by Rat Race Rebellion June 28, 2026
Long before the pandemic, many workers with disabilities requested remote work as a reasonable accommodation. They were told, more often than not, that it wasn’t possible. The job required being in the office. The culture depended on it. Flexibility like that couldn’t be extended to one person without extending it to everyone.
Then, in 2020 it happened – almost overnight.
What happened wasn’t theoretical. Remote work opened doors for people with physical disabilities, chronic illnesses, mental health conditions, and sensory impairments who had been locked out of or pushed out of traditional workplaces for years. Fewer commutes, more control over physical environments, less sensory overload, more flexibility to schedule medical appointments without disrupting the workday. For many, it wasn’t just a convenience — it was what made working at all possible.
This isn’t a small segment of the workforce. According to the CDC, roughly one in four U.S. adults lives with some form of disability, making workplace accessibility a mainstream employment issue rather than a niche one.
Now, return-to-office mandates are putting that access at risk.
What The Data Is Showing
Accommodation requests have risen alongside the expansion of return-to-office mandates. According to recent HR surveys, 60% of HR professionals report an increase in accommodation requests – and of those, 62% say the increase was by more than 21%. The single most common accommodation being requested? The ability to work from home.
In the federal government, where a January 2025 executive order directed employees back to the office five days a week, the numbers are even more stark. At FEMA alone, more than 4,600 reasonable accommodation requests were filed in fiscal year 2025, more than three times the prior year’s total. A separate workplace evaluation firm found that 86% of federal employees seeking accommodation evaluations cited the return-to-office mandate as the reason they sought one.
The pattern is clear: RTO isn’t affecting all workers the same way. For employees whose disabilities were managed in part by the flexibility remote work provided, the mandate isn’t an inconvenience — it’s a material change to their ability to do their job.
The Legal Picture Is More Complicated Than It Looks
Many workers assume the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) automatically protects them from RTO mandates. The reality is more nuanced.
The ADA requires employers to provide reasonable accommodations but it doesn’t automatically classify remote work as one. Whether work qualifies as a reasonable accommodation depends on an individualized assessment: the specific job, the specific disability, and whether working remotely would allow the employee to perform the essential functions of the role. Employers are required to engage in that assessment in good faith. However, workers and disability advocates have reported that this individualized process is not always followed consistently.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) issued joint guidance on this in February 2026, specifically in response to confusion about how RTO mandates interact with disability accommodation requirements. The guidance clarified that blanket RTO policies don’t override individual accommodation rights, but the gap between legal requirements and employees’ reported experiences has often been significant.
Workers who had telework arrangements that functioned effectively as accommodations – even informally – are finding those arrangements removed without the individualized review the law requires. Some are pushing back. Many are not, either because they don’t know they can, or because the process of doing so is itself a barrier.
What This Means For Remote Job Seekers With Disabilities
For anyone with a disability or chronic condition who relies on remote work as more than a preference, the current hiring environment requires more scrutiny than it used to.
A company’s current remote policy isn’t a guarantee of future flexibility. Some of the employers who were fully remote in 2022 and 2023 have since issued RTO mandates. A role that’s remote today may carry a policy change within a year or two, and for someone whose ability to work depends on that arrangement, the gap matters.
What to look for: employers who have been explicit about remote work as a permanent operating model — not just a temporary policy — tend to be more stable on that front. Long-established remote-first employers often provide more policy stability than companies that adopted remote work during the pandemic. Those signals are usually visible in how employers talk about their work culture in the listing, in interviews, and in publicly available statements from leadership.
It’s also worth asking directly, during the hiring process, whether the company’s remote policy is a stated permanent commitment or subject to change — and whether the company has a formal process for disability accommodations. Employers who have built that infrastructure tend to answer that question clearly. Those who haven’t, tend to be vague.
The Bottom Line
Remote work wasn’t originally adopted as a disability inclusion strategy – but for millions of workers, that’s exactly what it became. It quietly became one of the most meaningful accessibility tools the modern workplace had produced, not by policy, but by circumstance.
The current RTO wave is a stress test for that progress. Some employers will hold the line on flexibility. Others will treat RTO as a reason to stop assessing accommodations individually – which is both a legal risk for them and a real one for the workers who depend on it.
For job seekers navigating this, the question to ask before accepting any remote role isn’t just “is this remote now?” It’s “what’s the company’s stated commitment to keeping it that way?” In a market where policies are shifting, that distinction is more important than it’s ever been.
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