Remote jobs by state in 2026: the BLS telework rates

BLS does publish a telework rate for every state. It is an annual average rather than a monthly one, and it sits on the Local Area Unemployment Statistics page instead of in the monthly employment tables where most people go looking: in 2025, 22.4 percent of people at work nationwide teleworked or worked at home for pay, running from 49.5 percent in the District of Columbia down to 8.4 percent in Mississippi. The series begins in 2023, so there are three years of it.

So "which state has the most remote work" has a federal answer, and it is on a public web page. The more useful finding sits underneath the ranking, in what makes one state's number three times another's - because that turns out not to be a fact about the state.

Is there a BLS telework rate for my state?

Yes, annually. BLS added telework questions to the Current Population Survey in October 2022, and state tables for 2023, 2024 and 2025 are published through Local Area Unemployment Statistics. What does not exist is a monthly state figure: the CPS telework program page says in as many words that monthly tabulations by state are not available, and the eight monthly telework tables - numbered 41 through 48, broken out by age, sex, race, education, occupation, industry, full- or part-time status and class of worker - cover the nation as a whole.

Source: BLS, "States: Persons at work by telework status, 2025 annual averages," Current Population Survey via Local Area Unemployment Statistics.

How to read this. Each figure is the share of people at work in that state during the 2025 survey weeks who did some or all of their paid work at home, at any frequency - one day a week is counted the same as five. It is measured where the worker lives, not where the employer sits, which matters for Maryland and Virginia, whose residents commute into the District. And the 2025 column is an 11-month average: October 2025 was not collected because of the federal government shutdown, so BLS states that the 2025 annual estimates are not strictly comparable with annual averages for other years.

Where the rate is highest, and why

Telework rate by state, 2025 annual averages

Highest six and lowest five, with the U.S. figure. Share of people at work who teleworked or worked at home for pay.

District of Columbia		49.5%
Massachusetts		31.6%
Colorado		29.5%
Oregon		29.3%
Maryland		28.3%
Virginia		28.1%
United States		22.4%
Wyoming		14%
North Dakota		13.2%
Louisiana		13%
West Virginia		12.4%
Mississippi		8.4%

The District of Columbia is not a state and does not behave like one. At 49.5 percent it sits nearly 18 points clear of Massachusetts, which leads the fifty. Take the District out and the entire national range is 8.4 to 31.6 percent - a spread of 23.2 points between the two extremes of a country of 340 million people.

That spread is real, and it is mostly borrowed. The states at the top are the states whose employment leans toward finance, professional services, information and government: Massachusetts, Colorado, Oregon, Maryland, Virginia, Washington, New Jersey. The states at the bottom lean toward extraction, agriculture, manufacturing, tourism and health care delivered in person: Mississippi, West Virginia, Louisiana, North Dakota. Nothing about the Mississippi state line stops a laptop from working. The jobs on either side of it are different jobs.

The gap between industries is wider than the gap between states

Telework rate by major industry, June 2026

Share of employed people at work who teleworked or worked at home for pay. Current Population Survey.

Financial activities		52.5%
Information		47.2%
Professional and business services		41.8%
Public administration		21.4%
Education and health services		18%
Other services		18%
Wholesale and retail trade		12.1%
Construction		10.2%
Transportation and utilities		10%
Mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction		9.1%
Leisure and hospitality		7.7%

Your state is worth 23 points of telework rate; your employer's industry is worth nearly 45, and the industry is the one you can change by the end of the month. That is a position, so here is the arithmetic under it. The widest gap between two states in the 2025 annual table is 23.2 points. The widest gap between two major industries, measured in a single month, June 2026, is 44.8 - financial activities at 52.5 percent against leisure and hospitality at 7.7 percent. One of those variables requires moving house. The other requires answering a different set of postings.

Go a level finer and it widens again. Within financial activities, BLS put the detailed industry finance and insurance at 59.0 percent in June 2026, and professional and technical services at 55.8 percent. Both are above the District of Columbia's rate for all industries combined. What BLS does not publish is telework by industry within a state, so nobody can tell you the rate for insurance carriers in Mississippi - only that the national figure for that industry is roughly seven times the national figure for restaurants and hotels.

Where a Customer Support Specialist sits

Customer Support Specialist is a posting title; the occupation BLS counts is Customer Service Representatives, code 43-4051, and it belongs to the sales and office occupations group. That group is not the one you would guess.

Source: BLS table A-42, Current Population Survey, August 2026. The rows count people who worked at home for pay during the reference week, at any frequency.

Sales and office beats the all-worker average by 1.7 points and trails management and professional by 12.6. For a support role that reads as a warning and a reprieve at once: this is work that can obviously be done from a laptop and a headset, and roughly three-quarters of the people doing it still are not doing it at home.

Who is teleworking

The demographic cuts are the part of this data that job seekers rarely see, and one of them should change how an entry-level applicant reads a rejection.

In March 2026, 24.9 percent of employed women teleworked against 20.5 percent of employed men. The age split is wider and sharper: 6.7 percent of workers aged 16 to 24 teleworked that month, against 25.1 percent of those aged 25 to 54 and 24.1 percent of those 55 and over. A gap of 18.4 points opens between the youngest workers and the prime-age group.

Read that carefully before concluding the market is against you. It does not say employers refuse to let young workers work from home. It says the jobs held by 16-to-24-year-olds are concentrated in the occupations at the bottom of the telework table - retail floors, kitchens, warehouses - and that a 22-year-old aiming at a remote Customer Support Specialist role is applying against a base rate set by people already sitting in offices. The practical consequence is that a first remote job is usually a change of industry, not just a change of employer, and that takes more applications than a lateral move does.

Does your state matter for the job search?

It does, but not through the telework rate. The state number that should change your behaviour is the labour market you are competing inside, and BLS measures that every month. In July 2026 the District of Columbia had the highest unemployment rate at 5.9 percent and South Dakota the lowest at 2.0 percent. Over the year to July 2026, the largest payroll job gains were in Texas (+165,600), California (+112,700) and North Carolina (+51,600); the only over-the-year losses were Virginia, down 47,900 jobs or 1.1 percent, and the District, down 31,500 or 4.2 percent.

Now set those two tables beside each other, because together they retire the whole "best states for remote work" genre. The District of Columbia has the highest telework rate in the country and the highest unemployment rate in the country, and it shed 4.2 percent of its payroll jobs in a year. Virginia is fifth in the country for telework and lost more jobs than any other state. A high telework share describes what people who already hold jobs there are doing on a Tuesday. It says nothing about whether you can get one of those jobs, and in these two cases it points the opposite way.

There is a second-order trap worth naming, because it is easy to mistake for a remote-work effect. A remote Customer Support Specialist posting is usually still attached to an employer with an address, and that employer sits in an industry with a location. A state whose employer base leans toward financial activities will show more remote postings than one that leans toward leisure and hospitality - with telework behaviour identical in both. So a state ranking can be arithmetically correct and still be measuring the industry variable in disguise. Ask which of those two things a list is describing before you treat it as advice.

Your state does still decide whether a specific posting will accept you, which is a different question from how much remote work exists near you. Three checks settle it in under a minute.

Checking whether a remote posting is open to your state

1. 1
   Read the location field, not the headline

   A title that says Remote often sits above a location line naming a metro or a region. The headline is copy; the field is the constraint the recruiter filters on.

2. 2
   Look for the exclusion list

   Employers that cannot hire everywhere usually name the states they exclude near the bottom of the description. If no list appears, treat it as a question to ask rather than a yes.

3. 3
   Check the sector before the perks

   The employer's industry predicts telework better than the word remote in the title - 52.5 percent in financial activities against 7.7 percent in leisure and hospitality, June 2026.

What the same job pays, and who pays it

Customer Service Representatives, 43-4051

$21.53Median hourly wage, May 2025

2,666,000Employed, 2025

-5%Projected change, 2025-35

The median hourly wage was $21.53 in May 2025, which the Handbook also states as $44,770 a year. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $15.27 an hour and the highest 10 percent more than $30.57. Employment is projected to fall 5 percent over 2025–35, a loss of 141,800 jobs, and BLS still projects about 289,500 openings a year over that decade, because a workforce of 2.7 million replaces a lot of people who retire or move on. Typical entry education is a high school diploma; O*NET's survey of the occupation reports 55 percent of respondents naming a high school diploma as the requirement, 17 percent some college and 14 percent an associate degree.

Now put the wage table next to the telework table.

Source: BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook, Customer Service Representatives, May 2025. These are medians for the occupation inside each industry, not starting wages, and not offers.

The two industries near the top of that wage list are the two near the top of the telework list. Insurance carriers sit inside finance and insurance, which teleworked at 59.0 percent in June 2026; professional, scientific and technical services teleworked at 55.8 percent. Retail trade, at the bottom of the wage table, sits inside wholesale and retail trade at 12.1 percent. A Customer Support Specialist who answers postings from an insurance carrier instead of a retail chain is reaching for a $22.47 median in a sector where more than half of workers already work at home, rather than $17.96 in one where roughly one in eight does. That is a single filter, applied at the point of choosing which postings to answer, and it moves both variables at once.

What these numbers do not show

The telework series counts people who did paid work at home during one week. It does not separate a fully remote contract from a hybrid arrangement, it does not measure job postings, and it does not tell you whether a given employer will hire someone in your state. The state table is annual, lags by months, is measured at the worker's residence rather than the employer's, and for 2025 is missing October entirely. The wage figures are May 2025 medians for people already employed in the occupation, not the range on a current posting, and the industry rows are national. There is also no readable substitute for state wages by occupation: the per-occupation OEWS pages that once carried state and metro wage tables now resolve to an index of downloadable data files covering 1997 through May 2025, so a state-by-state wage table for 43-4051 is not something anyone can quote from a BLS web page today.

If you are applying for this role

Three specifics.

Search the title variants, not just yours. Employers post this work as Customer Service Representative, Client Services Representative and Call Center Representative. O*NET lists Receptionists and Information Clerks (43-4171.00), New Accounts Clerks (43-4141.00), Insurance Claims and Policy Processing Clerks (43-9041.00) and Order Clerks (43-4151.00) among the related occupations - adjacent postings a title-only search will hide from you.

Expect $15.27 to $30.57 an hour, and place yourself in it by industry. That is the 10th-to-90th-percentile band from May 2025, and the median is $21.53. Wholesale trade and insurance sit above it; retail and business support services sit below.

Ask one question in the screen: what share of the team works from home, and is that policy or practice? The industry rate tells you what is normal in the sector. Only the employer can tell you what is normal on the team you would join, and the gap between a written remote policy and a manager's expectation is where most of the disappointment lives.

Filtering by industry means answering more postings, not fewer, and typing the same six fields into a different form each time. HeroApply fills the application from your resume so the filter costs you attention rather than hours.