Fertility rates have fallen sharply around the world in recent decades, dropping below the replacement rate in many countries. As a result, populations are ageing in almost all countries, already shrinking in many, and are projected to decline globally over time. These demographic developments place greater demands on healthcare systems and old-age support programmes, strain government finances, and present risks to innovation and economic growth (Jones 2022, Kotschy and Bloom 2023, Geruso and Spears 2026).

Partly motivated by fertility declines, governments have implemented policies to support reproductive health, promote marriage, subsidise births, provide early childhood care, and mandate or subsidise parental leave and job protection. Many of these interventions appear to have little or no effect on fertility, while others achieve modest fertility gains at high cost to taxpayers (Olivetti and Petrongolo 2017, Gauthier and Gietel-Basten 2025, Kearney and Levine 2025).

An important possibility, then, is that policymakers may be overlooking another margin that matters for fertility: the organisation of work itself. A growing literature argues that the compatibility of family and career has become a key determinant of fertility in high-income countries (Doepke et al. 2023). In that context, flexibility in when, where, and how to work may matter in its own right. Jobs that allow work from home typically offer more flexibility in these respects, making it easier for parents to combine child rearing with employment, and perhaps raising fertility (Goldin 2014, 2021, Guner et al. 2025, Harrington and Kahn 2025). In our new paper (Davis et al. 2026), we investigate this issue directly using original survey data, along with complementary evidence on occupation-level work-from-home opportunities.

Evidence from 38 countries

Our first analysis relies on new micro data from two surveys of our own design: the Global Survey of Working Arrangements, which covers 38 countries, and the US Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes. Both surveys include core questions on demographics, labour market outcomes, marital status, and working arrangements. The survey waves we exploit also contain questions about realised and planned fertility. We focus on respondents who are 20 to 45 years of age as of the survey date and consider three fertility measures: realised fertility from 2023 to early 2025, including children in gestation; plans for future fertility as of the survey date; and lifetime fertility defined as children ever born to, or fathered by, the respondent plus plans for future fertility.

Both datasets reveal clear evidence that realised fertility, plans for future fertility, and lifetime fertility are greater for respondents who work from home at least one day a week (Figure 1). These patterns hold in the raw data and when controlling for age, education, marital status, presence of children before 2023, own and partner’s employment status, and country or state fixed effects.

Figure 1 Lifetime fertility (realised + planned) by household-level work from home status

a) 38 countries (Global Survey of Working Arrangements)

b) US (US Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes)

Notes: The figure reports mean lifetime fertility (realised + planned) by work-from-home (WFH) status. The sample is restricted to respondents aged 20 to 45 who live with a partner. ‘No one WFH’ means neither the respondent nor the partner works from home; ‘Only self WFH’ means only the respondent works from home at least one day per week; and ‘Both WFH’ means both partners work from home at least one day per week. Global Survey of Working Arrangements: No one WFH N = 2,929 (1,227 male, 1,702 female), Only self WFH N = 1,345 (577 male, 768 female), and Both WFH N = 1,336 (757 male, 579 female). US Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes: No one WFH N = 19,580 (7, 574 male, 12,006 female), Only self WFH N = 17,209 (9,393 male, 7,816 female), and Both WFH N = 12, 246 (8,163 male, 4,083 female).

The patterns hold for male and female respondents separately. For couples, we find weaker evidence that fertility is greater when the partner works from home. When both partners work from home at least one day a week, lifetime fertility is greater by an estimated 14% (0.32 children per woman) than when neither does so in our 38 country dataset. It is 18% greater (0.45 children per woman) in the data for the US. Ours is the first study to develop clear evidence that work-from-home arrangements are associated with higher fertility across many countries.

What mechanisms might explain the positive relationship between fertility and work-from-home status in the household?

We see three basic possibilities why fertility may be linked to work-from-home status. First, a simple causal story: by making it easier to combine child rearing with paid employment, work-from-home jobs lead women and their partners to choose higher fertility. Second, a pure selection story: families with children choose jobs that offer options to work from home, but fertility is insensitive to work-from-home status. Third, selection as a causal force: the availability of work-from-home jobs raises fertility by expanding current and future opportunities to select into parent-friendly jobs. All three stories align with the idea that work-from-home jobs make it easier for parents to combine child rearing and employment.

To develop evidence that more plausibly reflects causal effects, we investigate how individual-level fertility responds to work-from-home opportunities in the household. For this complementary analysis, we draw on the US Current Population Survey and consider respondents who are 30 to 45 years old.

We find clear evidence that one-year fertility rates rise with occupation-level work-from-home opportunities. This pattern holds after the pandemic (2023–2025) and before the pandemic (2017–2019). For a sense of magnitudes, consider female respondents with partners in the period from 2023 to 2025. Raising the own-occupation share of work from home by one standard deviation (in the cross section of persons) raises the one-year fertility rate by 7.3% of sample mean fertility. The total effect of raising shares of work from home of the woman and her partner by unit standard deviations is to raise the one-year fertility rate by an estimated 14% of mean fertility.

The actual and potential contributions of work from home to national fertility

Work-from-home contributions to fertility outcomes vary widely across countries. These differences arise mainly because work-from-home rates differ greatly across countries. That observation raises a natural question: if work from home were as common in other high-income countries as it is in Canada, the UK, and the US, what would happen to fertility?

The results show that increasing country-level work-from-home shares to the benchmark value would raise fertility by modest but non-trivial amounts. The fertility gains are greatest in countries that currently have low work-from-home shares. For example, the fertility gain for Japan equals 0.057 children per woman (4.6% of its actual total fertility rate), which implies 31,800 extra births per year. The fertility gain for South Korea is 0.033 children per woman (4.4%), which translates to about 10,500 extra births per year. The fertility gains are also non-trivial in France and Italy, 0.042 and 0.042, respectively, which translate to an extra 17,000 births per year in France and an extra 12,800 per year in Italy.

Implications

Our findings support the idea that broader access to work from home raises fertility, perhaps by easing the time and coordination costs involved in combining paid work with family life.

Hybrid work is not a silver bullet. Fertility depends on many other forces, including the opportunity costs of motherhood, the time and money costs of childcare and education, social norms, housing, and economic uncertainty (Bloom et al. 2024, Kearney and Levine 2025). In addition, the fertility consequences of work from home are likely to be highly uneven because work from home is strongly concentrated among college-educated persons, high earners, and professional and technical occupations (Aksoy et al. 2022, 2025).

Still, for societies faced with undesirably low birth rates, work from home can yield societal benefits that go beyond any direct benefits to employees and employers. In these circumstances, governments may consider policies that foster flexible working arrangements and revisit policies that discourage such arrangements. As countries search for ways to support family formation, they may need to think more seriously about how working arrangements shape the trade-off between family and jobs. One of the most important family-policy margins in the coming decade may not look like traditional family policy at all.

References

Aksoy, C G, J M Barrero, N Bloom, S J Davis, M Dolls, and P Zarate (2022), “Working from home around the world”, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity Fall: 281–330.

Aksoy, C G, J M Barrero, N Bloom, S J Davis, M Dolls, and P Zarate (2025), “The global persistence of work from home”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122(27).

Bloom, D E, M Kuhn, and K Prettner (2024), “Fertility in high-income countries: Trends, patterns, determinants, and consequences”, Annual Review of Economics 16: 159–84.

Davis, S J, C G Aksoy, J M Barrero, N Bloom, K Cranney, M Dolls, and P Zarate (2026), “Work from home and fertility”, CEPR Discussion Paper 21250.

Doepke, M, A Hannusch, F Kindermann, and M Tertilt (2023), “The economics of fertility: A new era”, in S Lundberg and A Voena (eds.), Handbook of the Economics of the Family.

Gauthier, A H, and S Gietel-Basten (2025), “Family policies in low fertility countries: Evidence and reflection”, Population and Development Review 51(1): 125–61.

Geruso, M, and D Spears (2026), “The likelihood of persistently low global fertility”, Journal of Economic Perspectives 40(1): 3–26.

Goldin, C (2014), “A grand gender convergence: Its last chapter”, American Economic Review 104(4): 1091–119.

Goldin, C (2021), Career and family: Women’s century-long journey toward equity, Princeton University Press.

Guner, N, E Kaya, A Ruggieri, and V Sanchez-Marcos (2025), “Firms, flexibility and fertility”, working paper.

Harrington, E, and M E Kahn (2025), “Has the rise of remote work reduced the motherhood penalty in the labor market?”, NBER Working Paper 34147.

Jones, C I (2022), “The end of economic growth? Unintended consequences of a declining population”, American Economic Review 112(11): 3489–527.

Kearney, M S, and P B Levine (2025), “Why is fertility so low in high income countries?”, NBER Working Paper 33989.

Kotschy, R, and D E Bloom (2023), “Population ageing and economic growth: From demographic dividend to demographic drag?”, NBER Working Paper 31585.

Olivetti, C, and B Petrongolo (2017), “The economic consequences of family policies: Lessons from a century of legislation in high-income countries”, Journal of Economic Perspectives 31(1): 205–30.