Remote work becoming more popular in Portugal
In the second quarter of 2024, a fifth of those employed in Portugal worked remotely. Hybrid models are the most popular and have increased by 19.2% since last year.
Remote work and hybrid work models are becoming more popular in Portugal. In the second quarter of 2024, more than one million people worked from home and, of these, around 403 thousand combined on-premise work with remote work.
This is the highest number since 2022 and an increase of 19.2% compared to the same quarter of the previous year.
Data released by the National Statistics Institute (INE) shows a general increase in these types of work, especially hybrid regimes, and confirms a trend that has already been seen in previous research.
The number of people combining remote and on-premise work not only increased, but also reached the highest level since the second quarter of 2022 (the period for which there is comparable data available).
This work modality has also gained relative weight as part of the total number of remote workers (1.072 million): from 27.6%, in 2022, it increased to 37.6% in the most recent period.
The hybrid regime is more common in women (51%), people aged 35 or over (71%), with higher education (77%) and working in the service sector (87%). According to INE, these workers worked, on average, three days at home and two at the office.
New normal
Until the pandemic, remote work was not common in Portugal. But since then, it has increased steadily.
The INE survey also allows us to conclude that 66% of people working remotely live in the Greater Lisbon region and the North, and that more than half are women and 47% are 45 years of age and over.
The data also reveals that these working models are more common in the service sector (accounting for almost 88% of people working remotely) and among workers with higher education, especially specialists in intellectual and scientific activities.