Despite numerous Bay Area companies implementing return-to-office policies, work-from-home numbers in the region have shifted little in the last year.
In May 2026, data from WFH Research showed that about 28% of paid days were done from home in the San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland metro area. That number is almost exactly the same as in May 2025, and just a bit down from 32% in the same month in 2024.
The data is collected through monthly surveys of about 5,000 working-age respondents a month that made at least $10,000 in the prior year. The survey asks respondents whether they worked each day of the previous week, and if so, where.
“It’s really stabilized,” said Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford University who is one of the leaders of WFH Research.
Based on data collected from December 2025 to May 2026, the Bay Area ranks third out of the nine in terms of work-from-home rates among major metro areas highlighted in the survey data. Top of the list was Miami with about 33% of full paid days working from home.
The trends found by WFH Research are most similar to other data sources that track how much employees are returning to the office, says Bloom.
According to data from Kastle Systems, a security company that tracks access-card swipes, the average rate of occupancy for offices in the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley metro area was 46% of pre-pandemic figures for the four weeks ending on June 10. Average occupancy was about 42% in the same period last year.
Estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau are not as current as those from WFH Research or Kastle, but they also show a slowdown in return to office. The numbers show that 17% of workers in the Bay Area’s nine counties were fully remote in 2024, the latest data available, which was only down by about 1 percentage point from 2023. (The census figures are lower than WFH’s numbers because they estimate the number of people who only work remotely.)
Bloom said that one reason for the stagnant return to office numbers is that employees just aren’t complying with new mandates. He said that it is genuinely hard for managers to accurately measure and enforce how many times employees are coming into the office.
In addition, managers are also incentivized to prioritize the performance of the team over attendance.
Managers “are basically saying, if you get your job done and you perform well, don’t worry about it,” said Bloom. “Because if you’re a manager of a team, ultimately, your bonus, your pay, depends on your team’s performance” not work-from-home levels.
