Work-from-home rates exploded between 2019 and 2021 and have remained elevated. Census data maps exactly where — and for whom — remote work has become the new normal.
One of the most dramatic labor market shifts of the 2020s is visible in a single ACS variable: the share of workers who work from home. In the 2019 ACS, about 5.7% of workers nationally reported working from home. By the 2021 ACS — which captured the COVID-19 pandemic's labor market reshaping — that share had risen to 17.9%. The 2023 estimates show a partial normalization to around 15%, still nearly three times the pre-pandemic baseline.
The state work-from-home rankings reveal a clear coastal pattern. The highest WFH rates are in:
At the city level, tech-heavy and government-worker-heavy cities top the charts. San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, Denver, and Washington DC all show city-proper WFH rates above 30% for knowledge workers. This has significant downstream effects on commercial real estate, transit ridership, and restaurant/retail foot traffic in urban cores.
Remote work is heavily skewed by occupation and education level. Professional, scientific, financial, and information-sector workers can work remotely; retail, food service, construction, healthcare, and transportation workers generally cannot. Because of this, high-income, high-education metros have dramatically higher WFH rates than working-class-heavy markets. This geographic divergence in remote work access is itself a source of income inequality — those with the highest incomes gained the most flexibility.
The spike in remote work directly enabled the population migrations documented in the fastest-growing cities data. When workers no longer needed to live near offices in expensive coastal metros, many chose to relocate to lower-cost markets. The metros that gained the most from this migration — Boise, Raleigh, Austin, Nashville, Salt Lake City — tend to have high WFH rates themselves, as they attracted remote workers rather than creating new in-person jobs.
Work-from-home is just one dimension of the commute story. The commute time rankings show that average commute times nationally declined from 2019 to 2021, reflecting both WFH and the collapse of traffic congestion. By 2023, commutes had partially rebounded as return-to-office mandates took effect — but remain below 2019 levels in most markets. For detailed commute data including transit share and means of transportation, explore the transit commuter rankings.
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