As the workforce distribution has become more hybrid than remote since 2021, commuting has also changed into a different normal. While more people are commuting from further away and the share of super-commutes has increased in some places, there are still not as many people on the road as there were in 2019 — so these longer distances are traveled faster.
However, there’s no longer the same close correlation between commute times and the remote workforce as there was in 2020-2021 — and their differences from one year to the next are not inversely proportional everywhere. So, to get a clearer picture of how commuting times have changed across the country since hybrid work took hold, we looked at the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data for the 50 largest cities in the U.S. and how each of them had fared compared to the national trend.
The Commute Time in the U.S. Got Longer Again
According to Census Bureau data, the mean one-way commute in 2023 was 26.8 minutes — 0.4 minutes longer than the reported travel time to work of 26.4 minutes in 2022. Although that difference doesn’t seem like a lot, it adds up to an estimated three more hours spent commuting in 2023 compared to the previous year, which equates to hundreds of millions of hours across the roughly 140 million people who commuted last year.
However, there were some places where this picture was a little brighter than the year before. Specifically, in 2023, 13 of the 50 largest U.S. cities saw decreases in reported travel times compared to 2022. Miami was the leader in this respect: The mean one-way commute in Magic City was roughly 10% shorter in 2023 than it was in the previous year — nearly three minutes less each way — which translated to about 24 hours saved in one year. At the same time, the remote workforce here also decreased by nearly one percentage point from 2022.
Atlanta was the next best on the list with commute times here dipping 1.2 minutes in 2023. According to Census reported mean travel times, commuters here spent about 10 hours less in traffic last year than they did in 2022. This was even as the share of remote workers in the local labor pool dipped roughly four percentage points from the previous year.
Next, Minneapolis commuter reports put the Twin City third in terms of decreasing time spent going to work. Here, a dip of a little more than one minute in the mean one-way commute time added up to a worker saving nine hours of travel between work and home last year.
New York City Commute Lasts 1.5 Times National Mean in 2023
According to U.S. Census survey data, New York City topped the list of longest commutes in the country: In 2023, the mean reported round-trip commute for non-remote workers here added up to one hour and 20 minutes. Clocking in at 40.1 minutes each way, this was 1.5 times the national mean travel time of 26.8 minutes one-way.
Chicago had the second-longest commute. Non-remote workers here spent a little more than an hour going to and from work (a reported 33 minutes each way).
Both of these locations are the hearts of sizeable metropolitan areas where they concentrate the largest density of employment opportunities. As the main economic engines in their respective regions, both NYC and Chicago draw upon workers from across the metropolitan area and beyond. At the same time, according to a recent Stanford report, both locations have seen increases in commutes longer than 40 miles since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, with super-commuting (75+ miles each way) in New York surging as much as 90% compared to 2019.
Even so, both cities saw a slight decrease in the Census reported commute time from 2022 to 2023: The estimated round-trip travel time was roughly one minute shorter for each of the two cities, which added up to about five hours saved by an NYC commuter and roughly four hours saved by a Chicago commuter last year as compared to the year before.
However, that wasn’t the case for Los Angeles, which was the city with the third-longest commute time last year. The mean reported travel time for an LA commuter was a little more than an hour (31.4 minutes one-way) and marked a 1.2-minute increase from the year before — 10 hours longer per year than 2022. The same Stanford report found a significant increase in Los Angeles commute trips longer than 35 miles with the share of super-commutes seeing as much as 20% growth compared to pre-pandemic levels.
Regional Highlights: Cities With Longest Commutes in 2023
Below, we look at the three cities in each U.S. region that recorded the longest commute times between September 2022 and September 2023. We begin in the Northeast, where we already noted the longest commute time in the country, which was reported by workers traveling to work in New York City. Although commute times in New York saw a slight uptick from 2021 to 2022, the mean travel time to work here last year was still below 2019 commuter reports. In fact, 2023 NYC data matched 2014 commute times almost exactly.
Next, Philadelphia commuters logged the second-longest travel time to work in the Northeast last year (slightly more than an hour round trip), while workers commuting in Boston came in third with a mean travel time of about 30 minutes each way. Both cities saw slight drops in commute times in 2023 compared to the year before and were each looking at some of the shortest reported travel times in the last decade.
Among Midwestern commuters, Chicagoans recorded the longest travel time, followed by Detroit and Indianapolis. More precisely, commuting workers in Motor City reported travel times that were slightly longer each way in 2023 compared to 2022 to add up to an estimated two extra hours per commuter throughout 12 months. Similarly, Indianapolis commuters spent more time on their way to and from work compared to the year before — about one minute longer each day or five hours more per commuter per year.
In the West, commute times in the top three cities have been inching up almost in unison since 2021. Even so, they remain markedly below the travel time to work in 2019, which seems to have been the peak year for all three during the last decade. Notably, in 2023, Western U.S. commuters in Los Angeles spent the most time traveling to and from work — about 63 minutes round-trip each day (31.4 minutes one-way).
Non-remote workers in San Francisco and Long Beach followed quite close behind with travel times here rounding out to about 31 and 30 minutes each way, respectively. The uptick in travel time to and from work from 2022 added up to an estimated 12 hours more per commuter per year in San Francisco and about eight additional hours per commuter per year for Long Beach.
In the South, Washington, D.C. commuters reported the longest travel time to work. The roughly 30 minutes spent commuting each way in 2023 was also about 1% longer than in 2022, which translated to an estimated two additional hours in commute time last year.
Nearby, Baltimore commuters experienced the second-longest travel time to work in the region last year (28.5 minutes each way). It’s worth noting that the reported commute time here decreased enough to save about three hours per commuter per year (compared to 2022).
Further south, Houston wasn’t too far behind: Commuters in the southeast Texas powerhouse endure the third-longest travel time to work among Southern U.S. cities — just less than 28 minutes each way.
Hybrid Takes Hold, Remote Work Continues to Slip in 2023
While the “return to normal” still pops up relatively often in the general discourse of how we organize our daily lives following the 2020 lockdown, everyone who wanted (and was able to) chose a slightly different normal when the world hit “pause” in the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Additionally, those who had the resources to do so took the opportunity to relocate from gateway cities further out in the suburbs or migrate to other metros, where housing was more affordable to them. Similarly, working remotely or less-tethered to the main office also allowed some to literally make room for greater career flexibility.
Accordingly, people settling further from the higher cost of living in the urban core had an immediate effect on almost everything, including air quality — like a 30% reduction in NO2 emission in the U.S. — and, of course, traffic. To that end, it was most notable in commuting in 2020 and 2021, when the average U.S. commute time dropped 7% as the remote workforce grew 12 percentage points compared to 2019.
Then, in 2023, the workscape seemed to have settled on hybrid work after the prevalence of remote work continued its fall from the highs of 2021, when an estimated 18% of the national workforce operated off-site. Last year, the share of employees working from home was 1.4 percentage points lower than in 2022 — nearly 14% of total workers in 2023, compared to around 15% in the previous year.
But, the trend remains well above pre-pandemic levels as the share of remote workers in 2023 was eight percentage points higher than it was in 2019.
Among the 50 largest U.S. cities, there were only three where the share of remote workers grew year-over-year — Tampa, Fla.; Milwaukee; and Tulsa, Ok.
Tampa saw the biggest change (comparatively) in this respect. Here, the percentage of employees working from home inched up from 21.3% in 2022 to 22.9% in 2023 — a 1.6 percentage point increase.
Conversely, the cities where the share of remote workers dropped the most last year were San Francisco; Oakland, Calif.; and Seattle.
In San Francisco, people working from home in 2023 represented roughly 24% of the workforce. This marked a rather steep drop (eight percentage points) from the share of nearly 33% in 2022. Across the Bay in Oakland, remote workers went from being about 31% of the workforce in 2022 to a share of roughly 23% in 2023 — a very close percentage-point drop (7.9%) behind San Francisco.
Further north, the share of remote workers in Seattle fell 7.5 percentage points from 36% of the workforce in 2022 to just below 29% in 2023. Even so, Emerald City remains one of the most remote-friendly cities in the country: Last year, the share of remote workers out of the total local workforce was the second-highest among the 50 largest cities in the U.S., behind Charlotte, N.C. (where 30% of the workforce was remote) and slightly ahead of Austin, Texas (28%).
Methodology
For this article, we relied on average U.S. commute times data from the latest U.S. Census American Community Survey. Specifically, we looked at travel time to work and the remote versus non-remote distribution of the workforce. For both commuting and workplace characteristics, we analyzed data from 2019 through 2023 for the 50 most populous cities in the U.S. Due to challenges faced by the Census Bureau when collecting ACS data in 2020, estimates for that year were not included in the data we analyzed.
Commute Time
The reported travel time to work includes all modes of transportation — time spent by workers who don’t work from home to pick up passengers in carpools, navigate public transportation, and any other activities related to getting to work. The commute time in minutes refers to time spent traveling one way between home and work.
Hours spent in traffic were calculated for commuting both ways (Census data multiplied by two), then by multiplying the minutes by working days (an average of 250 days, for reference) and dividing the result by 60 (minutes in an hour).
Workforce Distribution
For estimates on remote versus non-remote workforce distribution, we looked at work-from-home percentages from total workers as listed in the Census report and calculated the difference from one year to the next as a percentage-point change.
The number of workers who work outside of a centralized workplace was calculated using the WFH percentage and the number of total workers as per the Census data.
