Did working from home spark a baby boom? New Australian research says no, and Victoria's WFH law is about to lapse

By The Rundowns News Desk · Published 1 November 2026

When millions of Australians started working from home in 2020, some economists predicted more babies would follow: less commuting, more flexibility, easier childcare juggling. New Australian research says it hasn't happened. The e61 Institute, an independent economic think tank, found no measurable rise in births among women whose jobs shifted most to working from home. The finding lands days before new national birth figures, and as Victoria's proposed legal right to work from home is set to lapse when parliament expires on Tuesday.

What the research found

The study is by e61 research manager Pelin Akyol. She presented it at the HILDA Survey conference in early October, and The Age reported on it on Sunday night. The full paper hasn't been published yet, so the details below come from the conference slides and The Age's report.

• The data: HILDA, a long-running survey that follows the same Australian households every year (waves 2001 to 2024). The sample was women aged 30 to 44.
• The method: the pandemic acted as a natural experiment. Akyol compared women whose 2019 jobs could easily be done from home with women whose jobs couldn't, before and after 2020.
• Working from home did jump: women in more home-friendly occupations saw a much bigger rise in working from home after 2020 (about 9.5 percentage points more for each step up the scale, per the slides).
• Births didn't follow: one-year and two-year birth rates showed no statistically significant change. The slides are careful to say that's a failure to detect an effect, "not proof of an exact zero".
• Intentions: women in more home-friendly jobs reported slightly lower plans for more children, but that was a trend that already existed before the pandemic, not something working from home caused.
• One possible exception: the slides flag a suggestive effect where both partners have highly home-friendly jobs, though it isn't the main finding.

Akyol told The Age that Australia's fertility decline is driven by the cost of raising children, housing affordability, economic security and the career costs of parenthood. Working from home "does not remove the financial and time costs of raising children", she said, though flexibility may still help parents combine work and care.

Why it clashes with overseas research

Earlier this year, a team including Stanford's Nick Bloom published a US National Bureau of Economic Research working paper using surveys across 38 countries. It found people who work from home at least one day a week had more children from 2023 to 2025 and planned more, and that couples where both partners work from home had an estimated 0.32 more children per woman over their lifetime than couples where neither does.

The two studies aren't necessarily contradictory. The overseas paper measures an association and acknowledges it could partly be selection: people who want families may seek out jobs that let them work from home. The e61 study tries to isolate cause and effect using a shock nobody chose. It also lines up with the overseas paper's hint that the effect, if any, is strongest when both partners work from home.

Australia's fertility rate is at a record low

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the total fertility rate was 1.481 babies per woman in 2024, the lowest on record and well below the roughly 2.1 needed to replace the population without migration (also reported by the ABC and AAP). Births still rose 1.9% to 292,318 because there are more women of child-bearing age.

Victoria bucked the trend in 2024: its rate rose to 1.521, from 1.392 in 2023, per the ABS state table. The ACT was lowest at 1.273. The ABS lists its next Births release for Friday 6 November 2026. The Age reports it's expected to confirm the rate is still at a record low, but that's a forecast until the figures are out.

The Victorian angle: the WFH law lapses on Tuesday

Victoria was set to become the first state to give workers a legal right to work from home. The Equal Opportunity Amendment (Work from Home) Bill 2026 would have given eligible employees up to two days a week at home where that's reasonable. It passed the Legislative Assembly unamended on 30 July.

In the upper house on 10 September, the Coalition and crossbench voted 18 to 17 to send the bill to a select committee and defer debate until it reports (AAP, Guardian Australia). The committee was due to report by 20 October. The bill's official status page still shows it stuck at the Council's second reading.

The Parliament of Victoria says any legislation not passed when parliament expires on 3 November 2026 will lapse. So unless something unexpected happens, there will be no Victorian work from home law before the 28 November election. Whoever wins would have to bring a new bill to the next parliament, which makes working from home a live election issue (see our caretaker explainer).

What you can do now

The national right to request flexible work still applies everywhere. Under the Fair Work Act, according to the Fair Work Ombudsman, employees with at least 12 months' service can ask in writing to change where they work if, for example, they're pregnant or the parent or carer of a school-age or younger child. The employer must reply in writing within 21 days and can refuse only on reasonable business grounds. Check the Ombudsman's page for the full eligibility list and how to dispute a refusal.

What's next

We'll update this post when the ABS releases its 2025 birth figures (listed for 6 November), when e61 publishes the full paper, and if parties make work from home pledges during the campaign.