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By Joshua Rhett Miller
Senior Reporter
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As countries worldwide seek ways to offset declining birth rates, a widespread remote-work model could provide a sizable baby boom, researchers and analysts said.
Last month, a group of seven researchers established a "positive relationship" between remote work and procreation after analyzing data from 38 countries, including the United States, where the fertility rate dropped to an all-time low last year of fewer than 1.6 children per woman.
"Respondents who WFH at least 1 day per week had more biological children from 2021 to early 2025, and plan to have more children in the future compared to observationally similar persons who do not WFH," researchers wrote. "Respondents who spouse or domestic partner works from home also report higher recent and planned fertility."
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But when both partners worked remotely at least one day per week, total lifetime fertility increased by 0.2 children among the global sample and 0.18 children in the United States, researchers found.
Nicholas Bloom, a professor of economics at Stanford University and co-author of the study, "Work from Home and Fertility," said the research shows working from home “encourages couples to have children” and could make an immediate impact on lagging fertility rates.
“This is hardly surprising, as being able to work from home 1 or 2 days a week makes childcare easier,” Bloom told Newsweek. “You can more easily drop and pick up kids from school, take them to occasional appointments and supervises nannies. By saving about 1.5 hours on commuting, people that work from home have a lot more time, making it easier to have kids.”
Couples who both worked hybrid schedules averaged about a third more children than their counterparts, indicating a “massive” effect at scale, Bloom said.
“Allowing the roughly 50 percent of Americans that can work from home at least one day a week to do so could increase fertility in the U.S. by perhaps 100,000 babies a year,” Bloom continued.
Those additional mouths to feed would generate about $100 billion a year in extra spending, Bloom said.
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“It is free for the government, it is easy to execute and it is highly effective,” he said. “In contrast, supporting working from home could generate a similar increase, and also encourage the additional births into working families.”
Both mothers and fathers who work from home also spend more time with their youngsters, likely improving the quality of parenting overall, Bloom said.
“We have seen a pandemic-era bump in fertility compared to the pre-pandemic downward trend,” he told Newsweek. “One driver of this is likely the large increase in working from home.”
The fertility rate in the United States has been in steady decline for nearly two decades, falling to 1.599 in 2024 — well below the replacement rate of 2.1, the CDC announced in July. President Trump, meanwhile, issued an executive order in February to expand access to in vitro fertilization and has floated the possibility of $1,000-per-child "baby bonuses" to encourage additional births as more women wait longer to have children or decide against being mothers altogether.
"Our results suggest that expanded WFH opportunities make it easier for people to balance work and family life, thereby encouraging an increased in realized and desired fertility," researchers wrote in the 48-page paper. "This conclusion is consistent with other evidence that persons living with children place an especially high value on the opportunity to work from home part of the week."
Bloom said some Scandinavian countries have had success encouraging fertility through public policies like generous maternity and paternity leave, increased childcare options and other fertility support packages.
"So, policy can make a huge difference to birth rates," he told Newsweek.
Bloom predicted that the rise of employees who can regularly work from home in the United States will lead to an uptick in the lagging rate.
"The big risk is if companies and the government pushes employees into a full, five-day return to the office," he said. "This could reduce fertility rates by perhaps 100,000 a year compared to a regime of strong support for hybrid and remote work."
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Happy With Hybrid
While some employers have enacted strict return-to-work mandates in recent years, the majority of U.S. workers, including those with children, enjoy greater flexibility in 2025 compared to prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fifty-one percent of U.S. workers had hybrid roles as of May 2025, up from just 18 percent five years earlier, according to Gallup data. Twenty-eight percent reported working fully remote — down from 70 percent in 2020, at the height of the pandemic — while 21 percent work on-site daily. In January 2019, a year before the global public health emergency, 60 percent said they went to an office or worksite daily.
Looking ahead, 60 percent of U.S. workers with remote-capable jobs want to keep that flexibility, compared to 33 percent who prefer fully remote roles and 6 percent who favor on-site occupations, Gallup data shows.
For many professionals, remote work makes it easier to juggle a career and family whether they're becoming a parent for the first time or expanding their household, according to Chelsea Follett, a policy analyst at Cato Institute, a Washington-based think tank.
"This research adds to a growing body of evidence that remote and flexible work makes income earning and child-rearing more compatible by reducing the tradeoffs that parents face," Follett told Newsweek. "If remote work becomes more widespread, the change has the potential to reconcile paid careers and parenthood for a larger portion of the population, making it easier for those who desire additional children to expand their families."
While owners know what's best for their workforce, policymakers worried about fertility rates should prioritize removal of outdated government barriers to remote and flexible work, Follett said.
Federal and local labor regulations often make hybrid or remote work "difficult or impossible," as Follett noted in a 2023 paper, "Freeing American Families," that proposed reforms to labor laws, as well as tax, trade and child safety policies to cut the cost of raising children.
"Local labor regulations dictate everything from the timing and duration of lunch breaks to rigid work schedules set weeks in advance, reducing the compatibility of work and family life," Follett told Newsweek. "Some regulations make home-based businesses illegal."
Follett said the cottage food industry— in which people run restaurants or other food service businesses from their homes — serves as an example of home-based business regulation impacting remote work opportunities for entrepreneurs both with and without children.
"Eliminating licensing restrictions that hinder telework in fields such as medicine also frees more employers to provide remote options," she added. "Reforms introduced during the pandemic that removed obstacles to telemedicine not only made care more convenient for patients but also enabled many medical professionals to work remotely."
A Personal Choice
But the outlook for most families in the United States, particularly whether to add to their broods, will largely remain a personal choice and not heavily impacted by widespread workplace shifts, another expert told Newsweek.
"A big part of what determines whether or not a couple has a second kid or a third kid is how family-focused they are," said Timothy Carney, a senior fellow at American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based public policy think tank. "Familist is a word that some people use. How much of your life is built around your family versus your career or your recreation? That's one of the most relevant questions for whether or not people are going to have kids. But that's not a fixed thing for every individual."
That's a primary reason Carney believes subsidizing universal childcare would not dramatically increase birth rates.
"Because the cultures that have done that — like a lot of the Nordic countries — some of them have just become more 'workist,'" he said. "They've been pushing people saying, 'Don't worry, we'll take care of your kids for you. Go off and worry about your career.' People don't have more kids if their life is built around their career so much more than it is around their family."
Working from home clearly provides parents a greater opportunity to be more family-centric, Carney said.
"If they're both working from home, they have more opportunities to actually make babies," he noted. "I'm sure that helps, but I think the bigger thing is if their life is based in their house around their family, then their hearts and minds are more centered on their family."
To drive up birth rates, Carney suggested that the federal government — the largest employer in the United States — should allow people to work from home as much as possible. The current administration has taken the opposite approach, demanding federal agencies "take all necessary steps to terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person at their respective duty stations on a full-time basis."
"So not every position is going to do this, right?" Carney said, referring to jobs like park rangers or government roles with access to classified documents. "But any jobs that can be worked from home, I think should be."
Private companies would then be forced to compete with flexible government gigs, he predicted.
"The big asterisk on this is that our bureaucracy is not great necessarily at actually holding bureaucrats accountable," he said. "There are famous stories, especially during COVID, of people just not working."
Those outliers, whether in full-time private sector jobs or government positions, should serve as "cautionary tales" against near-universal WFH policies, but also point to a lack of accountability, Carney said.
"The baby bust has 100 causes, but the most important thing is: Do you have a culture where family is front and center in the minds of the people?" Carney concluded. "And I think the Western wealthy world is becoming less family focused as it becomes more individualistic. And part of that individualism is careerism. Where people's hearts are is going to determine what they're thinking about and what they're planning and what they're setting their life up for."
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