Return to office mandates are bringing back long commute times
With more and more companies requiring their workers to return to the office, commuting times are getting longer. And while the daily grind to and from work isn’t quite as bad as it was before the pandemic, it’s getting real close.
A study by management platform company Yardi Kube, using U.S. Census data, finds that the average American spent 52.8 minutes commuting last year, compared with 55.2 minutes in 2019.
That’s 0.8 minutes more each way than last year’s data, which might not sound like a lot, but it represents the biggest jump on record. It follows 3.2 million people returning to the office last year (compared with 2021).
The impact varies by city, of course. New York City is within one minute of its 2019 commute time, with a one-way trip taking 40.7 minutes. (And there are some “super commuters” who travel up to five hours per day to get to and from their jobs in Manhattan.) Wichita offers the nation’s best commute, the study found, averaging 18.5 minutes each way.
A few minutes more or less in the car can add up over the course of a year. For instance, the study notes that travel times in San Francisco are still 5.2 minutes less than they were in 2019. That works out to 43 saved hours of commuting per year.
Workers are spending that extra time in unexpected ways, separate research finds, with 40% of homebound employees using it to do extra work for their primary or secondary jobs. (That’s notably higher than the percentage who use the extra time for leisure activities.)
Commuting, of course, demands more than time, too. The price of gas, train passes, and more can quickly add up. Getting to and from work costs the average American $8,466.
The climb in commute times makes sense, but could still be concerning to workers as the push to get staff back at their desks intensifies. Less than 26% of U.S. households still have someone working remotely at least one day a week, far fewer than the 37% who were doing so in early 2021.
Some companies, like Goldman Sachs, now expect a return to five days in the office. And roughly 64% of CEOs believe there will be a full return to office by 2026, according to a KPMG survey of more than 1,300 CEOs. Just 7% of CEOs believe fully remote work will be the norm in the long term.
