New data suggests that high-paying remote positions are almost as rare as they were before the pandemic.
According to a recent analysis of over one million job postings between January and July from Ladders, a career platform for six-figure salary jobs, those offering salaries of $100,000 or more and that also offer remote or hybrid work plunged 15% in the second quarter of 2025.
Only about 6% of high-paying jobs now provide location flexibility—down from a high of 41% in 2022, and just a couple points above the 4% recorded back in pre-pandemic 2019.
By comparison, roughly 20% of jobs advertised on LinkedIn offer hybrid or remote work options. According to Indeed, fully remote positions advertised on its platform jumped from 2.4% of all postings in 2019 to 10.2% in 2022, but have since declined to about 7.9%.
“It’s definitely an employer’s market,” says Ladders founder Marc Cenedella. “In 2025, by and large, U.S. and Canadian companies have decided [workers earning six figures or more] are going back to the office.”
Cenedella adds that while six-figure jobs once represented a small slice of the workforce, the data now applies to a larger proportion of knowledge economy workers, thanks in part to inflation and the growth of the knowledge industry.
“When we started the business 20 years ago it would have been the top 25% of the workforce,” he says. “Now probably the top 50% of professional workforces is at that level.”
The Ladders data suggests that as the labor market tightens, employers are increasingly demanding more in-person work, especially among top earners.
Where did all the high-paying flexible jobs go?
This trend is an abrupt 180 from even a few years ago.
Cenedella explains that employers “were amazed in 2021 that they could be just as profitable as they were in the past without having to have all this real estate and overhead.” But just a year later, many employers started trying to pull staff back into the office, regardless of how much they make.
Today, a more challenging economy and a tighter labor market is giving them the opportunity to enforce their preferred location policies. “As time went on, those good habits kind of deteriorated. A new generation hasn’t been taught those good habits,” Cenedella says.
Cenedella reasons that if organizations could successfully operate remotely, most would opt to do so, as it offers some short-term savings on real estate and overhead.
In fact, a recent study conducted by professors at Harvard University, Brown University, and the University of California, Los Angeles, found that workers would accept a significantly lower salary—up to 25% less—in exchange for the opportunity to work remotely or hybrid.
But instead of saving on salaries by permitting remote work, the researchers found employers tend to do the opposite: “If firms don’t have to pay as much to attract people for remote positions, we might expect the salaries to be lower for remote work rather than in-person work—and we don’t find that,” says Bobak Pakzad-Hurson, an assistant professor of Economics and Entrepreneurship at Brown University, and one of the study’s coauthors. “In fact, remote workers make a tiny bit more.”
Despite workers’ willingness to sacrifice some of their salary for the opportunity to have more flexibility, the Ladders data suggests employers are unwilling to make that trade.
Are high-paying remote jobs ever coming back?
Still, Pakzad-Hurson doesn’t believe high-paying remote and hybrid work opportunities will remain at such low levels for long.
“Things in the short-run are tied to political and economic factors, but I don’t think the prevalence of work-from-home is going to go away, in part because of technological progress,” he says.
Much of the hesitation to hire across the board, but especially top earners, is the result of numerous seismic changes hitting the economy and the labor market all at once.
That’s causing employers to hold off until they get more clarity on the long-term effects, says career expert Jasmine Escalera of resume writing resource MyPerfectResume. “There are way too many factors that are completely changing corporate America,” she says, from economics to politics to AI.
Amid all these changes Escalera says employers are more hesitant to hire—as reflected in recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data—and may feel more emboldened to impose their preference for in-person work on a labor force with more limited options, especially for staff that command a premium salary.
With the current labor market conditions, those who are keen on finding a role with both location flexibility and a high salary may need to adjust their expectations, and their timeline.
Escalera says the Ladders survey further demonstrates how employers feel they’re in a position to call the shots, and while many are hesitant to cut back on salary, they appear more than willing to cut back on flexibility perks.
“They feel as though ‘if I give you a higher paying salary, I get to make demands,’” she says. “Companies have way more of an upper hand, and they’re basically dictating how things are going to flow, and workers just have to roll with it.”
Whatever the reason, employers appear to have settled on a preference for in-person work, and Cenedella of Ladders doesn’t believe flexibility will ever return to anything near that 2022 peak.
“Should it go back to being a hot market—and it will by 2027 or 2028—will those numbers go up 1 or 2%? Absolutely,” he says. “But I can’t see a world where we go from 6% remote work to 20%.”
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