Less people are working from home than a year ago, with the rise in energy bills cited as one reason why more people return to offices, a new study has found.

This year, 28% of workers have said they usually work from home, down from 37% last year.

The report was compiled by Deirdre Frost, policy analyst at Western Development Commission, and used the most recent CSO Labour Force Survey figures.

Ms Frost said: "The simple reason why there has been a decline is because there has been a removal of the Government guidelines which forced people to work from home due to the pandemic."

However, compared to pre-pandemic trend, the rate is still much higher than it used to be.

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Ms Frost said: "The question is, is this the beginning of the new normal? We do not have to work from home anymore, which we had in 2021, but now we have much higher rates of homeworking."

The study revealed there are significant regional differences in remote working, with 39% of people in Dublin working from home. The Midlands had the lowest rate of 20.9%.

However, there are still more people based at home than before the pandemic for a number of reasons including "current tight labour market, relatively high house prices, high fuel costs and the more established practice of remote working compared to just a few years ago", according to Ms Frost.

Dublin has seen a reversal in this trend, as prior to the pandemic it was the area with the least amount of people working from home.

Ms Frost said: "Before the pandemic, the Dublin region had some of the lowest rates of working from home, whereas the more rural regions, such as the Border and West had some of the higher rates.

"This pattern is reversed in 2022, where the Dublin region has the highest rate and the Mid-West and Midlands regions having the lowest rates.

"This is likely to be a pandemic effect where more employers are now supporting a greater level of working from home and this is most evident in Dublin."

It comes after CIPD Ireland, the organisation representing HR professionals, warned last week that soaring energy bills might remove the remote working trend this winter.

Working in a heated, comfortable office might be the answer to many people's problems as they try to bring down the cost of running their home during the colder months.

The organisation's director, Mary Connaughton, said the current energy crisis might change the perspective for a lot of employees. She urged employers to be understanding of workers' wellbeing and to aim to be flexible with their work-from-home policies during winter.

Ms Frost said: "It will be interesting to see what happens over the course of the winter when more people would be paying for fuel and heating.

"There is definitely going to be a tradeoff for those employees who have a choice. We could see a push and pull for both scenarios for people to work from home because of the extra fuel costs and transport costs compared with people going into the office because they don't want to pay for using their home.

"There are a lot of other factors that may come into play such as employees not liking hot desking, the extent that employers are supporting hybrid working, or a further spike of Covid, which would increase the rate of people working from home."