Working from home has become a fixture of Australian work culture, but its effect on mental health is still widely debated.

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Can working from home boost your mental health? If so, how many days a week are best? Whose wellbeing benefits the most? And is that because there's no commute?

These are among questions we answered in our new study, based on long-term survey data from more than 16,000 Australian workers.

We found working from home boosts women's mental health more than men's.

We analysed 20 years of data from the national Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey, which allowed us to track the work and mental health of more than 16,000 employees.

We didn't include two years of the COVID pandemic (2020 and 2021), because people's mental health then could have been shaped by factors unrelated to working from home.

The data allowed us to track people over time and examine how their mental health changed alongside their commuting patterns and working from home arrangements.

Our statistical models removed any changes driven by major life events (for example, job moves or the arrival of children).

We focused on two things to see if there was any effect on mental health: commuting time and working from home.

We also examined whether these effects differed between people with good and poor mental health, a novel feature of our study.

For women, commuting time had no detectable effect on mental health. But for men, longer commutes were tied to poorer mental health for those who already had strained mental health.

The effect was modest. For a man near the middle of the mental health distribution (close to the median),........

© Canberra Times