Half of Dutch workers work from home

No country in Europe works from home as much as the Netherlands. That is a measurement, not an impression, and the distance to the rest is large. This paper lines up the figures and asks what remains of pandemic-era home working.

In 2025, 11.3% of employed Dutch people aged 15 to 64 usually worked from home. Another 41.0% sometimes did. Together that is 52.3%: more than half of all employed people spend at least part of their time away from a company location.

The EU average stands at 23.0%. The Netherlands sits far above it, and above the Nordic neighbours that traditionally score high. At the bottom sit Italy at 8.2%, Bulgaria at 4.0% and Romania at 3.6%.

The total has barely moved since 2021: 53.9% then, 52.3% now. Inside it, the mix shifted hard. The share usually working from home fell from 20.4% in 2021 to 11.3% in 2025. The share sometimes working from home rose from 33.5% to 41.0%.

The return to the office that employers have announced since 2022 did happen, but only half of it. Workers did not go back to five days on site; they went from fully remote to partly remote. In the Netherlands the hybrid model has become the standard, not the exception.

For recruitment, home working is a distance measure. Whoever works from home two days a week accepts a longer commute on the remaining days. Every point of home working stretches the area within which a vacancy and a candidate can find each other.

That cuts both ways. The employer offering home working fishes in a larger pool than the competitor demanding five days of presence. And the employer not offering it competes, in the Netherlands, against half the market that has grown used to it.

• "Sometimes" is a wide category. Whoever works from home one afternoon a month counts as much as whoever does three days a week. The figure measures reach, not intensity.
• The series has a break. The European labour force survey was redesigned in 2021, so comparisons with 2019 cross that break. This paper uses only 2021 through 2025 for the trend.
• It covers employed people aged 15 to 64, not the whole labour force, and the possibility of home working differs sharply by occupation. A national average says little about a building site or an operating theatre.

• The quotable number. 52.3% of employed Dutch people worked from home at least sometimes in 2025, against an EU average of 23.0%. The Netherlands leads Europe.
• Hybrid is the norm. Fully remote nearly halved since 2021 while occasional home working kept growing. Demanding five days of presence deviates from the Dutch standard.
• Commuting distance weighs less. A vacancy with two home-working days has a larger recruitment area than the same vacancy without. Regional scarcity is therefore partly a choice.
• Do not benchmark against Germany. The German labour market runs on 24.7% home working, less than half the Dutch level. What works in recruitment there does not translate here by default.

All figures come from Eurostat, dataset lfsa_ehomp, employed people aged 15 to 64 working from home usually or sometimes, as a percentage of all employed people, reference year 2025 and, for the trend, 2021 through 2025, retrieved on 1 September 2026, licensed CC BY 4.0.

The two categories are summed into a total; Eurostat publishes them separately. The country comparison uses 2025 for every country. The labour force survey was redesigned in 2021, so figures from before 2021 are not directly comparable; the 2019 figure, 37.1%, appears here as context only, not as a trend point. What is missing: a breakdown by occupation, which matters more to recruitment practice than the national average and deserves a follow-up paper.