How to estimate working-from-home emissions

To estimate homeworking emissions, multiply the number of hours your team works from home in a year by the UK government homeworking factor. The factor is given per full-time equivalent hour and covers the extra electricity for laptops and lighting and the extra heating that wouldn’t have been used if people were in the office. You’ll find it in the Homeworking worksheet of the official 2026 conversion factors.

It’s a quick calculation once you know your team’s working pattern. The harder part is usually deciding whether to include it at all, so that’s covered here too.

Where do homeworking emissions sit in a carbon footprint?

Homeworking is part of Scope 3. The GHG Protocol Scope 3 Standard places it under category 7, employee commuting, and marks it as optional. The energy is paid for by your employees in their own homes, so it isn’t your Scope 1 or Scope 2.

Most small business footprints don’t include it, and nobody expects them to. It becomes worth adding when:

• You’re fully remote, so homeworking is effectively your office.
• A customer or tender specifically asks for commuting and homeworking. Central government Carbon Reduction Plans under PPN 006, for example, include employee commuting in the Scope 3 categories they ask for.
• You want to show the net effect of hybrid working, since fewer commutes partly offset the extra home energy.

How does the UK government homeworking factor work?

The UK government conversion factors, published each year by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, include a Homeworking worksheet. According to the 2026 methodology paper, the method is based on EcoAct’s 2020 Homeworking Emissions Whitepaper and estimates only the extra energy used at home compared with working in an office.

The main assumptions are:

• Office equipment: a workstation (laptop or PC, monitor, phone and printer) uses about 140 watts, plus about 10 watts for lighting.
• Heating: all homes are assumed to be gas heated, with heating used for six months a year (October to March) for ten hours a day.
• Not everyone adds heating: about a third of employees are assumed to have someone else at home during the day who would have had the heating on anyway, so only two-thirds of the heating counts.

The factor is expressed per FTE working hour, and the heating element is already averaged across the whole year. So you multiply by all annual home-working hours, not just the winter months.

In the 2026 set, the office equipment part is about 0.022 kg per hour and the heating part about 0.302 kg per hour, giving a combined factor of about 0.324 kg CO2e per FTE hour. The equipment figure fell by 31% compared with 2025, which the government’s major changes report puts down to the lower UK electricity factor. The heating figure hasn’t changed since 2022. For most small businesses, the combined factor is the one to use.

A worked example: a ten-person hybrid team

A ten-person agency works two days a week from home. Assume 46 working weeks a year after holidays and a 7.5 hour day. The factor is rounded, so the result is approximate.

• Home-working hours per person: 2 days × 7.5 hours × 46 weeks = 690 hours
• Team total: 690 × 10 = 6,900 hours
• Emissions: 6,900 × 0.324 kg = about 2,240 kg, or 2.2 tCO2e

For comparison, a fully remote sole trader working 37.5 hours a week for 46 weeks clocks up 1,725 hours, which is about 0.56 tCO2e a year.

It’s worth setting the result against a co-working desk, which our co-working desk guide estimates from standard office benchmarks. Homeworking isn’t automatically the lower-carbon option once heating is counted.

How do you collect the data without a survey headache?

You don’t need a detailed log from every employee. In order of effort:

1. Use your working pattern. If your policy is two office days a week, that’s a reasonable basis for everyone on it.
2. Adjust for part-timers. Convert to full-time equivalents. Someone on three days a week who works one from home counts as one home day.
3. Run a two-question survey if patterns vary a lot: how many days a week do you usually work from home, and how many hours is a typical day?
4. Note anything unusual, such as people who heat with a heat pump or who work from a co-working space instead of home.

Keep the method in a short note with your footprint. If someone asks how you got the figure, you can answer in one sentence.

How should you present homeworking in your report?

Keep it as its own line, separate from the rest of your footprint, and label it clearly as an estimate. Something like this works well on a supplier form or in a Carbon Reduction Plan:

“Homeworking: approximately 2.2 tCO2e (Scope 3, category 7). Estimated from 6,900 FTE hours worked from home, using the 2026 UK government homeworking factor, which is based on EcoAct’s homeworking methodology.”

That tells the reader the scope, the method, the factor year and the fact that it’s estimated. It also makes next year easy: update the hours and the factor, and you can compare like for like.

Is working from home lower carbon than the office?

Not necessarily, and it’s best to avoid claiming that it is. The answer depends on how people would otherwise commute, how the office is heated, and whether the office stays heated on quiet days anyway.

A team that would otherwise drive long distances will usually save emissions by working from home. A team that would walk or cycle to a shared, efficiently heated office may not. If you want to make a claim either way, estimate commuting too: the number of days in the office, the typical distance and the mode of transport, multiplied by the matching factor from the business travel tables. Our guide to business travel emissions lists rough figures for cars and trains.

How does ESG Now handle remote and hybrid teams?

The ESG Now questionnaire adapts to how you work. If you’re fully remote, it skips the office energy, waste and water questions entirely. If you’re hybrid with an office or co-working base, it calculates that base from your bills or an estimate.

It also estimates homeworking from your full-time equivalent staff and home-working days, and commuting from the days people come in, how they travel and a typical distance. Both are shown as separate lines and labelled as estimates. If you have better data, such as a staff survey, the method above lets you check or refine the figure. Our guide to ESG for remote and hybrid teams covers the rest of what remote businesses get asked.

A fully remote sole trader typically finishes in 10 to 15 minutes. Start your free report, and see our small businesses page for what’s included.