So, can remote work expand upward career mobility?

Yes—but only in a qualified sense. The evidence supports the idea that remote-eligible jobs can expand upward career pathways when they relax a binding geographic constraint on job matching, especially for workers whose local labor markets offer few high-value opportunities. It does not support the broader claim that everyone who works from home earns a causal wage premium, or that remote work automatically improves productivity, promotion, or welfare. The final judgment depends on keeping access, selection, and the meaning of “upward” separate.

This distinction is the central lesson of the two studies. One follows job transitions into employer-defined remote-eligible opportunities. The other asks why workers who report working from home have higher hourly wages. Read together, they describe different stages of the same labor market: remote eligibility can alter who can reach which jobs, while realized WFH can remain concentrated among workers who were already better paid or better positioned to obtain flexibility.

Remote work can widen the ladder when access is the constraint

A career ladder is narrow when a worker’s local labor market contains too few employers, too few adjacent occupations, or too few roles above the worker’s current level. Relocation can widen that market, but relocation has costs that are distributed unevenly. Housing, family obligations, partner employment, commuting, and uncertainty about a new city can make a distant opportunity impractical even when the worker is qualified for it.

Remote eligibility can loosen one of those constraints. It can allow a worker to be considered by an employer outside the immediate labor market without requiring a daily commute or an immediate residential move. The relevant benefit is an expanded feasible opportunity set: more employers and roles become realistic candidates, which can improve the chance of a better match. The mechanism is not that remote work creates ability or guarantees advancement. It is that physical location becomes a less complete filter on who can meet whom in the labor market.

The U.S. evidence is consistent with this mechanism. Compared with reweighted workers entering fully on-site jobs, workers entering remote-eligible jobs experience higher wage growth and are more likely to move into higher-seniority roles. The reported wage-growth association is 0.04 log points, described as an additional 4.13% increase relative to the previous job, and the probability of an upward seniority move rises by 2.05 percentage points. Remote-eligible entry is also associated with about a 1.95-percentage-point increase in cross-metropolitan job changes.

Those numbers should be read as a pattern of transition outcomes, not as a promise that remote work gives every worker a 4.13% raise. The study measures employer-side eligibility at job entry, not a known number of days spent working at home. Its estimates come from an observational comparison using inverse-probability weighting and fixed effects. Their value is that several dimensions of the transition move in a direction consistent with broader access, especially after the analysis accounts for many pre-entry characteristics.

The distribution of the result is especially important. The largest estimated wage gain occurs among workers in the lowest prior-wage tercile: a reported 0.136-log-point, or 14.6%, increase relative to the previous job. The study also finds larger wage-growth associations for workers coming from metropolitan areas with lower high-tech employment shares, and stronger cross-metropolitan responses among workers from lower-rent labor markets. These measures are not direct tests of “disadvantage,” and they do not prove that geography caused the gain. They do, however, fit a specific access story: remote eligibility matters most when it adds options to a market that previously offered few.

This is different from saying that remote work is only for the already privileged. The French evidence shows that workers who work from home are, on average, higher paid, and that much of the apparent premium reflects prior worker characteristics. The U.S. transition evidence shows that the estimated gains from entering remote-eligible jobs are largest among workers with lower prior earnings and thinner local opportunities. The two findings can coexist because access to an opportunity and the probability of receiving a valued arrangement are not the same thing.

The organizational route makes the answer more nuanced.