Do Employers Have To Allow Remote Work?

This article was first published in the Greater Rockford Chamber VOICE, September 2026 edition.

Remote work has become a go-to tool for recruiting and retention, especially for younger, tech-savvy employees who do their best work outside a traditional office. But remote work also raises a tangle of legal questions: how to track hours, which state’s laws apply, multi-state tax exposure, and privacy limits on monitoring employees at home. Those are topics for another day.

This article tackles one narrow but increasingly common scenario: an employee asks to work from home because of a physical or mental health condition. Do you have to say yes? And if so, for how long?

As with most employment law questions, the honest answer is “it depends.”

When the ADA Comes Into Play

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) doesn’t require every employer to offer remote work. However, if an employee’s condition qualifies as a “disability” under the ADA, and the employer already allows remote work in some form, disabled employees must have an equal opportunity to participate.

But then the law gets a little more complicated. The ADA requires employers to provide “reasonable accommodations” that allow an employee with a disability to perform the essential parts of their job. That can include letting someone work from home. However, remote work isn’t automatically the answer just because an employee requests it. If another accommodation would work just as well, the employee is not entitled to their first choice, including remote work.

How to Evaluate the Request

The law requires an “interactive process” between employer and employee. In practice, that means the employee explains their medical limitations and how the job could still get done from home, and the employer can ask for reasonable documentation if it’s unclear whether the condition qualifies as a “disability” by the ADA.

Protecting Your Business If There’s a Dispute

Every business should maintain written job descriptions that clearly specify each role’s essential functions. Courts generally defer to an employer’s judgment about what’s essential, but they may still expect minor duties or marginal functions to be reassigned if that’s the only thing preventing the employee’s ability to work from home.

For many jobs, the answer is obvious. A cashier, a food server, or a delivery driver can’t do their job from a laptop at the kitchen table. For office and knowledge-based roles, it’s murkier. The EEOC points employers toward a few key questions:

• Does the role require regular face-to-face collaboration with coworkers? (This may be increasingly hard to justify as video conferencing platforms facilitate that interaction.)
• Does the job depend on in-person contact with clients, customers, or outside partners?
• Does the employee require immediate access to documents or other information only available in the workplace?

How Long Does the Accommodation Last?

Generally, an employee is entitled to work from home for as long as their condition requires it, whether that’s one week or several months during treatment or recovery. Some conditions come with unpredictable flare-ups, which may call for an “as needed” arrangement rather than a fixed schedule, so long as it doesn’t create undue hardship for the business.

The Bottom Line

When an employee asks to work remotely for a health-related reason, resist the urge to give a knee-jerk answer. Be mindful of the ADA’s requirements, work through the interactive process in good faith, and document your reasoning along the way. Better yet, contact an experienced employment lawyer to make sure you navigate the gray areas with confidence for the benefit of your employee and your business.