Home Depot's five-day return-to-office mandate took effect Monday April 6 for corporate employees at the Atlanta Store Support Center, coupled with a cut of roughly 800 corporate positions announced in late January. [1] The company's operating logic is explicit: hourly store associates never left, and corporate should not live a different schedule than the people whose work it supports. The logic lands at a different place for the office staff, which is why the parking lot at the Atlanta campus, half-empty through 2025, is full again.

The national picture has moved with it. Remote work as a share of paid workdays has fallen to 22.6 percent from a 2023 peak of 28.5 percent, according to the WFH Research project. [2] The federal workforce, subject to Trump's January return-to-office executive order, is now operating at near-total on-site attendance. [3] Archie's 2026 RTO tracker, which began as a forecast of which Fortune 500 companies would mandate five days in 2026, has quietly shifted to a record of which ones already have. Home Depot joins Amazon, JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Dell, Boeing, Disney, and Starbucks. [2]

The X discourse lives outside the WSJ headline. Federal News Network has documented cases of line managers denying telework exceptions to single parents whose childcare arrangements predate the mandate. [2] The r/remotework subreddit archives internal memos. Bank of America saw a second wave of attrition after a March childcare-cost pushback. [2] None of this appears in the 22.6 percent headline number, because attrition registers as a different worker deciding that the math does not work.

The rollback is complete enough that its shape is now clear. The question the 2026 tracker will end up answering is how much of the office is furniture and how much is culture.

-- MAYA CALLOWAY, New York