5 days on-site — Big Wave Digital, a specialist Australian technology recruitment agency, on what the shift to 5 days on-site means for hiring.
When it comes to 5 days on-site, the difference between a good hire and a great one comes down to judgment. Here is what Big Wave Digital sees in the 5 days on-site market, and what it means for your team.
Over the past few months we have watched something change in the briefs landing on our desk. More and more clients are asking for people who will work 5 days on-site, and the requirement is being stated earlier and more firmly than it was a year ago. As a technology recruitment agency in Sydney, Big Wave Digital sits between employers and candidates every day, so here is a straight, neutral account of what we are seeing in June 2026 and what it means for both sides.
In this article:
What We Are Actually Seeing in the Briefs – 5-day on-site policy – this
The shift is real and it is measurable in our own pipeline. A year ago, the default expectation on most technology roles we handled was hybrid, usually two or three days in the office, sometimes fully remote for the right person. Today, a growing share of new briefs specify five days on-site from day one, and clients are far more likely to hold that line through the hiring process rather than treat it as negotiable.
This is not a fringe pattern. It tracks with what is happening globally. A recent JLL survey found that 55% of Fortune 100 companies now require employees in the office five days a week, up from just 5% in 2021. Roughly a third of all firms are now requiring full-time office attendance, and the share of employers actively measuring attendance has jumped to around 69%, up from 45% the year before. When the largest companies move, expectations cascade down through the market, and we are seeing that cascade arrive in Sydney briefs now.
We want to be clear about our role here. We are not advocating for or against five days on-site. Our job is to read the market accurately for the people on both sides of it, and right now the market is moving in a clear direction.
Why Employers Are Asking for this – 5-day on-site policy
When we ask clients what is driving the change, a consistent set of reasons comes up, and it is worth laying them out plainly because they are not all the same.
The most common is collaboration and culture. Many leaders believe that the speed of in-person problem-solving, the informal mentoring of junior staff, and the sense of shared culture are hard to replicate over video, and they have decided the trade-off favours the office. The second is a perception of accountability and output, with some employers feeling they get more consistent delivery when teams are co-located, whether or not the data fully supports that. The third is simple gravity: as major corporations and, in some markets, governments moved back to full-time office work, other companies followed, with a majority saying they were at least somewhat influenced by the big players doing it. And the fourth, less often said out loud, is the use of office attendance as a lever in a softer labour market, where employers feel they have more room to set terms than they did at the peak of remote work.
These reasons vary in how well they hold up, and reasonable people disagree about each of them. But they are the reasons we hear, and understanding them matters, because they shape how firmly a given client will hold the line.
How Candidates Are Responding
On the other side of the table, the candidate response is more measured than the headlines of a year ago suggested. Back in early 2025, surveys showed the overwhelming majority of workers said they would quit or look for a remote job if hit with a return-to-office mandate. By late in the cycle that number had fallen sharply, with closer to 40% saying they would actually leave over it. In other words, a lot of the initial resistance has softened as the market has shifted and full-time office roles have become more normal again.
That said, “softened” is not “gone.” Five days on-site still narrows the candidate pool, and it narrows it most among exactly the people many employers most want: experienced specialists with options, parents and carers managing a commute, and candidates who relocated or restructured their lives around flexibility over the past few years. For some roles and some people, on-site is a non-issue or even a positive. For others, it is a genuine dealbreaker. The point is that the requirement is no longer free; it has a cost in reach, and that cost is real even in a market that has tilted back toward employers.
What This Means for Sydney Employers
If you are hiring and you are considering a five-day on-site requirement, the neutral, practical guidance we give clients is simply to go in with eyes open about the trade-off rather than to treat it as costless or as the only option.
Be clear and early about the expectation, because nothing wastes more time on both sides than a hybrid assumption that collapses at offer stage. Know which of your roles genuinely benefit from co-location and which do not, because a blanket policy applied to a role that does not need it just shrinks your pool for no gain. Understand the segments of talent the requirement will cost you, so the decision is deliberate. And consider what you are offering in return, because candidates increasingly weigh a five-day commute against the total package, and the employers winning on-site talent tend to be the ones who make the office genuinely worth coming to.
None of that is a verdict on whether five days on-site is right or wrong. It is just the practical reality of hiring into that requirement in the current market, which is what we are here to help our clients navigate.
What This Means for Candidates
If you are a candidate, the honest read is that the market has moved and more of the best roles now carry an on-site expectation than did a year ago. That does not mean flexibility is dead; plenty of hybrid and remote roles still exist, and the right specialist skills still command leverage. But it does mean it is worth deciding in advance where your own lines are, so you can move quickly when the right opportunity appears and not lose it over a requirement you could have weighed up sooner.
It also means being open to the conversation. We have seen plenty of candidates assume a five-day brief is rigid when there was actually room to negotiate, and plenty assume there was room when the client genuinely had none. Knowing which is which, for a specific employer, is exactly the kind of market intelligence a specialist recruiter can give you that a job board cannot.
Where Big Wave Digital Sits
Our position in all of this is deliberately neutral. We are not in the business of telling employers how to run their workplaces or telling candidates what to want. We are in the business of reading the market accurately and matching the right people to the right roles, on terms both sides can actually live with.
What we can do, because we sit in the middle of hundreds of these conversations, is tell you the truth about where a given role really stands. Whether a five-day requirement is firm or flexible. Which segments of talent it will cost you, or which employers will genuinely consider your circumstances. That honest read, on both sides, is the most useful thing we offer in a market that is shifting as quickly as this one.
Ride the Wave
The trend toward five days on-site is one of the clearest shifts in client expectations we have tracked in 2026, and like every shift in this market it creates winners on both sides for the people who read it accurately and move with clear eyes. If you are building a technology team in Sydney, or weighing up your next move as a candidate, and you want a straight read on where the market actually is, we should talk.
Let’s connect, the coffee is on us. Or explore our specialist AI recruitment in Sydney, developer recruitment and IT recruitment services. And for our take on the wider hiring market, read June 2026: Sydney’s tech hiring market is holding, but the shape has changed.
By Big Wave Digital. Market figures are drawn from publicly reported data including a JLL survey of Fortune 100 companies and 2026 return-to-office tracking; this article is independent commentary and reports the trend neutrally.
For wider context on Australian hiring trends, see SEEK’s employment market insights.
The move to 5 days on-site is reshaping Sydney hiring. Candidates weigh 5 days on-site against flexibility. Employers asking for 5 days on-site need a sharper pitch. Getting 5 days on-site expectations right matters on both sides. The move to 5 days on-site is reshaping Sydney hiring. Candidates weigh 5 days on-site against flexibility. Employers asking for 5 days on-site need a sharper pitch. Getting 5 days on-site expectations right matters on both sides. The move to 5 days on-site is reshaping Sydney hiring. Candidates weigh 5 days on-site against flexibility.
