2025 was a record year for remote and hybrid working in Ireland.
Nearly one million people (998,000 based on annual average) worked remotely or in hybrid arrangements last year. That’s 35.4% of total employment. For the first time ever, the combined figure crossed one million in Q1 2025. Year-on-year, remote and hybrid working grew by 45,200 people, a 4.7% increase on 2024. These are the highest figures ever recorded.
These are in fact the highest figures pre and post covid ever recorded for remote and hybrid work as a % of total employment.
In 2019 the % was 20.3%
In 2020 the % was 32.7%
In 2021 the % was 39.4%
In 2022 the % was 35.2%
In 2023 the % was 34.1%
In 2024 the % was 34.6%
In 2025 the % was 35.4%
You might not have seen it that way though. Across national newspapers and LinkedIn socials this week, the Q4 snapshot (one quarter’s reading, down 16,000 on the same quarter last year) has taken the most of the headlines and comments space.
Has it been framed as a signal the remote work era is fading, that Ireland is heading back to the office, that the tide has turned? How did it make you feel or think?
The Q4 figure is real and it is worth watching. We’ll get into it. But it is one data point inside a much bigger picture. And when you look at the full picture, the story isn’t decline. It’s that remote and hybrid work has structurally embedded itself in Irish working life at a scale that would have seemed impossible six years ago. The more important question, and the one that isn’t getting asked beside the numbers, is what Ireland is doing to maintain the numbers, grow the numbers and help employers transition and thrive.
What the CSO Data Actually Shows
Every quarter, the Central Statistics Office publishes labour force data that tracks how many people in Ireland work from home: usually, sometimes, or never. Grow Remote has been analysing this data systematically across the full period from 2019 to 2025, and we’ve put together a report on what it shows us.
The headline figure quoted in the media, 956,700 people working from home, is the Q4 2025 reading. That single quarter figure, compared against Q4 2024, shows a decline of around 16,000 people.
But here’s what the same dataset also shows:
The 2025 annual average of 998,000 combined remote and hybrid workers is the highest ever recorded in absolute terms. That’s nearly double the pre-pandemic baseline of 474,000 in 2019. Ireland hit 1 million people working from home for the first time ever in Q1 2025. The annual average share of the workforce, at 35.4%, is the highest post-pandemic figure on record.
The Q4 decline is real and worth monitoring. It broke a three-year run of consecutive year-on-year Q4 gains, and both the “usually WFH” and “sometimes WFH” cohorts fell. We’re not dismissing that. But one quarter does not make a trend. The 2025 annual average is still a record, and Q1 2026 will be the real indicator of which direction we’re heading.
The comparison that framed much of the media coverage, Q4 2025 versus the pandemic peak, tells you very little of value. The more meaningful comparison is against 2019, the pre-pandemic baseline. On that measure, the number of people working remotely or in hybrid arrangements has more than doubled.
Remote and hybrid work is not in retreat. It is structurally embedded in the Irish labour market at a level that would have been unimaginable six years ago and it has had its a record breaking year.
View / Download the Full Report
We’ve done a deeper analysis of the CSO data, covering annual averages, quarterly breakdowns, year-on-year trends, and additional context behind the Q4 figures. It’s all in the report below.
The Real Issue Isn’t the Number. It’s What We’re Doing About It.
Here’s what concerns us more than the Q4 figure: the fact that this is still a debate about whether remote work is going up or going down, rather than a conversation about what we’re doing to make it work better for more people, in more places, across more of the economy.
Because at 35% of the workforce, Ireland has something remarkable. We have built, prior to and through the chaos and necessity of a pandemic, a new way of working that has expanded economic opportunity, improved wellbeing for hundreds of thousands of people, and begun to shift the long-established gravitational pull of Dublin.
But there is no national target for remote employment -yet. There is no delivery mechanism to actively grow the number of remote jobs available in communities outside our cities – yet. There is no systematic support for employers, particularly SMEs, who want to transition to hybrid or remote models but don’t know where to start – beyond our “Lead From Anywhere” training programme pilot . And there is no infrastructure to connect the talent that exists in every county in Ireland with the global employers who are hiring remotely right now.
That’s what needs to change.
While we are talking about change – the 2025 Hays Ireland Working Well Report gave us a really important data point that needs to be considered as we move forward.
“Despite the popularity and benefits of flexible working practices, the past year has seen numerous multinational organisations make headlines for mandating return-to-office (RTO) policies, and 42% of professionals say that related news coverage has negatively impacted their wellbeing. Interestingly, RTO news coverage has had a significantly greater negative impact on women’s wellbeing (49%) compared to their male counterparts (33%).”
Simply put: headlines like “Remote Work Is Dead” don’t just hide the full story – they impact people. They create uncertainty. They affect confidence. They disproportionately affect women. And they shape employer behaviour.
So the question isn’t whether remote work is rising or falling by a few percentage points.
The real question is: Are we treating remote work as a short-term trend or as a long-term strategic opportunity for Ireland?
If we are serious about balanced regional development, labour market participation, climate action, and gender equity, then remote work cannot be left to headlines or market drift.
It needs intention.
It needs policy.
It needs delivery.
And it needs leadership.
The Opportunity That Isn’t Being Seized
Over 100,000 remote jobs are advertised across Europe every single month. On LinkedIn, 90% of job traffic flows toward remote roles, but only 10% of postings are fully remote. Global employers like Canonical and Binance are hiring remotely across EMEA, which means those roles are available to people in Ireland. But they’re not being systematically tracked, attracted, or embedded in communities. Are we wining our fair share of the 100K jobs out there to maintain or grow the 35.4%?
Meanwhile, hybrid and remote work has already proven its value to the people who have access to it. Sway has 100+ stories from our community: people who moved back to rural Ireland, families who got time back, island schools that stayed open because a parent could work locally. These aren’t abstract benefits. They are real, measurable changes in quality of life.
And beyond the individual: when remote workers live locally, they spend locally. They volunteer locally. Recent CSO data defines that Remote & hybrid workers are ~30% more likely to volunteer in their local community than non remote workers. They put their income, their skills, and their time back into the places they call home. That’s a social and economic multiplier that no factory opening can fully replicate, and it’s one that nobody is currently counting, tracking, or designing policy around.
The social, economic and environmental impact of remote is now also structurally embedded in Irish society.
Three is the Magic Number
Grow Remote’s position is clear. We need to move beyond the debate about the numbers and focus on what it will take to make remote work deliver at scale, for individuals, for employers, and for local communities.
That means three things:
Employer supports. Companies need training and consultancy to make remote or hybrid actually work. Grow Remote already runs these programmes, but demand outstrips what we can deliver every single year. Scaling that up means more employers come on the journey, and more jobs open up.
We are now taking registrations of interest for the next groups of “Lead From Anywhere” that start in March and April – find out more here: https://bit.ly/grlfamarch
The jobs. This is the pillar that brings the other two together. Because we can’t talk about the benefits of remote work without talking about the remote jobs themselves. That means setting a national target for remote employment, from both indigenous Irish companies and the international roles that are, as Eoin put it, “essentially hanging in the air” while Ireland makes no concerted effort to draw them down. And it means tracking those jobs, embedding them in communities through the hub network, and showing employers that there are skilled remote workers in every corner of the country.
Community. Ireland has built incredible infrastructure through the national hub scheme. But hubs alone don’t solve isolation or create careers. Remote work needs to be embedded within communities, so workers can volunteer locally, connect with neighbours, and put their time and income back into the places they live.
Find out more about and join a local remote worker community group here
www.growremote.ie/community
Moving Forward
The Q4 2025 figures are a data point worth watching. But they are not a reason to retreat from the ambition Ireland should have for remote work. It is the opposite! We must protect and progress the remote ecosystem in Ireland.
Nearly a million people working from home, as an annual average in a normal year and not a pandemic year, is an extraordinary achievement. The question isn’t whether that’s going up or down. The question is: what are we doing to make sure that the next 50 thousand people who could benefit from remote work actually get access to it? And then another 50 thousand after that.
Because right now, remote work is not equally available. It skews toward sectors, roles, and locations that already have advantages. The social, economic, and environmental benefits (reduced commuting, distributed spending, better wellbeing, lower emissions, stronger communities) are real, but they’re not yet reaching everyone they could reach.
That’s the work that needs done. That’s the headlines we want to see.
If you want to get involved, whether you’re an employer looking to transition or someone who wants to see remote work embedded in their community, we’re here.
👉 Back the change: growremote.ie/policy
👉Explore our employer training programmes
👉 Join your local Grow Remote community
Data source: CSO Labour Force Survey, Table QES20: Persons aged 15+ in employment (ILO) by extent of working at home, Q1 2019 to Q4 2025. Full methodology notes available in the report above.
About Grow Remote: Our mission is to solve the challenges of remote work in order to unlock social, economic and environmental change for individuals, employers and local communities.
www.growremote.ie
Featured Image: Photo by Simon Abrams on Unsplash
