7.9% of employed Brazilians worked mainly from home in 2025, the federal statistics agency IBGE said on Wednesday. That is 6.6 million people aged 14 and over, roughly the population of the city of Rio de Janeiro. In practical terms, in a team of 100 people about eight now work from home, two more than before 2020.

The figure comes from the PNAD Contínua, the household survey IBGE uses to track employment. It was stable against 2024 and remains above the 5.8% of 2019, the last year before the pandemic. The series peaked in 2022 at 8.4%.

While home work has leveled off, office work has grown. The share of workers based at their employer's premises rose from 57.9% in 2022 to 60.2% in 2025, six in every ten workers. Another 13.8% work in places set by the employer or the client, 8.4% on farms, 5% in vehicles and 2.1% on streets or public areas.

How IBGE makes the count

Explainer: the PNAD Contínua is the survey IBGE runs every month in thousands of households to measure employment and income. The module released this week records where each person works most often, according to IBGE researcher William Araujo Kratochwill. A hybrid employee with three home days and two office days therefore counts as a home worker, and the reverse also holds.

The series shows a lasting shift. In 2012, the first year of measurement, only 3.6% of workers were based at home, less than half the current share. IBGE suspended this module in 2020 and 2021 because of pandemic restrictions, so the true peak of remote work cannot be measured.

Porto Alegre leads as offices refill

The map of remote work is uneven. Ceará (10.7%), the Federal District (10.6%) and Rio de Janeiro state (10.1%) all passed the 10% mark in 2025, while Acre (3.6%), Rondônia (4.1%) and Mato Grosso (4.5%) stayed below 5%. Among state capitals, Porto Alegre leads with 18.7%, nearly one worker in five, and Porto Velho has the lowest rate at 4.2%; the city of São Paulo stands at 9.3% and the state at 8.1%, according to Folha de S.Paulo.

The return to offices has reasons and costs. A Robert Half survey cited by g1 shows construction and engineering workers spend an average of 4.8 days a week on site, against 3.3 in services. In a WeWork survey, 65% of on-site workers call the commute the main drawback, an expense of time and transport that Beatriz Kawakami, a business manager at WeWork Brazil, calls a "silent cost".