According to the latest Ifo economic survey, over a third (35.1 percent) of all employees in the service sector worked partially or fully from the office in August. However, when looking at the overall economy, the percentage of employees working remotely stood at 24.9 percent for the same month.
Ifo researcher Jean Victor Alipour noted that the figures show no noteworthy changes in the proportion of home office work, neither overall nor when viewing specific industries, over the past several years.
Analyzing the sectoral data, companies specializing in wholesale recorded a remote work rate of 17.7 percent. In the industrial sector, this figure was 16.4 percent. The rates were substantially lower in retail and the construction industry, where only 6.2 percent and 5.1 percent of employees, respectively, worked from home at least partially in August. Alipour stated that these findings are consistent with international assessments, confirming that teleworking has become well-established across most industrialized nations.
This trend echoes previous research, which analyzed online job advertisements. That evaluation revealed a similar picture, showing that every fifth job listing in Germany included the option for employees to work from home. This proportion was particularly high in the finance and insurance services sector, where the option appeared in 42 percent of the postings. That comprehensive job ad analysis reviewed over 93 million listings between January 2014 and June 2025.
