New analysis by Tally Workspace shows UK startups, in contrast to many enterprise firms, are avoiding hard return-to-office mandates and favouring flexible, ambiguous, or light-touch hybrid models instead.
A new benchmark analysis from Tally Workspace, reviewing job listings and careers pages, and surveying professionals from across more than 160 UK startups, finds that only around 1.2% currently mandate full-time office attendance.
Rather than converging on a single return-to-office approach, startups appear to be deliberately avoiding rigid policies altogether. Nearly 40% don’t disclose any RTO expectations during hiring, while those that do most commonly anchor attendance at 2 days per week in the office.
As hiring normalises in 2026 and competition for talent intensifies, return-to-office language is increasingly being used to signal how work gets done, not simply where it happens.
Key findings from our study
- 40% of UK startups do not disclose RTO expectations in job listings
- UK startups are not converging on a single return-to-office model
- 1.2% of UK startups require full-time office attendance
- Hybrid is the most common stated approach, but is frequently left unquantified
- Where expectations are specified, 2 days per week is the most common coordination anchor
- Strict, full-time office mandates remain rare and founder-led, appearing in roughly 1–2% of startups
How UK startups are actually approaching the return to office
To understand how return-to-office policies are playing out in practice, Tally Workspace analysed publicly available job descriptions and careers pages — focusing on what companies explicitly tell candidates during hiring, rather than internal policy documents or leadership commentary.
This approach highlights what organisations are willing to commit to in public.
What emerges is not a dominant model, but a set of recurring patterns showing how founders and leadership teams are balancing flexibility, coordination, hiring risk, and speed in very different ways.
This benchmark is designed as a living reference point for founders, operators, and people leaders trying to understand how RTO mandates are evolving inside UK startups today.
No single RTO model is emerging
Across the UK, startups span the full spectrum.
Some require employees to be in the office five days a week. Others describe themselves as fully remote-first and treat location flexibility as part of their operating model. Most sit somewhere in between.
What’s notable is the absence of a “standard” approach. Despite ongoing debate around RTO mandates, UK startups are not aligning around a single attendance norm.
Hybrid is the default — but policies are often vague
Among startups that do disclose something about the return to office, “hybrid” is the most common label. In many cases, however, the term is left intentionally undefined.
Job listings frequently reference “hybrid working” or a “flexible working model” without committing to a specific number of days in the office. This leaves candidates without a clear picture of what attendance looks like week to week.
The pattern appears consistently across the data and suggests that, for many startups, hybrid functions more as a signal of flexibility than as a fully defined policy.
Mandate vs flexibility: Three clear approaches
Looking across the data, three broad approaches to return to office emerge, each with different trade-offs in how expectations are set, enforced, and communicated during hiring.
Mandate-heavy approaches
These prioritise clarity and coordination. Attendance requirements are explicit and enforcement is unambiguous.
This simplicity can reduce internal ambiguity, but it narrows the hiring pool and increases attrition risk — particularly for employees unable or unwilling to comply. In the case of Nothing, external reporting has highlighted internal tensions following a full return-to-office requirement.
Remote-first approaches
Remote-first startups treat location flexibility as part of their operating system rather than an exception.
Roles are advertised as fully remote, expectations focus on outcomes rather than presence, and any physical office space is positioned as optional. Periodic meetups or retreats are often used to maintain connection without enforcing attendance.
Hybrid models with stated days
Hybrid models that specify a set number of office days occupy a middle ground.
By anchoring collaboration to a small number of in-person days, these companies preserve flexibility while creating a shared rhythm. This approach is also the easiest to communicate clearly during hiring, as expectations are explicit without requiring heavy enforcement.
In practice, these stated hybrid days function as coordination anchors rather than compliance mechanisms.
Hard RTO mandates correlate with stronger founder control
One of the clearest patterns in the data is this: the strictest RTO mandates tend to come from companies with strong founder control.
Where full-time or near-full-time office attendance is required, the language is usually confident, direct, and unapologetic. There’s no hedging, no “subject to team agreement”, no quiet flexibility between the lines. These policies reflect deliberate leadership beliefs about how work should happen.
In these cases, return to office isn’t framed as a response to market pressure or productivity concerns. It’s a statement of intent. Founders are using office presence to reinforce speed, alignment, and decision-making authority — especially in environments where they believe in-person work accelerates progress.
That clarity can be powerful. Teams know exactly what’s expected. There’s less ambiguity, fewer edge cases, and a strong sense of how the company operates day to day.
But it comes with trade-offs.
Hard mandates narrow the hiring pool and increase the likelihood of attrition, particularly among experienced hires who value flexibility or simply can’t make full-time office work fit their lives. The data suggests founders who choose this route are aware of that cost — and are willing to accept it.
In other words, strict RTO mandates aren’t accidental. They’re a leadership choice.
Two days in the office is the most common hybrid working method
When startups do quantify hybrid working, a clear pattern appears.
Two days per week in the office shows up repeatedly, particularly in office-based and fintech roles.
Language is often framed as a “standard working week” rather than a strict mandate. Hokodo’s careers page explicitly states, “Hybrid — 2 days per week in our London office,” while TransferGo describes its model as “two days in the office, three days working from home.”
This positions office time as intentional collaboration rather than enforced presence.
RTO mandates are communicated during hiring, not after joining
One of the most telling findings in the data is where RTO mandates are showing up.
They’re not being quietly introduced after onboarding. They’re being communicated upfront, in job listings and careers pages, before a candidate ever applies.
This marks a clear shift. Return-to-office expectations have moved from internal policy to external signal. What a company writes in a job ad is no longer just operational detail — it’s a filter. It shapes who applies, who opts out early, and who enters conversations already aligned with how the company works.
For startups especially, this makes sense. Hiring is high-stakes, time-consuming, and expensive. Being clear about office expectations early avoids mismatched assumptions later. Candidates who apply do so with their eyes open, and teams reduce the risk of difficult renegotiations after offers are made.
At the same time, this explains why language is chosen so carefully. Where expectations are firm, they’re stated plainly. Where flexibility is important, wording is softer or deliberately open-ended. Either way, RTO is now part of employer positioning — not an afterthought.
Hiring risk is outweighing attendance control
Across the data, one theme cuts through clearly: most startups are more worried about limiting their hiring pool than enforcing attendance.
In a competitive talent market, rigid RTO mandates carry real risk. Fixed office requirements can immediately rule out strong candidates based on geography, caring responsibilities, or lifestyle constraints — before skills or experience even come into play.
That’s why so many startups are choosing flexibility, ambiguity, or light-touch hybrid models. Not because they don’t value in-person work, but because access to talent matters more than strict control over where work happens each day.
Even among companies that want people in the office, many are opting for coordination anchors rather than hard rules. A shared rhythm is often enough. Full compliance is not always the goal.
This trade-off is intentional. Leaders are weighing the benefits of certainty against the cost of exclusion — and, in most cases, hiring reach is winning.
How different RTO approaches work in practice
Most startups sit somewhere between fully flexible and fully office-based. But a small number stand out because they clearly show what different RTO approaches actually look like when put into practice.
These aren’t endorsements or recommendations. They’re useful reference points.
- Full office mandate: Nothing is a clear example of a hard RTO approach. Employees are required to work from the London office five days a week. The expectation is explicit, consistent, and enforced, leaving no ambiguity about how work happens day to day.
- Explicit remote-first: ZOE represents the opposite end of the spectrum. The company positions itself as remote-first, framing location flexibility as part of its operating model rather than a benefit. Roles are advertised as remote, with language that treats distributed work as foundational.
- Structured but flexible hybrid: Doctify shows a different hybrid approach. Roles are described as hybrid without fixed weekly office days, while allowing limited annual remote working outside the UK. Office time is framed around collaboration, culture, and shared rituals rather than attendance targets.
What these examples illustrate is not a “right” number of office days, but clear intent. Each company is signalling how work is expected to happen, in plain language, before a candidate ever accepts an offer.
That clarity — whether the policy is strict, flexible, or somewhere in between — is what sets these approaches apart.
Why some startups mandate the return to the office — and others don’t
The data suggests RTO mandates in startups are rarely arbitrary. Several consistent drivers appear across our data:
- Work type constraints: Mandates tend to appear where physical presence can be reasonably justified, such as labs, hardware, or production environments.
- Leadership intent: Mandate-heavy companies state requirements clearly and without qualifying language, reflecting deliberate beliefs about speed and coordination.
- Enforcement tolerance: Companies that mandate attendance appear willing to enforce it, even at the cost of flexibility.
- Hiring risk appetite: Most startups avoid mandates or leave expectations undefined to avoid narrowing the candidate pool.
Industry type matters, but it doesn’t explain everything
There’s a practical reality here that most leaders recognise straight away: some work simply has to happen in person.
Startups operating in lab-based, biotech, hardware, manufacturing, or production-heavy environments often require physical presence for at least part of the organisation. You can’t run lab experiments remotely. You can’t build hardware over Zoom. In those cases, office or site attendance isn’t a cultural preference — it’s operationally necessary.
What’s interesting in the data, though, is how those requirements are applied.
In many of these companies, RTO expectations are role-specific rather than company-wide. Lab teams or production staff may be fully on-site, while commercial, product, or HQ functions operate on a hybrid basis. Attendance is tied to the work itself, not imposed uniformly across the organisation.
That nuance matters.
Because when you look specifically at strict, blanket RTO mandates — policies that apply equally to all roles, regardless of function — industry type alone doesn’t fully explain them.
Plenty of startups doing fully digital work still require high levels of office attendance. And plenty operating in complex physical environments still allow flexibility where the role permits it.
This suggests that while industry constraints set the baseline for what’s possible, they don’t dictate policy on their own. Leadership beliefs, operating style, risk tolerance, and hiring strategy all play a role in whether physical presence becomes a requirement for everyone — or just for the roles that genuinely need it.
Why 40% of startups say nothing about RTO at all: Silence is the strategy
Nearly 40% of startups analysed make no public statement about return-to-office expectations during hiring. That absence isn’t a gap in policy. It’s a deliberate choice.
For many early-stage and scaling companies, RTO is still evolving. Teams are growing quickly, roles are changing, and ways of working are being tested in real time. Locking a specific attendance requirement into a job description can feel premature when the organisation itself is still finding its rhythm.
Leaving RTO unquantified gives leadership room to adapt. It allows teams to vary their approach by function, seniority, or project phase without having to explain why reality doesn’t match what was written in a job ad six months earlier. In fast-moving environments, that flexibility matters.
Silence also protects hiring reach. Publicly committing to fixed office days can immediately narrow the candidate pool, especially in competitive talent markets. By keeping expectations open-ended, startups preserve negotiation power and allow RTO to be discussed in context rather than enforced upfront.
Importantly, this pattern doesn’t signal indecision. It signals risk management. Early-stage companies are choosing optionality over rigidity, prioritising access to talent and the ability to evolve over the certainty of a formal mandate.
In practice, saying nothing about RTO is a way of keeping choices open. And in a hiring market where flexibility still carries weight, that quiet strategy is proving to be a very intentional one.
Using the office as a hiring advantage (not a mandate)
One pattern that sits quietly underneath the data is how startups are using their office as a pull, rather than a rule.
Instead of saying “you must be here”, many teams are letting the space do the talking. The office becomes something people want to come into — not something they’re required to show up for to stay compliant.
Across job listings, careers pages, and candidate conversations, startups increasingly highlight the experience of being in the office rather than the obligation. You’ll see language that focuses on how the space feels, how it supports collaboration, and what people enjoy about being there day to day.
That matters. Especially in a hiring market where flexibility is expected, but connection still counts.
The most effective offices aren’t framed as attendance checkpoints. They’re positioned as cultural assets. Somewhere good work happens naturally. Somewhere that supports focus, collaboration, and the human side of work — without needing a policy to force it.
This approach also reduces risk. When people come in because the office works for them, enforcement becomes irrelevant. Attendance is driven by value, not fear of being seen as non-compliant.
This is exactly where workspace choice makes a difference.
Tally Workspace helps startups find offices that people want to use — spaces that feel intentional, flexible, and aligned with how teams actually work. Whether that’s a light-touch hybrid setup, a collaboration-led HQ, or a space that supports growth without locking you into rigid terms, we do the legwork so you don’t have to.
The result? Offices that support hiring, retention, and culture — without needing to lean on hard mandates to make them work.
RTO mandates are the exception (not the default) in UK startups
Pulling all of this together, one conclusion stands out clearly: RTO mandates are not the norm in UK startups.
Despite the noise around return-to-office debates, most startups are not enforcing rigid attendance rules. Instead, they’re experimenting, signalling intent through hiring language, or anchoring collaboration lightly without locking themselves into hard commitments. Full-time office mandates exist, but they are rare, deliberate, and usually founder-led.
This matters because it reframes the conversation. The dominant story isn’t one of mass rollback or blanket enforcement. It’s one of cautious design. Leaders are balancing flexibility with coordination, hiring reach with clarity, and cultural intent with operational reality.
For UK startups, return to office has become less about enforcing presence and more about communicating how work gets done. Where attendance is required, it’s increasingly tied to role, rhythm, or purpose — not policy for policy’s sake.
That makes RTO mandates the exception, not the default. And it explains why so many companies are resisting simple answers to a complex question.
For founders and operators navigating this space, the takeaway is straightforward: the strongest RTO strategies are intentional, clearly communicated, and aligned with the work itself. Anything else risks creating friction without delivering the benefits leaders are actually looking for.
