Remote vs. On-Site: What US Executives Actually Expect in 2026

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, tax, immigration, or financial advice.

The remote work debate is over. The executives won. According to SHRM 2025-2026 research, 48% of organizations report profitability increases with engaged workforces, and flexible work is a material engagement driver. Research shows executives now recognize the direct link between flexibility policies and financial performance, both through talent retention and real estate cost reduction (up to 55% savings in some cases).

Not employees asking for flexibility. Not real estate vendors panicking. Not consultants selling cultural cohesion. Executives won because they now control when and where work happens, and they’re using that control to reshape how they build, scale, and compensate their teams.

We need to be direct about what we’re seeing in 2026: the work-from-anywhere fantasy is dead, the full return-to-office mandate is fading, and what’s left is a ruthlessly pragmatic middle ground that favors companies willing to be explicit about what they need and flexible about how they get it.

If you’re a foreign company entering the US market or trying to understand what your American counterparts actually expect, you’re probably getting this wrong. Let me tell you what they really want.

Remote vs. On-Site Work: Executive-Level Data (2024-2025)

Sources: SHRM, Gartner, McKinsey, Korn Ferry (2024-2025 data)

The Current State: It’s Not What the Headlines Say

The popular narrative suggests American executives are divided. Some headlines scream “CEO Demands Return to Office,” while others celebrate “Majority of Companies Maintain Remote-First Policies.” Both are partially true, which means both are misleading.

Here’s the actual picture:

88% of executives managing hybrid or remote teams say they would not enforce a full return to office. That’s a significant number, and it tells you something important: the era of unconditional office mandates is over. Companies that tried forcing everyone back in 2023 and 2024 learned a painful lesson: you lose talent, productivity drops, and you burn through real estate costs you can’t justify.

But here’s what those same executives are doing: they’re incrementally increasing in-office requirements. Companies requiring full five-day office attendance are expected to rise to 30% by 2026. Nearly half of all companies now plan to require employees to be in the office four days a week or more. 34% of employees must be on-site four days per week, up from 23% in 2023.

That’s not a return to office. That’s a slow, methodical increase in mandatory in-person time.

The distribution looks like this: About 52% of remote-capable employees now work hybrid. Roughly 26% work fully remote. Only about 22% are fully on-site. And in the job market, 24% of new postings in Q4 2025 were hybrid, with 11% fully remote.

What does this mean? Hybrid is the baseline expectation now, not the exception. If you’re offering pure remote or pure on-site, you’re already behind.

The Executive Playbook: It Varies Far More Than You Think

This is where most foreign companies fail. They treat “executive expectations” as a monolith. They’re not.

The Chief Financial Officer (CFO)

CFOs are laser-focused on one metric: cost per unit of output. And they’ve discovered something that threatens a lot of office-centric real estate businesses: remote and flexible work can reduce real estate costs by 55%.

That’s not theoretical. That’s in CFO spreadsheets right now.

Here’s what CFOs are actually doing: 74% of CFOs plan to move at least 5% of their previously on-site workforce to permanently remote positions specifically to cut costs. They’re not doing this because they think remote work is morally superior or because employees asked nicely. They’re doing it because the math works.

This means CFOs are building hybrid policies that prioritize cost efficiency over culture. They want core roles in-office, but they’re ruthless about moving anything that doesn’t require physical proximity into a permanently remote structure. Accounting, finance operations, some analysis: these roles are being decoupled from geography intentionally.

The CFO’s unspoken rule: If you can do it remotely and it costs less, why wouldn’t you?

The Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

CTOs have a different problem: they can’t find enough talent. And the talent they can find demands flexibility.

CTOs care most about productivity (85% cite it as a priority), but they’ve also learned that rigid office policies tank retention. The best engineers don’t need a CTO’s permission to work from anywhere: they’ll just take a job at a company that doesn’t require it.

This makes CTOs pragmatic about hybrid arrangements, but with a twist: they want core hours, collaborative spaces, and access to in-person mentorship for junior engineers. They’re not fighting remote work; they’re fighting the loss of institutional knowledge transfer that happens when everyone is distributed.

The CTO’s unspoken rule: Let senior engineers work remote. Keep juniors close. Make office time about collaboration, not seat-warming.

The Vice President of Sales

VPs of Sales are a different breed entirely. They want their teams in one place, or at least clustered by territory. Full stop.

Sales is fundamentally about relationships, competitive energy, and the informal knowledge-sharing that happens around a conference table or at lunch. A VP of Sales managing a fully distributed team is fighting gravity.

What VPs of Sales are actually doing: They’re requiring in-office time for the team, but allowing senior account executives who’ve already built relationships to work hybrid. They’re separating roles by maturity and performance.

The VP of Sales’s unspoken rule: Collaboration in person. Execution anywhere.

The Comparison: Remote vs. Hybrid vs. On-Site

Let me give you the actual trade-offs executives are weighing:

The dirty secret: Most executives are choosing hybrid because it’s not actually better than remote or on-site. It’s just cheaper than either extreme and harder for employees to argue against.

What Foreign Companies Get Dangerously Wrong

We work with a lot of international companies trying to establish operations in the US. They make predictable mistakes:

Mistake 1: Imposing HQ Culture on American Offices

A German company we worked with opened a US office and immediately instituted a 4-day mandatory office week. They were shocked when their best hires left within six months.

Their reasoning was sound by German standards: office presence builds culture, informal collaboration drives innovation, the team needs face-time. All true. But they applied German expectations to an American labor market where top talent has options, many of them.

American executives have learned this lesson through attrition: impose a policy that competes poorly against what competitors offer, and you lose your best people to those competitors. It’s not philosophical. It’s supply and demand.

What works: Foreign companies that succeed in the US adapt to American expectations, not the reverse. They listen to what CFOs, CTOs, and VPs of Sales actually want, and they let the work model follow the business needs, not the other way around.

Mistake 2: Treating Location-Based Pay as Offensive

Many foreign companies are appalled by location-based pay. It seems unfair. A developer in Austin does the same work as a developer in San Francisco; why should one earn 30% less?

By that logic, they’re right. But American executives have already accepted location-based pay as standard practice.

The reality: 66% of US firms offer location flexibility, but most of those firms also adjust compensation based on geographic cost-of-living. A developer in Austin earning $150k might earn $195k in San Francisco. This isn’t discrimination; it’s market pricing.

Foreign companies often resist this and pay market rates everywhere, which creates its own problems: either your Austin office becomes dominated by people who moved there from expensive markets and can’t afford to stay long-term, or you overpay relative to local markets and your CFO has questions about efficiency.

What works: Transparent geographic pay bands tied to clearly defined cost-of-living indexes. Employees know where they stand. No surprises.

Mistake 3: Confusing Flexibility with Performance Tolerance

Some foreign companies interpret American flexibility as “we don’t care where you work, so we don’t care how much work you do.” They’re lenient on hours, loose on accountability, and shocked when output drops.

American executives are learning a different lesson: flexibility about location doesn’t mean flexibility about results. In fact, companies that offer remote or hybrid work are increasingly adopting stricter output-based performance metrics because they can’t rely on face time as a proxy for work.

What works: Decouple location policy from accountability. Be clear: “We don’t care where you work. We care about outcomes. Here’s how we measure them.”

The Compensation Conversation: Where Remote Intersects with Pay

This is where executives get uncomfortable, so let me be blunt.

Remote work fundamentally changed compensation expectations, and most companies haven’t fully reckoned with it.

The tension: If a role is legitimately remote, with a developer in rural Pennsylvania doing the same work as a developer in Manhattan, does the Manhattan cost-of-living differential apply?

Different executives answer this differently:

Conservative approach (common among tech companies): Market-rate pay by role and location. A senior software engineer earns $220k in San Francisco, $180k in Austin, $140k in rural Ohio. Justified by local market rates and cost of living.

Progressive approach (startup standard): Same pay regardless of location. A senior engineer earns $200k whether they’re in San Francisco or small-town Montana. Simplified, egalitarian, and increasingly hard to sustain when your payroll is 30% higher than competitors.

Hybrid approach (increasingly common): Tiered locations. “Tier 1” cities (San Francisco, New York, Boston) get full market rate. “Tier 2” cities (Austin, Denver, Seattle) get 85% of market rate. “Tier 3” areas get 70%. Simplified categories, still responsive to real differences in cost and market pressures.

What executives are actually doing: About two-thirds of US companies now adjust remote worker compensation by location. It’s standard. If you’re a foreign company importing American-style salaries everywhere, you’ll eventually face pressure to adjust.

The contrarian insight: Remote work doesn’t eliminate geographic pay differences. It just makes them more granular and harder to defend if you’re not explicit about the logic.

The Checklist: What to Do Right if You’re a Foreign Company Setting US Work Policies

You want to avoid the mistakes we’ve outlined. Here’s what works:

• Be explicit about the work model for each role. Not the company overall: each role. Some sales roles need to be in-office. Some support roles can be fully remote. Say this clearly in job postings and onboarding.
• Tie the work model to business outcomes, not culture. Don’t say “we want hybrid because it builds culture.” Say “account executives work on-site Monday-Thursday because client relationships require in-person collaboration.” Employees respect honest reasoning.
• Set clear core hours and location requirements in advance. If hybrid means “Monday, Wednesday, Friday in-office,” say so. If it means “we need you in-office 3 days a week, you pick which days,” say so. Ambiguity kills retention.
• Establish transparent, role-based compensation bands. Use clearly defined location tiers tied to actual cost-of-living and market data. Communicate this during hiring. No surprises after offer.
• Resist the urge to import headquarters culture wholesale. If your HQ is in Germany and you have an office in Austin, your Austin office doesn’t need to look or operate like your German headquarters. American talent has options. Compete on flexibility if you can’t compete on prestige.
• Measure output, not presence. Remote, hybrid, and on-site workers should all be evaluated the same way: by results. If you can’t measure results, that’s your hiring problem, not your location policy problem.
• Acknowledge that executive expectations vary by role. Your CFO cares about costs. Your CTO cares about talent retention and productivity. Your VP of Sales cares about collaboration. All valid. Align your policy to serve all three, or make a deliberate choice about which priority wins.
• Plan for incremental change. You’re not locked into a policy forever. What you offer today is what you’ll offer in six months unless you deliberately change it. So don’t over-commit. Start with 2-3 days in-office for collaborative roles. You can always increase. You can’t easily decrease.
• Build the infrastructure for distributed work, even if you require in-office time. If 3 days a week your team is in-office and 2 days distributed, your meeting rooms, collaboration tools, and communication norms need to work smoothly for both. Most companies get this wrong and end up with distributed employees watching in-office conversations on Zoom. That’s not hybrid. That’s exclusion.
• Accept that some of your best people might still leave. You can’t offer everything. If someone needs fully remote and you require 3 days in-office, they’ll find a job that fits. That’s okay. Optimize for the 90%, not the outliers.

The Real Executive Agenda in 2026

Strip away the rhetoric about culture, collaboration, and company values. Here’s what’s actually driving executive decisions:

For CFOs: Remote work is a tool to reduce real estate costs and access cheaper labor markets. It’s not about employee wellbeing or work-life balance. It’s about the spreadsheet. This is why CFOs love geographic pay bands: they create cost efficiency.

For CTOs: Remote work is a necessary evil to retain talent. They wish everyone was in-office. They know they can’t mandate it. So they’re designing hybrid models that maximize informal knowledge-sharing during in-office time and maximize focus during remote time. It’s optimization within constraints.

For VPs of Sales: Remote work is a loss they’ve accepted for roles that don’t directly impact client relationships. But for client-facing roles? They’re fighting to keep people in-office, and they’re winning because sales is inherently relationship-driven.

For all of them: Location-based pay is the future because it aligns compensation with market realities and cost structures. It’s not unfair; it’s efficient. And efficiency is the language executives speak.

The One Contrarian Thing Worth Saying

Here it is: The best companies in 2026 won’t be debating remote vs. on-site. They’ll be clear about what each role requires, they’ll compensate fairly within that constraint, and they’ll stop pretending the work model is a proxy for company values.

The worst companies will still be trying to create culture through office mandate and wondering why they can’t compete for talent.

The rest will muddle through with inconsistent policies that work for some roles and feel arbitrary to others.

If you’re building a company or entering the US market, you have a choice: be intentional about your work model, or inherit the confusion that everyone else is dealing with.

The work model conversation is done. The next conversation, the one that separates excellent companies from mediocre ones, is about intentional, role-based flexibility paired with transparent compensation and ruthless accountability on outcomes.

Ready to set a US work model that holds up? At Pact & Partners, based in Miami with a second office in Boston, we place executives for foreign companies entering the US market, and we see every week which location policies close candidates and which ones lose them. Our how we work page explains the method, our fees page sets out the search fee structure, and our guide to relocation packages for US executives covers what changes when a role is hybrid rather than fully on-site.

If you are hiring in the US and want to pressure-test your work model before it costs you a candidate, schedule a meeting with our CEO. We can discuss the roles you are trying to fill, what the market expects for each of them, and how to write a policy your best hires will actually accept.