Data analysis shows a range of jobs are being carried out at home. Photo / Getty Images
Older workers and those with disabilities are among the most likely to be working from home, according to an analysis of the United States Census Bureau’s long-running Current Population Survey.
They are only rivalled by workers with university degrees and Asian American workers, two categories across which there’s substantial overlap.
The odds of working hybrid - that is, some of your hours remote but some in the office - decline as you age, according to analysis of the survey’s work-from-home data.
Fully remote work goes the opposite direction.
Older workers, specifically those who have hit retirement age - are the most likely of any group to be working from home.
To be sure, that’s only because of people who work part-time in retirement. All groups shift towards working fewer hours when they hit their 60s, but fully remote workers show the sharpest shift of all.
We assume that’s partly because many of them are former on-site workers who stay on to offer veteran guidance.
Speaking of expertise, these fully remote older workers are much more likely to have advanced degrees.
And they’re also much more likely to be self-employed.
We’d guess that’s because they’re running a small business they built during their working years, consulting or contracting in their former industry or even taking on a side hustle to keep them busy.
Or, they’re farming - an increasingly rare occupation that, technically, often qualifies as work-from-home.
We only have data since late 2022, when the Census Bureau added broad work-from-home questions to their flagship monthly survey as an evolution of data they started collecting during the Covid-19 pandemic. Even over that brief time, we’ve seen what we’re guessing will be a once-in-a-lifetime-size shift.
For most of the time for which we have data, US federal Government employees were a remote-work success story.
They “teleworked” much more often than their private-sector peers. In particular, they did more hybrid work than any other class of worker in the US.
Then, in early 2025, the Trump Administration slashed the federal workforce. Now federal workers are among the least likely to work either remotely or in a hybrid way, behind only their local-government friends.
The federal government accounts for a small-enough share of all employment that, broadly speaking, the remote-work landscape hasn’t changed much in the past few years. That allows us to use data from that entire time period and pinpoint trends within niches as narrow as older or disabled workers who don’t go into the office.
When we do, we find that the top work-from-home jobs overall - meaning, those where most workers are fully remote - are web developer, writer, and editor.
Others, including technical writers, database administrators, and travel agents, also come close to being majority-homeworkers.
For people in their early 20s, their best bet at remote work involves customer service. For most workers in their 20s and 30s, it’s software development.
And for anyone around age 40 or older, the highest probability of remote work goes to the managers - a category that includes many self-employed workers and small-business owners.
In most jobs, older workers are more likely to earn remote-work privileges.
The exceptions we found tended to concentrate in a few tech-heavy careers - such as web designers, web developers. and software testers.
If you ook for the jobs that attract the most remote workers, regardless of how many on-site and hybrid workers are also in that job, you see that older workers concentrate - quite logically - in the most senior positions. They’re managers, management analysts, chief executives and lawyers.
Their younger peers are much more likely to be software developers or customer service representatives.
How do we isolate jobs that might work for people who need work now? We saw some clues with workers with disabilities.
We looked specifically at those who have difficulty with mobility or with caring for themselves, since they’re most likely to work from home.
For almost every stat we looked at, they followed patterns similar to those of their able-bodied peers. But their top fully remote jobs include a few that we didn’t see as often among older workers, including customer service, accounting, and real estate.
That’s in part due to their youth, but also because they have more varied education levels than the typical heavily credentialled, older work-from-homer.
When we look at retirement-age people again, but focus on those who don’t have advanced degrees, we see managers still rise to the top.
But the three jobs we mentioned for disabled workers - bookkeeping, customer service and real estate - also jump up the list.
As do some other credible career opportunities, such as property managers, executive assistants, and salespeople.
We also get personal care aides and childcare workers - both jobs that presumably are only work-from-home if you do live-in work or run a home-based business.
The most useful list may come not from looking at the most popular work-from-home jobs, but the ones that - once they’re employed - older workers are most likely to be allowed to do from home.
Those include medical transcriptionists, travel agents, insurance underwriters, credit analysts, claims adjusters and typists.
And, of course, writers and editors. If only anyone were hiring those right now.
- Andrew Van Dam writes the Department of Data column each week for the Washington Post. He has covered economics for the Post and the Wall Street Journal.
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