Remote work in IT 2026: 60 percent at home, but nobody talks about it

#Remote work in IT 2026: 60 percent at home, but nobody talks about it

Sixty percent. The Just Join IT survey for 2024, answered by 1660 specialists, found 60.12 percent of Polish IT specialists working fully remote, 32.47 percent hybrid and only 7.41 percent in the office. The 2025 survey, with more than 4400 respondents, gave almost the same result. Despite this, the public narrative in 2026 is “everyone is going back to the office”. The data says otherwise. This article argues that polemic with concrete numbers and shows where those numbers reach their limits.

The piece connects to the article on the Polish senior engineer in the outsourcing market, which has Eurostat data on the number of ICT specialists and hard-to-fill vacancies, and to the polemic on Polish WordPress developer salaries, where the same dataset is used in a different context.

#TL;DR

• Just Join IT surveys: fully remote 61.94 percent (2023), 60.12 percent (2024), almost 60 percent (2025). In the office every day: 7 to 8 percent.
• Job offers are less clear-cut: Just Join IT counts 73 997 remote offers out of 110 996 in 2025, while No Fluff Jobs sees fully remote offers falling from 55 to just under 43 percent in two years.
• Across the whole Polish economy, 6.1 percent of employed people usually work from home (Eurostat, 2025). IT is the exception, not the rule.
• The remote work provisions of the Polish Labour Code, in force since 7 April 2023, apply to employees. A senior on B2B sets the work mode in the contract.
• For outsourcing to Poland: the contractor standard is remote work, regardless of the offer description.

#Remote work statistics in Polish IT for 2024 and 2025

Just Join IT publishes an annual salary report that combines two datasets: the offers posted on the site and a survey of specialists. The report Zarobki i oczekiwania branży IT 2024/2025 (IT salaries and expectations 2024/2025) gives these figures for 2024:

In this one report, practice runs ahead of the listings by 13.37 percentage points for fully remote work. It is tempting to treat that as proof that the market works remotely whatever the offer says. The next report complicates the picture.

The 2025 report gives offer counts instead of shares: 73 997 remote offers (13 percent more than a year earlier), 32 736 hybrid (up 29 percent from 25 316) and 3 700 on-site, which is 5.65 percent of the total, against 6.98 percent in 2024. With 110 996 offers in 2025, remote offers make up about two thirds, more than in the survey. The figure of 25 316 hybrid offers in 2024, out of 99 363 offers in total, does not match the 46.27 percent share from the previous report. So the site changed how it counts work mode in offers, and the shares from the two reports cannot be compared year on year. The honest version of the thesis is this: worker surveys stay at around 60 percent, while offer data depends on who counts it and how.

The second job board counts differently. No Fluff Jobs, IT job market report 2025/2026, reports that fully remote offers fell from 55 percent of the market two years ago to just under 43 percent, while hybrid is growing and appears in 35 percent of offers. If a “return to office” shows up anywhere, it is here: in the offers of one of the two big job boards. It does not show up in how specialists say they actually work.

#How the remote share in IT changed from 2023 to 2025

Three consecutive Just Join IT surveys make it possible to check whether the return-to-office narrative is backed by what specialists themselves report. The 2023 and 2024 figures come from the 2024/2025 report, the 2025 figures from the work mode page of the 2026 report.

The 2025 survey was run online (CAWI) from 19 October to 7 November 2025, with more than 4400 respondents (report methodology). The 2024 survey had 1660 responses. These are online surveys of the site’s users, not a representative sample of the whole industry, so a single percentage point of difference is not a trend.

The trend that is visible is slow and goes one way: fully remote work loses about one point a year, hybrid gains, and daily office work shrinks. The claim that the remote share is “stable or growing” is too strong. Stable, yes. Growing, no.

What matters more than one point is what hybrid looks like. In 2025 the most common pattern was four days remote and one in the office (34.1 percent of hybrid workers), followed by three days remote and two in the office (27.7 percent). One day remote and four in the office was chosen by 12.2 percent. Hybrid in Polish IT is therefore mostly work from home with one or two office days, not office work with a day off from commuting.

#Is Polish IT returning to the office

Below are three interpretations of how the numbers relate to the media narrative. This is the author’s interpretation, not a research finding.

First, narrative-driven: in 2024 and 2025 many large companies announced a “return to office”. These announcements reached the media. They were received as a market trend.

Second, segment-specific: the announcements concerned a specific segment (global corporations with offices in Poland, some fintechs, some big tech). The rest of the market, especially senior B2B, was not affected.

Third, behavioural: where the employer forced a return, specialists changed employer. Just Join IT surveys, which ask about the actual work mode rather than employer declarations, show the net effect: remote work held at around 60 percent because specialists choose it and have the leverage to keep it. In its commentary on the 2025 data, Just Join IT writes that companies pushing a return to the office quickly realised they were losing the fight for talent.

The median actual earnings of a senior on B2B in 2024 were 24 360 PLN net on the invoice, according to the Just Join IT survey (2023: 24 412 PLN). Seniors account for 51.48 percent of offers on the site, juniors for 4.79 percent. With demand structured like that, forcing a return to the office costs the employer that senior.

#How many people work from home in Poland and the EU according to Eurostat

Job boards describe IT. Eurostat describes the whole economy, based on the EU Labour Force Survey, in the lfsa_ehomp dataset. The data covers all employed people aged 15 to 64, not just IT. Eurostat distinguishes between working from home “usually” and “sometimes”.

Three things follow from this table. First, the Polish economy as a whole works from home less often than the EU average and half as often as Germany. In 2020, 9.0 percent of employed people in Poland usually worked from home; by 2022 it was 5.0 percent. A return to the office really did happen in the Polish economy, only it happened in 2021 and 2022.

Second, Polish IT, with almost 60 percent fully remote, is an exception in a country with a low share of home working. The return-to-office narrative describes the Polish labour market in general quite well. It does not describe Polish IT.

Third, in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands the share of people usually working from home fell after the 2020 and 2021 peak, but working from home “sometimes” is growing. The same shift towards hybrid that Just Join IT surveys see in Polish IT, Eurostat sees in the economies to which Polish seniors sell their work.

#Remote work in the Polish Labour Code versus a B2B contract

Since 7 April 2023, remote work in Poland has its own chapter in the Kodeks pracy, the Polish Labour Code (chapter IIc, art. 67^18 to 67^34). It was added by the act of 1 December 2022 amending the Labour Code (Dz.U. 2023 poz. 240, Journal of Laws 2023, item 240), published on 6 February 2023; the remote work provisions entered into force two months after publication. The key rules:

• Remote work is work performed fully or partly at a place indicated by the employee and agreed with the employer, including at home (art. 67^18). It can be agreed when the contract is signed or during employment (art. 67^19 § 1).
• The employer must grant a remote work request from, among others, a pregnant employee, a parent of a child under 4 and a carer of a family member with a disability certificate, unless the organisation or type of work does not allow it. The employer gives the reason for a refusal within 7 working days (art. 67^19 § 6).
• If remote work was agreed during employment, either party can submit a binding request to return to the previous terms. The return happens no later than 30 days after the request is received (art. 67^22 § 1). For the people covered by art. 67^19 § 6, the employer can do this only when continued remote work is not possible because of the organisation or type of work.
• Refusing consent to remote work, requesting it, or ending remote work in this way cannot be a reason for terminating the contract (art. 67^23).
• The employer provides work equipment and covers the cost of electricity and telecommunication services needed for remote work (art. 67^24). These benefits, including a lump sum, are not income under the personal income tax act (art. 67^25).
• Occasional remote work at the employee’s request is possible for up to 24 days per calendar year (art. 67^33).

The chapter applies to employment relationships, including those based on something other than an employment contract (art. 67^34). A B2B contract is not an employment relationship, so the Labour Code rules on remote work do not cover it. Work mode, equipment and connection costs are set by the contract between two businesses.

This matters for the polemic. According to the Just Join IT survey for 2025, 48.7 percent of IT specialists work on B2B and 45.5 percent on an employment contract. In the author’s opinion, a “return to office” has a real legal tool only against the second group, and only where remote work was agreed during employment: then the employer can end it with a binding request within 30 days. Against a senior on B2B the employer has no such request. It can only decline to renew the contract, and with the current market structure that costs it the senior.

#How the pandemic changed remote work in IT

What it changed:

• The Polish IT market internalised remote tools (Slack/Zoom/Notion/Linear) as the standard.
• Employers learned to onboard and run a project remotely.
• According to Just Join IT, for many specialists the ability to work from anywhere in Poland or abroad is a benefit as important as pay.

What it did not change:

• Very small local employers still prefer the office; Just Join IT notes that daily office work is most common in startups and companies with a traditional culture.
• Entering the profession is harder: junior offers made up only 4.79 percent of Just Join IT listings in 2025, and juniors 9.6 percent of respondents.
• Team culture has to be built deliberately; it does not emerge on its own through Slack.

The last point is, in the author’s opinion, where the return-to-office narrative was born. An employer who could not build team culture remotely tries to enforce physical proximity as the fix. Specialists respond by changing employer. The surveys show that the remote share has held.

#Nearshore software development in Poland for western buyers

Five implications for an agency or buyer working with a Polish specialist:

First, a Polish senior B2B specialist in 2026 is remote by default. The Polish location matters mainly for time zone and legal jurisdiction.

Second, online tools are mature. Slack, Linear, Notion, Loom, GitHub, Cloudflare. The Polish senior has worked with these tools since 2020 and does not relearn them for a western contract.

Third, asynchronous work is the standard. The Polish senior does not expect a daily meeting with the UK or DACH. A weekly standup plus written updates is a sufficient format.

Fourth, a contractor places less load on HR and the office. No need to rent a desk, no benefits coordination, no corporate back office. The B2B rate is a net rate on the invoice.

Fifth, EU jurisdiction post-Brexit. A B2B contractor operates under Polish law, and Poland applies the GDPR, has implemented NIS2, and financial entities fall under DORA. Details on EU and UK data adequacy are in the article on Polish senior engineers.

#Poland vs UK vs DACH IT contractor market compared

The table shows only what can be measured with the same source. Eurostat does not publish this data for the United Kingdom after 2019, and this article has no comparable IT work mode surveys for Germany and Austria. Poland combines remote IT with EU jurisdiction, in an economy that outside IT works from home less often than its western neighbours. That is a structural position, not a passing fashion.

#Remote WordPress developer from Poland in 2026

A Polish WordPress developer in 2026 is not just a “Polish WordPress developer”. They are a senior IT specialist on Polish B2B who builds WordPress + Astro or Next.js + Cloudflare. They work remotely. They collaborate with clients in Germany, the UK, the US, sometimes from Poland.

The fact that the client opens a laptop in Berlin, London or San Francisco does not change the fact that the senior sits in the Tricity, Wroclaw or on the borderlands. The Polish IT market is remote in a Polish way, not because of the client.

This is why “Polish WordPress outsourcing” is a distorting term in 2026. It is not just outsourcing; it is a remote senior who operates on the EU market with a Polish rate and a western process.

#More on Polish IT salaries and nearshore

It connects to the article on the Polish senior engineer in the outsourcing market, the polemic on Polish WordPress developer salaries, the WPPoland careers page, and the headless WordPress services pillar, where the technical standards of the Polish senior are translated into an offer for the western client. The full freelancer vs agency comparison (communication, rates, bus factor, SLA) is in the WordPress developer role guide, together with a table of rate ranges by level.

For the application volume side of the same data, see Polish IT applications-per-offer drop 2026.