COVID19: Cypriots work less from home than EU average

Social distancing measures introduced as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic forced many people to work from home, but Cyprus is well below the EU average of homeworkers.

In 2020, 12.3% of employed people aged 15-64 in the EU usually worked from home, although this share had remained constant at around 5% over the past decade.

Cyprus was in Europe’s bottom six with a 4.5% share of people working from home, even lower than Greece’s 7%.

Finland topped the EU Member States list for home working, with 25.1% of employed people usually working from home in 2020.

Finland was followed by Luxembourg (23.1%) and Ireland (21.5%).

In contrast, the lowest shares of home-workers were reported in Bulgaria (1.2%), Romania (2.5%), Croatia (3.1%) and Hungary (3.6%).

In previous years, the share of self-employed who reported that they usually work from home has been consistently higher than the share of employees in the same situation.

However, COVID-19 made the gap smaller in 2020 as the share of employees who usually work from home increased from 3.2% in 2019 to 10.8%, while the share for the self-employed increased to a smaller extent: from 19.4% in 2019 to 22.0% in 2020.

More women work from home

There are different trends according to the age and sex of workers when it comes to home working.

In 2020, a higher share of women (13.2%) reported that they usually worked from home than men (11.5%).

Compared with other age groups, younger people were less likely to work from home: only 6.3% of those aged 15-24 reported that they usually worked from home, compared with 13% of those aged between 25-49 and 12.4% of those aged 50-64.

‘Usually working at home’ means doing any productive work related to the current job for at least half of the days worked in a reference period of four weeks.