More U.S. parents work from home, but childcare strain persists

Remote work has changed the daily math of raising children. For many parents, it has meant fewer commutes, more flexibility for school events and easier coverage when a child is sick. But the gains are not evenly shared, and the basic childcare burden has not disappeared.

A Pew Research Center survey of 2,242 U.S. working parents, conducted March 2-15, 2026, found that 35% said their job can mostly be done from home. That includes 17% who work from home all or most of the time, 10% some of the time and 9% rarely or never. Those shares were roughly unchanged from 2024, but still well below 2020 and 2022, when the pandemic pushed far more workers into telework.

The shift has helped parents in concrete ways. Pew found that parents who work from home all or most of the time are more likely to say they have a lot of flexibility to attend their children’s activities during regular work hours. Yet the same survey underscored a limit that has not gone away: working from home does not erase the broader strain of balancing work and family responsibilities.

The federal data show why. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said 33% of employed people spent time working at home on days worked in 2024, down from 35% in 2023. Women were more likely than men to do so, at 36% versus 29%. Access also tracks closely with education: among workers age 25 and over, 50% of those with a bachelor’s degree or higher worked at home on days worked, compared with 18% of workers with a high school diploma and no college. The benefits of flexibility are therefore concentrated among workers with more bargaining power and more white-collar jobs.

Childcare remains the other hard constraint. The Federal Reserve’s 2024 household well-being report found that among adults with children under age 13, just under one-fourth used paid childcare, while 46% used unpaid childcare from someone other than a parent. The report also found that women were significantly more likely than men to be the primary caregiver and to provide unpaid care for sick or aging adults, a pattern that helps explain lower rates of work for pay.

Cost pressures make the problem worse. KPMG said daycare and preschool costs rose at nearly twice the pace of overall inflation between 1991 and 2024, and that childcare often consumes 10% to 20% of family household income, above a commonly cited affordability threshold of 7%.

A February 2026 Bureau of Labor Statistics paper on couples’ remote work found that fathers’ remote or hybrid schedules were strongly positively associated with mothers’ employment status, especially in households with young children. It also found that remote workers worked fewer hours for pay than onsite workers, while hybrid workers worked more. The evidence points to a clear conclusion: remote and hybrid work can function like a family policy, but only for the workers who can access it.