Bank of America places new restriction on remote work

• Key insight: Only a few years ago, hybrid work looked like a permanent feature of the banking industry. But one by one, lenders have made flexible work less flexible.
• Supporting data: Most Bank of America employees are still allowed to work two days per week from home. But starting after Labor Day, those days will have to be nonconsecutive.
• Why it matters: Bank of America says it's better if not all employees are crowding into the office on the same two or three days in the middle of the week.

As the COVID-19 pandemic drifts further into the rearview mirror, even the most flexible banks are quietly tightening their return-to-office policies.

Almost all JPMorganChase employees are on-site five days a week. So are the staff at Truist Financial. And in the latest example, Bank of America's employees will soon be barred from working from home two days in a row.

Compared to other big lenders in the post-pandemic period, the nation's second-largest bank has maintained a relatively flexible hybrid work policy. Since 2022, client-facing workers at BofA have been required to work at the office all week, but other employees — who make up a majority of the 211,000-person workforce — have retained the right to work any two weekdays from home.

Now that's about to change — slightly. Starting on Sept. 8, those employees eligible for hybrid work will be required to space out their remote days, a BofA spokesperson confirmed to American Banker. That means no more working from home Monday and Tuesday, Thursday and Friday or even Friday and Monday; there must always be one day of in-office work in between.

The reasons for this change, the spokesperson said, are twofold. Like many other banks, BofA believes in the value of in-person collaboration. And secondly, the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank wants to make efficient use of its commercial real estate.

Both purposes, the spokesperson said, are better served if not all employees are crowding into the office on the same two or three days in the middle of the week. The tweak to the policy, BofA emphasized, was informed by employee feedback.

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But the change is also emblematic of a broader shift. In the years just after COVID arrived in the United States, remote and hybrid work grew far more common in almost all industries, including banking. By 2024, 73% of financial-services firms were operating at least partly on a work-from-home basis, according to Arizent research.

"We won't put the genie back in the bottle," James Gorman, then the CEO of Morgan Stanley, predicted to Bloomberg in 2023. "Five days in the office for everybody is not going to happen again."

But more recently, the tide has begun to turn. In January 2025, JPMorgan announced that it was calling all its employees back to the office full-time, with few exceptions, effective that March. Truist made the same announcement in November, effective in January 2026. Goldman Sachs, which set a five-weekday return-to-office policy all the way back in 2021, has repeatedly reminded its employees of that policy.

Some bank employees, including thousands at JPMorgan who signed a petition protesting the five-weekday mandate, saw the clawback of hybrid work as a step backward. Many banks and their allies, meanwhile, saw it as an overdue correction.

"It's gone in a cycle," Alan Johnson, president of Johnson Associates, a consulting firm for some of the world's largest financial companies, told American Banker last year. "At first you could work anywhere, anytime, whatever, and then people realized that we went too far with that."