Half of all Brussels workers work from home

According to BISA’s research, in 2019 – before the start of the COVID pandemic – only a quarter of Brussels workers worked from home at least one hour a month.

in 2020 the pandemic led to a sharp increase in working from home, in Brussels, Flanders and Wallonia alike. This reached a peak in 2021, when over 60 per cent of Brussels’ workers were working from home.

55 per cent work from home today

Since then, the figure has hardly fallen. By 2025, 55 per cent of employees were working from home at least part of the time. So called ‘intensive homeworking' – defined as working from home for at least half the total of working hours – has increased tenfold. A quarter of all Brussels workers and commuters working in Brussels work from home at least half the time. This compares with just two per cent in 2019, before the pandemic.

By contrast, little has changed in terms of occasional working from home (less than half of all working hours) – both before and after the crisis, this applies to around a quarter of all employees.

Permanent working from home remains very rare even today: it was practiced by 1 per cent of employees before the crisis and by just 2 per cent in 2025.

Commuters in Brussels, in particular, work from home

It is also striking that in 2025 62 per cent of commuters worked from home, compared with 47 per cent of Brussels residents. Commuters have always worked from home more frequently; this was also the case before the pandemic. This difference between commuters and Brussels residents is particularly clear in the case of intensive working from home, the BISA figures show. “Before the crisis, this practice was rare, both among commuters and among Brussels residents. Since the pandemic almost a third of commuters have been spending at least half their working hours at home (32 per cent in 2025), compared with 18 per cent for Brussels residents.”