It found, between 2019 and 2021, the number of people primarily working from home tripled from 5.7%, or about 9 million people, to 17.9%, or 27.6 million people. That's correlated with a drop in commute time, as also found in the ACS results. The average one-way travel time to work dropped to 25.6 minutes in 2021, among the shortest times in the past decade and two minutes shorter than the average of 27.6 minutes in 2019.
More data from 2022 and ensuing years will be necessary to determine how far of a reach working from home will have in markets nationally. But it's increasingly clear one of the biggest permanent changes from the pandemic is adoption of remote work. Redmond, Washington, saw the highest share of reported remote workers in 2021, at 55.2%, among U.S. cities with relevant ACS data. Only 3.7% of ACS respondents in Redmond indicated they were remote workers in the 2019 survey.
The push toward more people working remotely has significant implications for the office markets of MSAs seeing the biggest gains in remote workers, especially city centers. Given D.C.'s economy is largely concentrated in government and business-oriented fields — historically heavy users of office space — the higher share of remote workers, if the trend sticks, will have outsized ripple effects on vacancy and demand. The same is true of other metros seeing big spikes in remote workers.
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