In 2024, the United States total fertility rate dropped to a record low of 1.6 births per woman. As policymakers and economists search for ways to reverse the slide, many have pointed to remote work as an obvious fix. Without daily commutes and rigid office hours, the thinking goes, parents have more time, flexibility, and freedom to move to affordable neighborhoods or live near helpful relatives.
A new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper finds that the reality is the exact opposite. Rather than sparking a baby boom, the post-2020 shift to remote work reduced annual birth rates among college-educated married women while increasing their full-time employment and earnings.
Untangling job choice from family planning
Earlier multi-country surveys found that couples who work from home at least one day a week have more children over their lifetimes than couples who work entirely on-site. However, Andrew C. Johnston, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin, noted that simple comparisons between remote and in-person workers suffer from a major blind spot. People choose their jobs, and workers who already plan to have children may actively seek out flexible, work-from-home positions.
From an economic perspective, remote work pulls prospective parents in two opposing directions. While eliminating a commute lowers the time cost of raising a child, working from home also makes it much easier for mothers to stay in the labor force full time. When full-time careers become more accessible and lucrative, taking time away from work to have a baby carries a higher financial tradeoff.
Working and raising children under the same roof can also create friction. Instead of work adapting to family life, home life can easily become reorganized around the demands and physical space of a remote office.
To measure how remote work actually affects birth rates without the distortion of workers switching jobs to start families, Johnston looked at the sudden expansion of remote work in 2020. He tracked graduates based on their college majors, which most people had chosen years before the pandemic hit. Using pre-pandemic occupational data, he calculated the share of jobs associated with each of 173 college majors that could be performed entirely from home.
This remote-work index varied widely by field of study. Nursing, the second-most popular major among college-educated women, scored near the bottom at 21 percent remote-capable, while biology scored 44 percent, psychology 59 percent, accounting 70 percent, and computer science 79 percent. Johnston then analyzed American Community Survey data from 2015 through 2024, covering roughly 1.9 million observations of college-educated women aged 18 to 44 and an equal number of college-educated men aged 18 to 50.
Fewer births and more full-time careers
When offices closed in 2020, graduates in remote-capable majors rapidly shifted to working from home, and much of that gap persisted through 2024. For women, each one-standard-deviation step up on the remote-work scale, which is a 15-percentage-point increase roughly equal to the gap between a biology major and a psychology major, raised the likelihood of working primarily from home by 3.9 percentage points after 2020. That represented a 67 percent jump over the pre-pandemic average.
Instead of increasing family size, greater access to remote work lowered birth rates. Between 2021 and 2024, each 15-point step up in a major’s remote-work score reduced annual births among college-educated women by 1.9 percent. The decline was driven entirely by married women, whose annual birth rates fell by about 2 percent, while birth rates for unmarried women and fertility rates for men showed no statistically significant change.
At the same time, married women in remote-friendly fields stepped up their career commitments. For each 15-point increase in a major’s remote-work score, full-time employment among married women rose by 1.3 percent, and wage income among those with earnings climbed by 2.6 percent. Married women also increased their share of their couples’ combined income and became more likely to out-earn their husbands.
Unmarried women and men, by contrast, saw no change in their full-time employment rates. If the post-2020 economy had simply created a hiring boom for graduates with tech or finance degrees, employment would have risen across all demographic groups. The fact that only married women worked more full-time hours indicates that remote work removed a barrier that had previously kept many wives and mothers out of full-time jobs.
To see whether the rise in full-time work caused the drop in births, or if having fewer babies simply freed women up to work more, Johnston ran several accounting checks. Based on pre-pandemic employment patterns, having fewer young children at home could explain only 12 percent of the jump in married women’s full-time work. Conversely, the shift into full-time employment accounted for roughly half of the decline in births.
Why the expected family benefits fell short
Johnston also tested the most common theories for why remote work is supposed to help families grow. One popular argument is that remote workers can move to cheaper housing markets or relocate closer to grandparents who can help with childcare. Yet the census data showed that graduates in remote-capable majors were no more likely to move to a new house or a new state after 2020, and their homeownership rates edged slightly downward.
Another theory suggests that when fathers work from home, they can share more of the parenting and household load, making it easier for mothers to have another child. In the census data, married men in remote-friendly majors saw an even larger jump in working from home than women did, yet a husband’s access to remote work had no effect on a couple’s likelihood of having a baby.
To find out why, Johnston examined daily diaries from the American Time Use Survey between 2011 and 2025. After 2020, married men in remote-capable occupations spent about 41 more minutes per day at home, while married women spent 24 more minutes at home. Almost all of that extra time at home went straight into paid work, and while remote-working husbands spent a couple of extra minutes cooking and more time hanging out with their wives, they did not significantly increase the time they spent on housework or childcare.
Even among married women with no children at home, whose full-time employment rates barely budged, first births still fell noticeably. Survey data from the General Social Survey confirmed that women in remote-friendly majors had not changed their minds about the ideal number of children to have. Something else about working from home was discouraging couples from expanding their families.
Housing data pointed to a physical constraint: competition for space. When Johnston broke down the birth results by home size, he found that the fertility drop occurred entirely among married women living in homes with three or fewer bedrooms, where annual birth rates fell by more than 3 percent. Among married women living in houses with four or more bedrooms, the birth rate did not fall at all, suggesting that when a spare bedroom is claimed as a home office, couples in smaller homes may hesitate to add a nursery.
Delayed parenthood or smaller families?
A dip in annual birth rates can sometimes reflect a temporary delay rather than a permanent reduction in the number of children a woman has over her lifetime. However, breaking the data down by birth order and age revealed signs of a lasting decline. Second and later births accounted for 62 percent of the drop among married women, pointing toward couples stopping at one or two children rather than just pushing back their timelines.
The age breakdown offered even stronger evidence. Births among married women aged 35 to 39 fell by 3.1 percent overall, and the drop deepened from 1.9 percent in 2021 and 2022 to 4.1 percent in 2023 and 2024. Because women in their late thirties have limited time to catch up on postponed births, Johnston noted that a portion of the fertility decline will likely be permanent.
Extrapolating these numbers to the broader population suggests that the rise of remote work has had a noticeable impact on national demographics. If remote work returned to pre-pandemic levels, Johnston calculated that the national total fertility rate would rise by about 0.05 births per woman if only college graduates responded, or by 0.09 births per woman if non-graduates responded in the same way. To guard against potential pandemic-related distortions in the data, Johnston also ran tests excluding healthcare and education majors, who faced unique on-site pressures after 2020. The results were mixed. Excluding health majors alone left the estimated effects on working from home, births and employment small and not statistically significant. When both groups were excluded, births among all college-educated women still fell and married women’s full-time employment still rose. However, the estimated decline in births to married women was about half the size of the main estimate and not statistically significant, though it remained negative in every specification.
Still, the analysis comes with two important caveats. Because the study tracks outcomes only through 2024, researchers will need several more years of data to measure the exact toll on completed lifetime fertility for younger women. And while the birth decline continued to grow through 2023 after pandemic restrictions had ended, the initial shift to remote work was triggered by a global health crisis, meaning remote work adopted during ordinary economic times could potentially play out differently.
