New UK research finds rising home working increases employment of disabled and older workers
Rising rates of working from home have measurably increased employment among disabled workers and workers aged over 50 in the UK, according to a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in September 2026 and discussed in a CEPR column on 19 October.
Here, There, and Everywhere: Remote Work’s Impact on Employment in the UK, by Ian Burn, Melissa D. Gentry and Joanna Lahey, NBER Working Paper 35791, uses the pandemic’s increase in home working as a quasi-experiment. The authors compare occupations with high growth in working from home against those with lower growth, measuring growth rates among non-disabled or younger workers, then instrument using pre-pandemic remote work scores.
From the abstract: “We find significant evidence that rising WFH increases employment of disabled and older workers in the UK. We additionally find decreases in commute time and wages for both groups, but no effect on hours worked.”
Why this matters
Remote work has been claimed as a route into employment for disabled people and for older workers for the whole of the last decade, mostly on the strength of it being obviously plausible. This is causal evidence for the UK that it is true, using a method designed to separate the effect of remote work from everything else that happened after 2020.
The wage finding is the part not to skip. Employment went up and wages went down for both groups. A paper that found only the first result would be easier to quote and less useful. What it describes is a trade: access to work in exchange for somewhat lower pay, with hours unchanged. For someone who has been shut out of the labour market altogether, that may be an entirely rational trade to accept. It is still a trade, and the people making it deserve to know it is one.
Remote Work Europe has argued consistently that accessibility is central to what remote work is for rather than a secondary benefit of it. This is the kind of evidence that argument has been short of.
A note on figures
The CEPR column accompanying the paper reports specific magnitudes for the employment, commute and wage effects. We have not reproduced them here because the column itself was not readable at source when we checked, and the figures do not appear in the NBER abstract. The direction of each finding is from the authors’ own abstract. Anyone citing the magnitudes should take them from the paper.
What to watch
Whether the same method is applied to other European labour markets. The UK has the Quarterly Labour Force Survey, which made this possible; comparable work elsewhere depends on comparable data.