Overview
The August recess broke this week, and the strongest material came from the statisticians. Eurofound published its full report on hybrid working on 27 August, and the headline finding is about control rather than headcount. Around one in four EU employees now works in a hybrid arrangement, but only 48% of them have real autonomy over both when and where they work. A further 17% choose their location but not their hours, 13% choose their hours but not their location, and 22% have almost no say over either. Access is concentrated at the top: 56% of managers work hybrid, against 1% of employees in elementary occupations.
Ireland’s Central Statistics Office reported the same week that home working there fell again, and the shape of that decline matters more than the total. Across Q2 2026, 990,600 people worked from home at least sometimes, down 22,500 year on year. But the fall is entirely in majority-of-the-week home working, which dropped 4.6% to 529,800. Occasional home working actually rose, by 3,200 to 460,800. Full-time remote is contracting; the day or two at home is holding.
In Belgium, a concrete and immediate change: from 1 September the flat-rate allowance an employer can pay a homeworker free of tax and social security rises from €160.99 to €164.21 a month. Elsewhere, EY gave the return-to-office argument a new form – come in because AI makes human skills the differentiator – while Airbus went the other way, tabling a final offer that writes its existing telework agreement into the collective agreement through to 2030.
EU-Level Policy and Regulation
The Quality Jobs Act consultation closes on 28 September. The European Commission’s second-phase social partner consultation covers algorithmic management and AI at work, health and safety, workers’ rights in subcontracting chains, fair digital and green transitions, and enforcement. A legislative proposal is expected in the final quarter of 2026. (European Commission)
One point of clarification, because it is being reported loosely. There is no legislative proposal on a right to disconnect currently on the table. The Commission’s own announcement of the Quality Jobs Act consultation does not mention telework, remote work or the right to disconnect. The separate two-stage consultation on the right to disconnect and fair telework concluded in October 2025, and whether its outcomes reach the statute book through this Act or another instrument has not been decided.
A second clarification worth carrying: the EU framework agreement on cross-border telework, which lets a teleworker who spends between 25% and 49.99% of their working time in their country of residence stay in their employer’s social security system, is not expiring. It runs from 1 July 2023 to 30 June 2028 with automatic five-year renewals, and Estonia acceded to it on 1 February 2026.
Country Updates
Ireland
Home working fell for a second consecutive year, according to the Labour Force Survey for Q2 2026, published on 20 August. The number who never work from home rose 43,800 to 1,839,400, which is 64.8% of everyone in employment. Ireland’s statutory position is unchanged: the Work Life Balance and Miscellaneous Provisions Act 2023 gives a right to request remote working, not a right to receive it, and these figures show what employers are doing inside that discretion.
Separately, employment lawyers have flagged that Ireland prescribes no procedure at all for right-to-work checks, and no guidance has issued from the Department of Justice, the Department of Enterprise or the Workplace Relations Commission. The statutory defence requires an employer to show it took all steps reasonably open to it, which leaves employers designing their own process.
Belgium
The flat-rate office allowance for structural, regular homeworkers rises to €164.21 a month from 1 September 2026, up from €160.99. The qualifying condition is home working equivalent to one day a week, and the amount is not reduced for part-time staff. Supplements of up to €20 a month each for internet and computer use sit on top. (RSZ/ONSS administrative instructions)
Belgium also introduced a new regime for cross-border workers with effect from 17 August. EU citizens no longer register with the municipality and no longer receive an Annex 15. Non-EU nationals resident in the Netherlands, France, Germany or Luxembourg who commute to a Belgian workplace now receive an Annex 64 from the municipality where they work – an entry-and-exit right tied to their work authorisation and capped at one year, not a residence permit. Existing Annex 15 holders have a 12-month transition. We have not been able to locate the underlying Royal Decree in the Moniteur Belge, so anyone affected should confirm the position with their municipality before relying on it.
Spain
No new national legislation on remote work or immigration appeared in the Boletín Oficial del Estado between 24 and 31 August. The digital nomad visa income requirement for a single applicant remains €2,849 a month, being 200% of the annualised minimum wage. Several sites are currently circulating lower figures; they are out of date.
In Andalucía, the decree that would give the region’s public employees two telework days a week will not be approved in September. Regional minister José Antonio Nieto said on 25 August that the procedure cannot be completed in a single month, which breaks a commitment signed with unions in April to finish the process before 30 September. Roughly 40,000 Junta employees remain on the interim arrangement of one day a week, and the decree is now unlikely to be in force before late March 2027.
One change that did take effect: Real Decreto 416/2026, allowing pensioners to work as autónomos while retaining 25% of their pension, entered into force on 28 August. Contributions paid during that period do not increase the pension, and anyone registered with RETA in the three years before retirement is excluded – a condition the self-employed association UPTA criticised the same day.
United Kingdom
The government’s response to the “Make Work Pay: improving access to flexible working” consultation, which ran from February to April, has still not been published. The reasonableness test for refusing a flexible working request sits in the Employment Rights Act 2025, with commencement pencilled in for 2027.
Meanwhile parents staged co-ordinated strike actions across the UK on 27 August, calling for flexible working by default and six weeks’ paternity leave at 90% of pay, timed as the government’s parental leave review nears its conclusion.
Germany
The reform of the Working Time Act remains a ministerial draft rather than a bill. The Referentenentwurf that emerged in June would allow collective bargaining parties to replace the daily eight-hour ceiling with a weekly maximum of 48 hours averaged over twelve months, and would require daily electronic recording of working time, with transition periods for smaller firms. On 26 August the head of the Chancellery said the changes must come by the end of the year. Nothing has changed for workers yet, and the eight-hour day has not been abolished.
Netherlands
Two dates worth diarising rather than acting on. The equal-terms provisions for agency workers under the Wet meer zekerheid flexwerkers take effect on 31 December 2026, and the main Act commences on 1 January 2028.
Corporate Watch
EY has asked partners to encourage junior consultants into the office, and the reason given is artificial intelligence. Sayeh Ghanbari, managing partner of EY’s UK and Ireland consulting practice, told the Financial Times that people “have set up their lives to be at home a lot” and that this “is just not the route to success in the world of AI”. The reasoning across the sector is that AI is levelling out the technical analysis firms produce, leaving client handling as the differentiator. There has been no formal policy change. (Personnel Today)
Airbus moved in the opposite direction. After mediation, the company tabled what it describes as a final collective-agreement offer on 28 August: pay indexed to real inflation with 7.6% purchasing-power recovery to 2030, a €2,000 net one-off payment in the January 2027 payroll, and – the point that started the dispute – the existing telework agreement maintained in full, with 40% of the working week remote and individual agreements respected. The Spanish workforce was voting on suspending its indefinite strike as this digest was published. This follows Airbus’s suspension in August of its plan to require four office days a week, which we covered at the time.
ZEW Mannheim found German employers expect no change. A representative survey of around 1,400 firms found that in the information economy roughly 25% of all working hours are done from home, with firms expecting that to hold over the next two years. 85% allow at least one home day a week, two-thirds allow at least two, and about half allow three or more.
AI Search and GEO Developments
Three developments in a fortnight are resetting how independent publishers appear inside AI answers.
Cloudflare’s Bot Preference Sync, announced 21 August, writes a site’s dashboard AI-bot settings directly into its robots.txt, prepending generated rules while preserving existing Disallow directives. Preferences split into Search, Agent and Training, with Training a straight allow or disallow. It is on by default for new customers, and existing customers are prompted to review. If your site sits behind Cloudflare and you have deliberately allowed AI training crawlers in order to be cited, this is worth checking before Cloudflare’s separate default change on 15 September. (Cloudflare)
Google shipped an embeddable Preferred Sources button on 20 August, letting publishers add a control to their own pages that registers their site as a reader’s preferred source and returns the reader to where they were. Google says readers find their chosen sources “in Top Stories, AI Overviews, and AI Mode”, and reports over 600,000 unique sources selected. It is personalisation rather than a ranking boost, and Google published no list of the markets where it works, so European publishers should confirm availability. (Google)
ChatGPT advertising went live across 31 European markets on 24 August, covering all 27 EU states plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. Ads serve to Free and Go users, with contextual targeting only at launch. High-commercial-intent questions – visa routes, accountants, relocation services – are exactly where sponsored placements will sit above organic citations. (Euronews)
Research and Data
Eurofound, The shift to hybrid working: Management challenges (27 August). Beyond the autonomy split, the report links flexibility to how fairly people feel treated: 93% of employees in fully flexible hybrid arrangements say they are treated fairly, against 83% in controlled ones. Among supervisors, 38% in controlled hybrid setups report stress always or most of the time, against 21% in location-flexible ones. (Eurofound)
European Central Bank on AI at work (26 August). Using the ECB Consumer Expectations Survey of around 20,000 respondents across 11 euro-area countries, AI use at work rose from 26% in 2024 to 41% in 2025 and 52% in 2026. The median user saves three hours a week, or 7.7% of median working time. Adoption is 61% among university-educated workers against 37% among those with lower education. The analysis does not examine remote or hybrid working. (ECB)
Flex Index moves to LSE and IE Madrid (25 August). The dataset tracking employer flexibility policy passes to Professor Prithwiraj Choudhury at the London School of Economics, working with Assistant Professor Marco Minervini at IE University in Madrid, and becomes a free open repository with public underlying data. First refresh 6 October. (Flex Index)
What to watch next week
- 1 September – Belgium’s telework allowance rises to €164.21 a month.
- 10 September – Spain’s “5G Redes muy rurales” grant call closes at 23:59. Applicants are telecoms operators, not individuals, but the €17.98m targets areas currently without a 4G or 5G signal.
- 15 September – Cloudflare’s change to its default position on AI crawlers takes effect.
- 28 September – The European Commission’s second-phase social partner consultation on the Quality Jobs Act closes.
- 6 October – First Flex Index data refresh under LSE and IE Madrid stewardship.
- Ongoing – The result of the Airbus workforce vote in Spain, and whether the UK government publishes its long-delayed flexible working consultation response.