Remote employees have quietly unlocked one major workplace perk: Getting paid 12% more than their in-office colleagues, Fed study finds

At the end of last year, a Harvard University–led study revealed the lengths to which remote employees would go to continue working from the comfort of their home offices: Participants were, on average, willing to forgo 25% of their total compensation in order to have their identical job, except with partial or full remote work capabilities, instead of working in the office.

New research from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco suggests the opposite phenomenon is happening—at least for some workers. Employees working from home are actually getting paid more than their in-office colleagues. 

A recent study published by the San Francisco Fed analyzed data from nearly 25,000 French employees using the French Labor Force Survey, as well as firm-level data, and Social Security records to look at which jobs had flexible options, what they paid, as well as demographic information about the workers.

Researchers found employees who work from home, at least some of the time, earned, on average, 12% higher hourly rates than those working fully in-person. About half of this boost was correlated with education levels, gender, and age, and when researchers controlled for these variables, they still saw about a 6% difference in wages, with remote employees still e...