Confusion persists over right to remote work
More than half of Irish workers don’t know they have a legal right to request remote working. As we’re starting to see a push, or rather, a pull, back to the office, the Government might need to get creative in a bid to promote the legislation.
In 2025, the number of people working from home dropped, with a further 15,900 people called back to the office. Currently, 956,700 people work from home occasionally. This is the lowest that number has been since the Covid-19 pandemic.
This tallies with what we’re hearing in terms of return to the office mandates and the increase in traffic during rush hour. The figures support the evidence on our roads – the number of people who never work from home jumped 74,200 to 1,865,600.
As it stands, 57% of employees are fully office based, 33% are hybrid workers, and just 9% are fully remote.
Still, the Government Statutory Review Report on the Work Life Balance says we rank second in Europe for frequency of working from home, and they have no plans to change the current Right to Request Remote Work legislation.
That legislation says employees have a legal right to request remote working. But there are a few issues with the legislation. Let’s start with one that’s difficult to fix. Simply put, some sectors and types of businesses are more remote-friendly than others: 44% of business say remote work isn’t possible in their business, and only 54% of small businesses say they can offer it. Sectors like hospitality, retail, transport and construction require staff to work on a site, in person. There’s no way around that.
Secondly, and surely this is an easy fix, no-one knows about the legislation. Ok, not exactly no-one, but awareness is chronically low. Over half of workers don’t know it exists. This goes up to 62% in rural areas.
Just one in 10 workers have submitted a formal request to work from home since the legislation was launched in March 2024, and just 5% of employers say they have received a request in that time.
That’s despite the fact that the approval rate is a massive 94%, with less than 7% of requests refused completely. It’s worth mentioning that the employer does not need to approve a request, they just need to consider it.
So we have high approval rates, but low request rates.
With that in mind, the Government says it is planning a national awareness campaign for the legislation – we don’t know yet what that will look like.
It says it’s also going to update the Workplace Relations Commission’s code of practice to improve transparency around decisions, the appeals process, and the mediation support. It’s also planning to make the applications templates easier to use for employees.
While most employees who used the process said it was relatively straightforward, there is a definite gap between the experience of the employee and the employer: a significant minority of workers have reported confusing paperwork, unclear policies and concerns about managerial gatekeeping. Crucially, only 33% of employees said they felt confident they understood the process.
There’s work to do here, not only to raise awareness of the legislation in general, but to streamline the process itself and to demand transparency.
The high approval rate is promising, but against such a low uptake, it’s far from transformative. With workers steadily being called back to the office, the impetus is on the Government to push the legislation harder and, if they’re not going to crack down on these return to work mandates, they need to ramp up their efforts to promote the right to request remote work.
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