We Analysed 1,800+ UK Work-From-Home Job Adverts. Here's What They Actually Offer.

Introduction

If you search any UK job site for "work from home", you'll see thousands of listings. But how many of those are truly remote roles? How many are hybrid, and what does "hybrid" really mean in practice? What are employers looking for, what do the jobs pay, and who is actually putting up these adverts?

So, we decided to find out. We pulled UK job adverts from the Reed Jobseeker API, read the full text of each one, and sorted them based on what they actually say about where the work happens. For a broader view across sectors, we used Adzuna, which aggregates adverts from across UK job sites.

Here's how we did it: we searched Reed for "remote", "work from home", "home based" and "hybrid", then read through 4,102 adverts in full. Out of those, we kept the 1,879 unique roles that genuinely mention working from home. Unless a chart says otherwise, all percentages are based on those 1,879 roles. Two sections step outside that sample: who posts the adverts, which uses Reed's market-wide counts, and the sector breakdown, which uses Adzuna's count of 635,965 UK adverts. Both say so where they appear.

Fully remote, or a few days at home?

Hybrid jobs stand out. 54% of the 1,879 adverts are hybrid roles, while just 22% are fully remote. Among adverts that offer homeworking, most still expect you in the office some days each week.

Here’s where things get more confusing: 23% (433 adverts) mention working from home but never make it clear what the actual setup is. They mention some home working or flexibility, but don’t specify if the job is hybrid or fully remote.

A smaller slice, 1% (28 adverts), mentions remote or hybrid working only to rule it out. The advert says the role is office-based and homeworking is not on offer.

How many days in the office?

There are two levels of vagueness here, and they are worth separating. 433 adverts never say what the arrangement is at all. A further 1,008 say "hybrid", but only 375 of those go on to say how many days.

Among the hybrid adverts that do commit to a number, 47% ask for three days in the office. That is the same answer large employers give about themselves: in our UK Return to Office Statistics 2026, three days is the most common published policy too. Two different kinds of evidence, one from corporate policy statements and one from the adverts those companies place, land on the same number.

Employers phrase this in several ways, and we convert them all the same way our Return to Office statistics do: a percentage becomes days on a five-day week, so 60% of your working time in the office is three days. A monthly figure converts on a 20-day month, so 12 days a month is also three. A stated range is recorded at its midpoint, so two to three days is 2.5. The half days in the chart come from that arithmetic; no employer advertises half a day in the office.

Three days is the pattern among employers willing to name a number, not the market average; most do not name one.

What kind of jobs are these?

Job titles are written by whoever posted the advert, so the same job appears under several names. Even the top one, Business development manager, appears in just 19 of the 1,879 adverts. What the ranking shows is the shape of the market rather than its size: these are the roles that come up again and again when UK employers advertise work that can be done from home.

Only 37% of the 1,879 adverts include a seniority marker in the title, such as senior, junior, lead or manager. The rest give a bare job title, which makes it hard to tell from a listing whether a role is the right level for you.

How much experience do they ask for?

Most adverts don't state a number. In fact, 83% of the 1,879 adverts don't specify a required number of years, meaning only 17% (322 adverts) do.

When experience is mentioned, it's usually just a small amount; two years is the most common request. The two most frequent experience bands together make up 59% of adverts that specify anything. Longer requirements do pop up but are rare, so anything above five years gets grouped together.

What stands out most is what's left unsaid: if you're hesitating to apply because you're unsure about your years of experience, keep in mind that most adverts don't state a requirement at all.

Do they want a degree?

Most of the time, job adverts don't mention qualifications. 95% of the 1,879 adverts we looked at never ask for a degree or equivalent. Just 96 adverts ask for one, and only 13 specifically want a postgraduate qualification.

Of course, just because an advert doesn't mention qualifications doesn't mean the employer doesn't care; some companies may still prefer candidates with degrees even if they don't say so. But listing a degree as a requirement isn't the norm: it shows up in only 5% of the adverts we analysed.

Permanent or temporary?

Remote work is not casual work. Out of 1,879 adverts, 82% are for permanent positions. Contract roles make up 11%, and temporary ones just 7%, so fewer than one in five are fixed-term jobs.

If you picture work-from-home listings as mostly temporary or stopgap positions, that is not what employers are advertising here. The large majority are regular, permanent roles that just happen to be done from home.

Full-time or part-time?

Only 2.7% of adverts are for part-time roles, just 50 out of 1,879. Because part-time jobs tend to be re-advertised more often than full-time ones, you will come across them more often than that number suggests, but either way they're uncommon.

We hear from a lot of people looking for part-time remote work; it's one of the most common things we're asked about. That's just based on the messages we get, not hard data, but the adverts tell a clear story. Employers are offering flexibility of place, not flexibility of hours. Remote part-time jobs are actually quite rare.

What they pay

83% of these adverts disclose a salary. Of the 1,334 that quote an annual figure, the median is £47,500. A quarter advertise less than £35,500, while another quarter offer more than £62,000.

Keep in mind, these are just advertised figures, not necessarily what people actually earn. Plus, the types of jobs in the fully remote group aren't the same as those in the hybrid group, so think of these numbers as what's being offered, not as the "price tag" for working from home. Whether the same job pays differently depending on where you do it is another question, and one we're still looking into.

Where the hybrid jobs are

If you're considering a hybrid job, this shows where you'd need to be. London stands out with 177 adverts, 18% of all hybrid roles, while Manchester comes in second with 38.

It's a mixed picture. Most hybrid roles aren't in London, but they are spread thinly: Manchester only accounts for 4% of hybrid listings, and every other city has even fewer. So it's less about how many hybrid jobs there are in the UK overall, and more about whether one is close enough for you to commute. Outside the largest cities, your options drop off quickly. If you're not near one, keep an eye on fully remote jobs. They make up a smaller share (22%) of the market, but they're not tied to any location.

Who is posting them

This section looks at all those live adverts, not just our core sample of 1,879. You can't always tell from the advert text whether a recruiter or an employer posted it, but Reed can filter for this, so these numbers are based on the full set of adverts for that day, with no sampling.

Here's the starting point: 79.5% of all UK job adverts on Reed are posted by recruitment agencies instead of direct employers. Agencies have a huge presence in UK job adverts, so the question isn't whether remote roles are agency-heavy, but whether they're more agency-heavy than average.

The terms are not equally common: 17,285 for "hybrid", 9,725 for "work from home", 5,872 for "home based" and 5,056 for "remote". One advert can match more than one of them.

For adverts mentioning "hybrid", the agency share is higher at 87.5%, eight points above the overall average. So if you're searching for a hybrid role, about seven out of every eight adverts will be from a recruiter.

Adverts for "work from home" have a lower agency share of 63.3%, but that one needs care. We read adverts from that same search ourselves, and only 17.5% of them actually described home working. The others were mostly training courses, care jobs and other unrelated listings, which employers are more likely to post directly. So that percentage is really about the phrase, not genuine work-from-home jobs.

Which sectors mention remote working

This chart is a bit different from the rest of the page. While the earlier sections are based on adverts we read and sorted ourselves, this one pulls data from Adzuna, which simply counts how often keywords show up across its whole UK index. So it tells you how much certain phrases get mentioned, not necessarily what's actually being offered.

Looking at those counts, IT comes out on top: 33.4% of adverts in that sector mention remote work. At the other end, domestic help & cleaning barely registers at 0.2%.

But keep in mind, just because a job advert mentions remote work doesn't mean it's really on offer. When we've read through adverts, we've found that many of those keyword hits don't describe real homeworking at all; some even rule it out, or use "remote" in a completely different way. That's almost certainly true in these numbers, and the effect isn't the same across sectors. So it's best to read this as a ranking, not as a set of firm figures.

Part of the difference between sectors might just come down to wording. Adzuna groups "remote" and "work from home" together, so if a sector prefers one term over the other, it still gets counted the same way.

Methodology

Source. We got the job adverts from the Reed Jobseeker API, which provides the full text of each advert and indicates whether a recruiter or the employer posted it. The sector counts come from Adzuna, which publishes counts by sector, giving us whole-market numbers without having to read every advert ourselves.

From read to analysed. We went through 4,102 adverts in detail. Of those, 1,839 (about 45%) had nothing to do with working from home; sometimes "remote" just means far away, and a care home is a workplace, not your home. That also includes 144 ads for training courses and 397 for care jobs, and leaves 2,263. The same role is often posted more than once, so we count one advert per combination of employer, job title and salary, which brings us to 1,879 unique roles from 737 different employers. Unless we say otherwise, all percentages are based on those 1,879 roles.

Collection. We gathered the full text of all adverts between 15 September 2026 and 26 September 2026. Here's the breakdown: "remote" had 1,736 adverts (last checked 17 September 2026), "work from home" had 887 adverts (last checked 16 September 2026), "home based" had 800 adverts (last checked 26 September 2026), "hybrid" had 800 adverts (last checked 25 September 2026). Since these searches happened on different days, keep in mind that any direct comparison has a timing gap. For whole-market counts, we checked twice on 15 and 25 September, and the percentage of agency adverts barely changed, shifting by less than half a point.

Sampling. Reed won't show more than 9,900 results for any search. Of the four searches above, only "hybrid" went over that; there were 17,286 matching adverts, but we could access only the first 9,900, so that's where our hybrid sample comes from. Reed doesn't explain how it sorts those results, and we noticed they're not in date order, so this isn't a random slice of those 17,286. The other three searches were small enough that we could sample from the entire pool.

Classification. We sort working arrangements based on a set of rules. First, we look for clear phrases like "fully remote". If that's not there, we check for any on-site requirements, then for a specific number of office days, and after that, for phrases that clearly say "hybrid". If we only find a vague mention of homeworking with no extra detail, we mark it as "unspecified" instead of guessing. When adverts mention office days, we convert percentages to days in a five-day week, monthly numbers to days in a 20-day month, and use the middle of any stated range; that's where any half-day figures in the chart come from.

Experience and qualifications. We only count years of experience if the advert is clearly talking about what the candidate needs. For experience ranges, we always use the lower end.

Job titles. We group job titles after removing things like punctuation and filler words. To appear in our list, a title must come from at least three different employers, so a single advertiser posting the same job repeatedly doesn't skew the results.

Salary. We only used annual salaries between £10,000 and £250,000. We left out hourly and day rates instead of converting them, since turning them into annual figures would require guessing the number of hours worked, which the adverts don't tell us.

Sectors. We used Adzuna's categories and only included sectors with at least 500 adverts. Since Adzuna shows almost identical numbers for "remote" and "work from home" (48,621 and 48,540 nationally), we just used one search term for the sector breakdowns. That means we can't tell the difference between the two phrases in the results.

Limits. Just to be clear, these are job adverts, not actual jobs or people. An advert shows only what an employer is looking for when they post it. It doesn't tell you how many people got hired, what happened during the offer process, or how things worked out after someone started.

Corrections. Email [email protected].

Changelog

28 September 2026 — First published. 1,879 adverts from four Reed searches, plus whole-market counts from Reed and Adzuna.