Considering jumping back into the job market? If you work remotely, you might want to think again. As of this year, employees at corporate giants like Amazon and JPMorgan are required to be at the office five days a week, Business Insider writes. Meanwhile, the number of hybrid job postings on Indeed and LinkedIn are continuing their downward slide from their peak in 2022. The upshot? It’s getting more and more difficult to land — and keep — a position that lets you work from the comfort of your couch.

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Flexibility is one way companies seek to limit turnover. “Companies frequently make exceptions to RTO mandates for employees to avoid losing them, so policy changes might affect new hires more than incumbent employees,” Julia Pollak, the chief economist at ZipRecruiter, told BI. The move helps with retention, as employees are happier to stay in comfortable work arrangements rather than try to find another remote role elsewhere.

But WFH is still very much a thing. At the end of 2024, 23% of workers in the US reported that they worked remotely at least part of the time — a 4% increase from two years earlier — and 10% reported that their job was completely remote, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.

So what’s causing the shift? Economists — including Nicholas Bloom, co-founder of the remote work research website WFH Research — believe the drop in remote job postings could mean that employers are keeping work locations flexible for their existing employees, but prioritizing in-person new hires. This would allow more employees to be physically present in the office without engendering pushback from those who’ve already gotten used to remote arrangements.

But the job market is pretty stagnant right now. Over the last two years, hiring, layoffs, andresignations have slowed, meaning that people aren’t actually changing jobs very often. Lisa Simon, the chief economist at Revelio Labs, noted to BI that there’s been a general slowdown in white-collar hiring in particular — opening up the possibility that the slowdown in WFH positions might just be a side-effect of lower corporate hiring, period.

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