Remote work in IT 2026: 60 percent at home, but nobody talks about it

#Remote work in IT 2026: 60 percent at home, but nobody talks about it

Sixty percent. Live data from Just Join IT for 2024 and 2025 reports 60.12 percent of Polish IT specialists working remotely, 32.47 percent hybrid, only 7.41 percent in the office. Despite this, the public narrative in 2026 is “everyone is going back to the office”. The data says otherwise. This article argues that polemic with concrete numbers.

The piece connects to the English article on the Polish nearshore senior and to the polemic on Polish WordPress developer salaries, where the same dataset is used in a different context.

#TL;DR

• Just Join IT live data: 60.12 percent actually remote, 32.47 percent hybrid, 7.41 percent office.
• Offers listed as remote: 46.75 percent. Practice runs ahead of the listing by 13 percentage points.
• Trend stable or growing from 2023 to 2025.
• For Poland nearshore: the contractor standard is remote work, regardless of the offer description.

#The numbers that are publicly available

Just Join IT, salary report 2024/2025 (live data, aggregator):

The gap between listing and practice is 13.37 percentage points for fully remote. In other words, 13.37 percent of IT specialists work remotely even though their offer was not listed that way. That is the key fact for understanding the market.

No Fluff Jobs IT job market 2025/2026 confirms the trend, though with a different cross-section: B2B at the senior level is 72 percent of placements in 2025. A B2B contract means remote work by default, because there is no employment relationship and no obligation to be present in the office.

#Polemic: why “return to office” is a narrative, not data

Three interpretations of how the numbers relate to the media narrative:

First, narrative-driven: in 2024 and 2025 many large companies announced a “return to office”. These announcements reached the media. They were received as a market trend.

Second, segment-specific: the announcements concerned a specific segment (global corporations with offices in Poland, some fintechs, some big tech). The rest of the market, especially senior B2B, was not affected.

Third, behavioural: where the employer forced a return, specialists changed employer. Just Join IT data, which measures the actual work mode rather than employer declarations, shows the net effect: remote work held its ground because specialists choose remote work and have the leverage to keep it.

The senior B2B median is 24360 PLN net according to Just Join IT 2024. A senior at this rate has dozens of active offers on the market. Forcing a return costs the employer that senior.

#What the pandemic changed and what it did not

What it changed:

• The Polish IT market internalised remote tools (Slack/Zoom/Notion/Linear) as the standard.
• Employers learned to onboard and run a project remotely.
• Specialists relocated from office cities to cheaper locations (Tricity, Wroclaw, Krakow, smaller towns).

What it did not change:

• Very small local employers still prefer the office.
• Onboarding a junior is harder remotely; the junior share of the market dropped to 5.3 percent in 2025 (No Fluff Jobs).
• Team culture has to be built deliberately; it does not emerge on its own through Slack.

The last point is where the mythical return-to-office narrative was born. An employer who could not build team culture remotely tries to enforce physical proximity as the fix. Specialists respond by changing employer. The numbers confirm it.

#What this means for the western nearshore buyer

Five implications for an agency or buyer working with a Polish specialist:

First, a Polish senior B2B specialist in 2026 is remote by default. Physical location in Poland is practically irrelevant; the Polish location only matters for time zone and legal jurisdiction.

Second, online tools are mature. Slack, Linear, Notion, Loom, GitHub, Cloudflare. The Polish senior has worked with these tools since 2020 and does not relearn them for a western contract.

Third, asynchronous work is the standard. The Polish senior does not expect a daily meeting with the UK or DACH. A weekly standup plus written updates is a sufficient format.

Fourth, a contractor places less load on HR and the office. No need to rent a desk, no benefits coordination, no corporate back office. The B2B rate is a net-to-bank rate.

Fifth, EU jurisdiction post-Brexit. Regardless of physical location in Poland, a B2B contractor operates under Polish law, and Poland is under GDPR, NIS2 and (where applicable) DORA.

#Poland vs UK vs DACH: a comparison of market structure

Poland is the only market in this comparison that combines high remote density with a dominant B2B model and EU jurisdiction. That is a structural position, not a passing fashion.

#Polemic: what this means for the “WordPress developer”

A Polish WordPress developer in 2026 is not a “Polish WordPress developer”. They are a senior IT specialist on Polish B2B who builds WordPress + Astro or Next.js + Cloudflare. They work remotely. They collaborate with clients in Germany, the UK, the US, sometimes from Poland.

The fact that the client opens a laptop in Berlin, London or San Francisco does not change the fact that the senior sits in the Tricity, Wroclaw or on the borderlands. The Polish IT market is remote in a Polish way, not because of the client.

This is why “Polish WordPress nearshore” is a distorting term in 2026. It is not just nearshore; it is a remote senior who operates on the EU market with a Polish rate and a western process.

#Where this article fits

It connects to the English article on the Polish nearshore senior, the polemic on Polish WordPress developer salaries, the WPPoland careers page, and the headless WordPress services pillar, where the technical standards of the Polish senior are translated into an offer for the western client.

For the application volume side of the same data, see Polish IT applications-per-offer drop 2026.