What are the top jobs that can be done at home by older or disabled Americans?
It’s a tremendous question. Unfortunately, we’re not sure who asked it! We can’t find it in our records, so maybe it was someone who found us in the story comments, on our cellphones or maybe even in the $1.50 hot dog line at Costco?
We’ll start with the answer.
Well, we’ll actually start with the question. Because it’s super perceptive.
Older workers and workers with disabilities are among the most likely to be working from home — assuming they’re working at all — according to our analysis of the Census Bureau’s long-running Current Population Survey.
They are rivaled only by workers with college degrees and Asian American workers, two categories across which there’s substantial overlap.
The odds of working hybrid — that is, some of your hours remote but some in the office — decline as you age, according to our analysis of work-from-home data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. But fully remote work goes the opposite direction. Older workers, specifically those who have hit retirement age — are the most likely of any group to be working from home.
To be sure, that’s only because of folks who work part-time in retirement. All group shifts toward working fewer hours when they hit their 60s, but fully remote workers show the sharpest shift of all. We assume that’s partly because many of them are former on-site workers who stay on to offer veteran guidance from Sun City or The Villages.
Speaking of expertise, these fully remote older workers are much more likely to have advanced degrees.
And they’re also much more likely to be self-employed. We’d guess that’s because they’re running a small business they built during their working years, consulting or contracting in their former industry or even taking on a side hustle to keep them busy. Or, they’re farming — an increasingly rare occupation that, technically, often qualifies as work-from-home.
What jobs are they doing? We’ll answer that in a second, but we want to start with the lay of the land. Because it’s shifting fast.
We only have data since late 2022, when the Census Bureau added broad work-from-home questions to their flagship monthly survey as an evolution of data they started collecting during the coronavirus crisis. But even over that brief time, we’ve seen what we’re guessing will be a once-in-a-lifetime-size shift.
For most of the time for which we have data, federal government employees were a remote work success story. They “teleworked” much more often than their private-sector peers. In particular, they did more hybrid work than any other class of worker in the country.
Then, in early 2025, Trump took power for a second term, DOGE hit the federal workforce, and agencies curtailed remote work. Now federal workers are among the least likely to work either remote or hybrid, behind only their local government friends.
But the federal government accounts for a small enough share of all employment that, broadly speaking, the remote work landscape hasn’t changed awful much in the past few years. That’s a relief, because it allows us to use data from that entire time period, and thus get enough survey responses to pinpoint trends within niches as narrow as older or disabled workers who don’t go into the office.
When we do, we find that the top work-from-home jobs overall — meaning those where most workers are fully remote — are web developer, writer and editor. Others, including technical writers, database administrators and travel agents, also come close to being majority homeworkers.
But, as the Long Lost Question Asker implied, your remote work options depend on your age. For folks in their early 20s, their best bet at remote work involves working customer service. For most workers in their 20s and 30s, it’s software development. And for anyone around age 40 or older, the highest probability of remote work goes to the managers — a category that includes many self-employed workers and small-business owners.
In most jobs, older workers are more likely to earn remote work privileges. The exceptions we found tended to concentrate in a few tech-heavy careers — web designers, web developers and software testers come to mind.
If you flip the equation and look for the jobs that attract the most remote workers, regardless of how many on-site and hybrid workers are also in that job, you see that older workers concentrate — quite logically — in the most senior positions. They’re managers, management analysts, chief executives and lawyers. Their younger peers are much more likely to be software developers or customer service representatives.
But that all that analysis doesn’t quite seem to fit the spirit of the question! It implies that the best path to getting a job you can do from home well into your advanced years is to have an advanced degree or be a top manager. Of course that’s true. But “you probably should have spent the past 40 years building a wildly successful career and learning irreplaceable skills” isn’t actionable advice for someone looking for work today.
How do we isolate jobs that might work for folks who need work now? We saw some clues with workers with disabilities. We looked specifically at those who have difficulty with mobility or with caring for themselves, since they’re most likely to work remote. For almost every stat we looked at, they followed patterns similar to those of their non-disabled peers. But their top fully remote jobs include a few that we didn’t see as often among older workers, including customer service, bookkeeping and accounting, and real estate.
That’s in part due to their youth, but also because they have more varied education levels than the typical heavily credentialed, older work-from-homer. So, let’s look at retirement-age folks again but focus on those who don’t have bachelor’s or advanced degrees.
When we do, we see managers still rise to the top. But the three jobs we mentioned for disabled workers — bookkeeping, customer service and real estate — also jump up the list. As do some other credible career opportunities, such as property managers, executive assistants and salespeople.
We also get some wild cards, including the aforementioned farmers. But the most interesting were personal care aides and child care workers — both jobs that presumably are only work from home if you do live-in work or run a home-based business.
But the most useful list may come not from looking at the most popular jobs for older work-from-home workers, but the ones that — once they’re employed — older workers are most likely to be allowed to do from home. Those include medical transcriptionists, travel agents, insurance underwriters, credit analysts, claims adjusters and typists.
And, of course, writers and editors. If only anyone were hiring those right now.
Hello, there! The Department of Data continues collecting queries. Tell us what piques your curiosity: What jobs are most likely to offer hybrid work? What are the best-paying remote jobs? Is it just my imagination, or are people walking faster than they used to? Just ask!
If your question appears in a column, we’ll send you an official Department of Data button and ID card. This week, we’ll mail them to all the anonymous benefactors who will (hopefully) emerge from the woodwork once they see we’ve answered their questions.
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