Working from home? Who Actually Works From Home, and why the ‘creator economy’ is on the rise.
The office-versus-home debate has settled into something more permanent than anyone expected.
Before 2020, remote work accounted for less than 5% of paid workdays in the U.S.; during lockdowns, it spiked to roughly 60%. By early 2026 it has settled at around 25% of paid workdays, not a retreat back to the office, but a structural shift that researchers at Stanford's WFH Research project now treat as the new baseline.
In Australia, 36% of employed people usually worked from home as of August 2025, down from a pandemic peak of 40.5% in August 2021, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. A broader measure from Roy Morgan, counting anyone working from home at least part of the time between July 2024 and June 2025, put the figure at 6.7 million Australians, or 46% of employed workers. Managers and professionals worked from home at roughly triple the rate of other occupations, 59% versus 21%, per the same ABS release. A study by the Australian Institute of Family Studies, run during the pandemic and published in 2021, found 67% of employed Australian parents sometimes or always worked from home, up from 42% before COVID.
It also found a clear gender split in how that flexibility was used. 58% of mothers relied on flexible hours and 52% worked from home to manage childcare, compared with 38% and 36% of fathers respectively. This data is older than the U.S. figures above and reflects the pandemic period rather than current conditions, worth flagging if used side by side.
A 2024 YouGov survey of 830 Australian adults found 29% had previously worked as a digital nomad, defined as travelling for at least a week while working remotely, and a further 41% of non-nomads said they would consider it. New Zealand and Japan were the most popular destinations among respondents.
Research commissioned by Westpac found that 27% of Australians currently earn income from a side hustle or microbusiness, with another 28% considering starting one. Most cite financial pressure as the main driver, 77%, though 29% pointed to exploring a passion as a motivating factor, echoing the same pattern seen in the U.S. data.
Even company age matters: 90% of firms founded since 2011 offer some form of location flexibility, compared with under 70% of those founded before 2000. Nowhere is the impact clearer than for parents. A 2025 NBER working paper by economists Emma Harrington and Matthew Kahn found that a 10% increase in work-from-home prevalence narrowed the employment gap between mothers and other women by nearly 1%, with even larger income gains, and the effect was strongest in traditionally inflexible, high-paying fields like finance, not just the flexible sectors you'd expect.
Their data point is stark: among women without access to remote work, nearly 25% stopped working after having a child, compared with almost none among those who had it. That lines up with labour-force figures showing participation among mothers of children under five in the U.S. climbed from roughly 65% in the 2008 to 2017 period to over 70% by 2023, an all-time high, with 44% of degree-holding mothers of young children now working at least one day a week remotely, according to Brookings research cited by SHRM. Stay-at-home dads taking on more of the caregiving load have followed a similar trajectory, part of a broader reshuffling of who does what at home when the commute disappears.
Then there's a smaller, faster-growing group: people who work while they travel. MBO Partners' 2025 Digital Nomads Trends Report puts the number of American digital nomads at 18.5 million (a 153% increase since 2019), now representing about 12% of the U.S. workforce. Roughly 40% are millennials and 35% are Gen Z, and the group splits almost evenly between traditional employees (11.2 million) working remotely while mobile and independent workers (7.3 million) running their own businesses or freelancing from wherever they happen to be.
This is no longer a fringe lifestyle; it's the rebirth of cottage industry, and it is a measurable slice of the labour market with its own demographics, spending patterns, and even its own countertrend: "slomading," where nomads are staying an average of 6.4 weeks per location rather than racing between cities. That same flexibility is fuelling something else: a genuine resurgence of small-scale, independent work.
Roughly 28% of Americans currently run a side hustle, according to a 2026 Omnisend/Cint survey of over 1,300 U.S. adults, collectively generating more than $84 billion a month in extra income, though it's worth being honest that most people start one out of financial necessity rather than passion (80%, versus 9% who cite following a passion or hobby). Still, that remaining slice matters: it's the modern version of the cottage industry, individuals turning a skill or craft into a real, standalone practice rather than a side project buried in spare time.
Tools that help people plan, track, and manage that work (the same discipline larger teams rely on) are part of what makes that shift viable at an individual scale. That's the space Propagio sits in: helping people organise their own projects with the same rigour a project manager would bring to a team, whether that project is a client engagement, a craft business, or a passion they're finally making room for.
Hopefully this was worthwhile, more to follow.
Cheers,
Luke