COVID-19 and Remote Work:
An Early Look at US Data

Erik Brynjolfsson, John Horton, Adam Ozimek, Daniel Rock, Garima Sharma, Hong Yi Tu Ye

September 8, 2020

We report the results of a survey on remote work for nationally-representative sample of the US population during the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey ran in three waves in April 2020, May 2020, and July 2020 covering a total of 75,000 respondents. Of those employed pre-COVID-19, we find that about half are now working from home, including 33.0% who report they had previously been commuting and recently switched to working from home. In addition, 10.1% report being laid-off or furloughed since the start of COVID-19. We find that the share of people switching to remote work can be predicted by the incidence of COVID-19 and that younger people were more likely to switch to remote work. Furthermore, states with a higher share of employment in information work including management, professional and related occupations were more likely to shift toward working from home and had fewer people continuing to commute. We find no substantial change in results between the first two waves, suggesting that most changes to remote work manifested by early April. However, by the third wave in July, employees started to return to workplaces, with 22 percent of those who had initially switched to remote work having switched back to commuting.