22 Companies With The Best Work-Life Balance (2023)
This post was written in May of 2022. It was updated in February of 2023 to highlight this year’s companies with the best work-life balance. It was updated again in September of 2023 for formatting and information (the 2023 winners were not changed).
A list of companies with the best work-life balance usually comes out biased. Best is subjective, after all. I didn’t want to add another subjective list of the best work-life balance companies to the internet, so here’s how I went about it instead. We picked nine specific employee benefits that show a company’s dedication to work-life balance. Click here to jump down in the article to view the criteria. Or…
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Companies With The Best Work-Life Balance: 2023 Gold Winners
Here are our 2023 gold-medal winners for the companies with the best work-life balance. There are just 22 of them:
Rank | Company | Work-Life Benefits | Jobs |
1 | Buffer | Remote Home Office Stipends | |
2 | Shopify | Remote Home Office Stipends | |
3 | Automattic | Remote Home Office Stipends | |
4 | VMware | Remote 401K Match | |
5 | Instacart | Remote Home Office Stipends | |
6 | Zillow | Paid Sabbaticals 401K Match Home Office Stipends | |
7 | REI | Remote 401K Match | |
8 | Adobe | Paid Sabbaticals 401K Match | |
9 | Basecamp | Remote Home Office Stipends | |
10 | Doist | Remote Home Office Stipends | |
11 | GitHub | Unlimited PTO 401K Match | |
12 | Gitlab | Remote | |
13 | Hotjar | Remote Home Office Stipends | |
14 | Hubspot | Unlimited PTO Home Office Stipends | |
15 | Unlimited PTO 401K Match | ||
16 | Oracle | Unlimited PTO 401K Match | |
17 | Tulip | 4-Day Work Week Home Office Stipends | |
18 | Uber | 401K Match Home Office Stipends | |
19 | Microsoft | Unlimited PTO 401K Match | |
20 | Work From Anywhere Home Office Stipends | ||
21 | Paypal | Paid Sabbaticals 401K Match | |
22 | Work From Anywhere 401K Match Home Office Stipends |
You’ll see some work-life balance companies on the list that have had notable rounds of layoffs in the last year. For those companies, we factored in layoffs to the rank but we did not remove companies due to layoffs. We used layoffs.fyi to sort companies on our list with the highest amount of layoffs as a percentage of the total workforce. The companies with the highest layoff percentages were moved lower on our list. In other words, recent layoffs are a tiebreaker but not a deal breaker.
See Also:
- The 70 Best Remote Companies To Work For
- 587 Fully Remote Companies
- 844 Remote-First Companies
- 33 Best Software Companies To Work For
- 34 Best Tech Companies To Work For
- 82 Companies With The Best Benefits
Companies With The Good Work-Life Balance: 2023 Silver Winners
As of the time of writing this, Buildremote has 3,920 companies in our database where we track the unique employee benefits that set the criteria for this list. Of the 3,920, our 2023 silver award-winning companies (just 41 of them) offer two of these employee benefits.
- 15Five: remote work, asynchronous work
- 3M: great 401K match plan, great maternity leave
- Accenture: great 401K match plan, great maternity leave
- Almanac: asynchronous work, home office stipend
- Alt: unlimited PTO, home office stipend
- Amazon: great 401K match plan, great maternity leave
- AMEX: work from anywhere, great maternity leave
- Apple: great 401K match plan, great maternity leave
- Autodesk: paid sabbaticals, great 401K match plan
- Biogen: paid sabbaticals, great 401K match plan
- Bunny Studio: remote work, 4-day work week
- Capital One: great 401K match plan, great maternity leave
- Charles Schwab: paid sabbaticals, great 401K match plan
- Chegg: unlimited PTO, home office stipend
- Cockroach Labs: unlimited PTO, home office stipend
- Convertkit: remote work, home office stipend
- DigitalOcean: unlimited PTO, home office stipend
- EY: great 401K match plan, great maternity leave
- Fidelity Investments: great 401K match plan, great maternity leave
- Float: remote work, asynchronous work
- Frontastic: remote work, asynchronous work
- G2i: remote work, 4-day work week
- General Electric: unlimited PTO, great 401K match plan
- Goldman Sachs: unlimited PTO, great 401K match plan
- Gumroad: remote work, asynchronous work
- KPMG: great 401K match plan, great maternity leave
- LiveControl: unlimited PTO, home office stipend
- MailerLite: remote work, asynchronous work
- Mayer Brown: paid sabbaticals, great maternity leave
- Maze: remote work, asynchronous work
- Mediavine: remote work, home office stipend
- Patagonia: paid sabbaticals, great maternity leave
- PwC: work from anywhere, paid sabbaticals
- Skillshare: paid sabbaticals, home office stipend
- TeamSnap: remote work, unlimited PTO
- Thoughtworks: paid sabbaticals, great 401K match plan
- Toggl: remote work, asynchronous work
- Twitter: unlimited PTO, great maternity leave
- Webflow: remote work, home office stipend
- Yac: 4-day work week, asynchronous work
- Zapier: remote work, home office stipend
Criteria: How We Ranked The Best Work-Life Balance Companies
These are the employee benefits we analyzed to determine if a company is committed to work-life balance:
- Remote: Remote companies have removed the office and the commute which returns time and flexibility back to the employee. See our full list of companies going remote.
- Four-day work week: These companies have removed a work day completely (and usually reduce weekly hours to 32) to show their commitment to work-life balance. See our full list of four-day companies.
- Asynchronous work: Colleagues work on their own schedule (not necessarily at the same time), allowing them to personally manage their work-life balance. See our full list of async-first companies.
- Unlimited PTO: Employees can request off as many vacation days as they choose without a cap, showing the company’s commitment to balance. See our full list of unlimited PTO companies, or remote companies with unlimited PTO.
- ✈️ Work from anywhere: The company has a program in place that allows employees to perform their jobs outside of the office, the home, and outside their home state or country. See our full list of work-from-anywhere companies.
- Paid sabbaticals: Employees can take an extended break from work (like a month), retain their salary, and not use vacation days. See our full list of companies with sabbaticals.
- 💰 401K match plan: Pay is an important part of work-life balance. Note: Since average and median salaries at large companies aren’t useful (the range is far too wide), we used the 401K match percentage to represent a company’s willingness to invest financially in their employees regardless of role or salary. Companies on this list offer a 3% 401K match as a minimum (some companies go much higher). See our full list of the best companies for 401k match.
- 🍼 Paid maternity leave: Companies on this list offer mothers at least 16 weeks of paid leave for the birth of a child. Note: Maternity leave policies are more publicly available than “parental” or “paternal” policies. Therefore, we use maternity leave as a barometer for the company’s approach to all parent leave. See our full list of companies with 16+ weeks of maternity leave.
- 💻 Home office stipends: These companies invest in the comfort and functionality of their employees’ home offices through stipends – a fixed sum of money paid from employer to employee to be used for home office equipment. See our full list of companies that offer work-from-home stipends.
(Want to see a much bigger list? Check out our awards for the companies with the best benefits. Those awards were was built on 20 of the best employee benefits.)
Best Work-Life Balance Companies: 2022 Winners
These are the 12 organizations that made our list of the best companies for work-life balance in 2022. These companies offer two or more work-life balance benefits. Objectively speaking, these were the companies with the best work-life balance based on benefits they offered in 2022.
Rank | Company | Work-Life Benefits | Jobs |
1 | Buffer | 4-Day Work Week | |
2 | Hubspot | Remote | |
3 | Microsoft | 4-Day Work Week* | |
4 | VMware | Remote | |
5 | Basecamp | 4-Day Work Week | |
6 | Shopify | 4-Day Work Week | |
7 | Gitlab | Asynchronous | |
8 | Instacart | Remote | |
9 | Remote | ||
10 | Adobe | Remote | |
11 | Intel | Remote | |
12 | REI | Remote |
See Also: 127 Biggest Companies Hiring Only Remote Workers
In our 2022 list, we used the following employee benefits to rank the best company for work-life balance:
- Four-day work week
- Remote work
- Asynchronous work
- Unlimited PTO
- Paid sabbaticals
See Also: The Best Fintech Companies To Work For
Want to see some deeper looks at the work-life balance at some massive companies? We’ve broken down these Fortune 100s: Apple, Alphabet, Meta, Fedex, Goldman Sachs.
See Also: How Many Work Hours & Days Are In A Month? [2023]
Want to nominate a great company for work-life balance?
Get in touch with Buildremote here. We’ll investigate that company’s work-life balance (and credit you for the tip, if you’d like).
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See Also: 122 Influential Work-Life Balance Quotes