant that they didn’t have to work from the office.

On average, it was found that employees are willing to accept up to a quarter pay cut for partial or fully remote roles. 

What the researchers found was that, on average, employees are willing to accept up to a 25 per cent pay cut for partly or fully remote roles. The team adds that this estimate is “three to five times that of previous studies.” They add that the difference could be down to how previous studies have carried out their research, including “understating preferences for remote work.”