No survey asks workers directly whether they regret going remote or staying in the office, so the cleanest available signal is what people say they would choose if they could. The Pew Research Center’s January 2025 report is lopsided on the office side: 63% of workers who rarely or never work from home say that, given the choice, they would prefer to work from home most or some of the time; within that same office group, 19% would choose to work from home all the time and only 17% would opt to keep rarely or never working remotely. Pew, however, publishes no matching “would prefer the office” figure for people who already work remotely, so the two sides cannot be compared like-for-like. What Pew does show about remote workers is attachment: 46% of current remote workers say they would be unlikely to stay at their job if their employer eliminated work-from-home, and a smaller 36% say they would be likely to stay — the closest thing to a low-regret ceiling on the remote side. The pattern is consistent with Gilovich and Medvec’s long-term inaction-dominance finding — sticking with the office when a flexible alternative exists leaves more people wishing they had chosen otherwise — but the magnitudes on the two sides come from different questions and should be read as directional.
A separate satisfaction survey points the same direction without being a regret measure. The Global Work-Life Survey by Remote, the Future Workforce Alliance, and IE Business School found 65% of remote workers “extremely satisfied” with their jobs versus just 34% of office-based employees. That is a satisfaction gap, not a regret rate: an earlier version of this entry inverted those top-box scores (treating everyone not “extremely satisfied” as regretful), which counted merely “very satisfied” workers as dissatisfied and inflated both numbers. Those inverted figures (35% and 66%) have been dropped.
The main caveat is measurement. “Would prefer the other arrangement” still is not lived regret — someone content in the office who would mildly prefer flexibility counts in the 63%, so the proxy can overstate true regret. The direction is robust across independent surveys; the absolute magnitudes should be read as upper bounds. The often-quoted Envoy figure that “80% of bosses regret return-to-office plans” is excluded here as a worker-level rate: it measures executives’ process regret about how their company handled RTO, a different population and a different construct. The Pew sample is US adults; remote-work norms vary across countries.