Working from home has become a fixture of Australian work culture, yet its influence on mental health is still extensively discussed.
Can working from home help your mental health? If so, how many days a week are best? Whose welfare benefits the most? And is that because there’s no commute?
These are among issues we answered in our new study, based on long-term survey data from more than 16,000 Australian workers.
We found working from home boosts women’s mental health more than men’s.
What we carried out
We tracked the job and mental health of almost 16,000 employees by analyzing 20 years of data from the national Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey.

We didn’t include two years of the COVID pandemic (2020 and 2021), because people’s mental health then could have been impacted by variables unrelated to working from home.
The data allowed us to track people over time and evaluate how their mental health evolved with their commute patterns and working from home arrangements.
Our statistical models excluded any changes triggered by big life events (for example, job relocation or the advent of children).
In order to determine whether working from home and commuting time had any impact on mental health, we concentrated on two factors.

As a novel aspect of our study, we also looked at whether these impacts varied between individuals with good and bad mental health.
Men and women are affected by commuting in different ways.
For women, commute time had no detectable effect on mental health. However, for males whose mental health was already challenged, longer commutes were associated with worse mental health.
It had a small impact. For a man around the middle of the mental health distribution (close to the median), adding half an hour to his one-way commute reduced reported mental health by roughly the same amount as a 2% drop in household income.
For women, hybrid work was ideal.
Working from home has a strong favorable influence on women’s mental health, but only in certain conditions.Women who worked mostly from home but also spent one or two days a week in the office or on-site showed the greatest improvements.
For women with low mental health, this arrangement led to better mental health than working completely on-site. The gains were equivalent to a 15% increase in household income.
This finding parallels an earlier study, which indicated the same type of mixed work arrangements linked to greater job satisfaction and productivity.

The advantages for women's mental health go beyond simply cutting down on commute time. Because our analysis controlled for transportation independently, these advantages reflected additional good elements of working from home. These include assisting people in balancing work and family obligations or reducing job-related stress.
Women's mental health was not significantly impacted by light or infrequent work from home. Due in large part to the fact that we saw comparatively few women working from home full-time, the evidence for this practice was less conclusive.
For men, working from home showed no statistically reliable influence on mental health, either positive or bad, regardless of how many days they worked from home or on-site.

This could be explained by the gendered division of labor in Australian homes and the tendency for men's social and friendship networks to be more focused on their jobs.
What’s the key message?
Workers with lower mental health are the most sensitive to long journeys and the most likely to benefit from extensive working from home options. This is partially due to the fact that individuals with poor mental health are already less able to handle stressful situations.
Working from home can significantly improve the welfare of women who have poor mental health. Reducing commuting hours can also be beneficial for men with poor mental health.

However, workers with robust mental health appear less vulnerable to both commuting and working-from-home habits. Although they may still enjoy flexibility, their work arrangements have less of an impact on their mental health.
What comes next?
Here are our recommendations based on our findings.
If you are an employee, keep an eye on how various work-from-home arrangements and commuting impact your personal well-being instead of believing there is a single optimal strategy. If you struggle with mental health, arrange your most demanding duties on days when you are working in the place where you feel most comfortable.

If you’re an employer, offer flexible working-from-home opportunities, especially for employees who struggle with mental health. Consider hybrid models that involve both home and workplace time, since these appear most helpful. Treat travel time as an issue in workload and wellbeing conversations. Avoid one-size-fits-all return-to-office policies.
If you make public policy, invest in reducing congestion and improving public transport capacity. Strengthen structures that enable flexible work arrangements. Support access to mental health care.