Raleigh-Cary residents are more likely than most to work from home, Census Bureau says
The portion of people working at home in the Raleigh area tripled between 2019 and 2021 and was among the highest of any large metro area in the country, according to a new report from the U.S. Census Bureau.
In the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, an estimated 31% of workers were doing their jobs from home in the Raleigh-Cary metro area, which includes Wake, Johnston and Franklin counties. That’s up from an estimated 10.2% in 2019, before governments and businesses issued work-from-home orders to try to curb spread of the coronavirus.
Raleigh-Cary had the fifth highest portion of at-home workers among the country’s 57 largest metro areas, just behind other tech- and government-heavy places such as San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Austin, Texas, according to the Census Bureau. The Durham-Chapel Hill metro area was not included in the bureau’s report.
In the Charlotte metro area, the portion of at-home workers also tripled, from an estimated 8% in 2019 to 25.3% in 2021, according to the census. Statewide during that time, the portion of people working at home jumped from 6.7% to 18.8%.
It’s not clear what the numbers look like now, as employers have brought people back to the office. But a nationwide survey by researchers at Stanford University this winter found historically high numbers of people still working at home. About 28% of workers surveyed said they were working at least part-time at home and 12% were home full time.
The relatively high number of people working remotely in the Triangle during the pandemic is reflected in traffic data gathered by the N.C. Department of Transportation.
NCDOT produces annual estimates of “vehicle miles traveled” or VMT in each county. Urban areas, where most people work in offices, saw bigger declines in 2020 than rural ones, said Kent Taylor, who compiles the data.
“That has to do with the fact that a lot of the activities in urban areas involve being close to people,” Taylor said. “There’s a lot more office-type jobs, and a lot of offices shut down and people started teleworking, which is the trend you’re seeing in the census data. And that affected urban areas much more than rural areas.”
Statewide, average daily VMT dropped 13.5% in 2020, compared to 2019, according to NCDOT. But that number was lower in rural counties and higher in places such as the Triangle, where VMT declined 16.4% in Wake County and 18% in Durham.
Taylor and others at NCDOT expected travel to return to pre-pandemic levels in 2022, but a sampling of data from around the state suggests that didn’t happen. Inflation and economic uncertainty may be discouraging some travel, but what really put the recovery off track appears to be Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February.
“Gas prices kind of jumped up very quickly because of that,” Taylor said. “And when gas prices jump up, people tend to travel less.”
But it’s also possible that some cars remain parked because people are still spending a work day or more at home each week. Taylor and the reporter calling him to talk about the VMT numbers were both working at home.
“I’m sitting in my den,” he said. “A couple of years ago, I would have been in the office talking to you.”
The complete VMT numbers for 2022 are not yet available.
Triangle already a leader in working from home
For a long time, the people most likely to work at home in the United States were farmers and ranchers, according to the Census Bureau. As farm employment declined, so did the number of home-based workers, from an estimated 4.7 million in 1960 to about 2.2 million in 1980.
Then home computers and the internet came, enabling people in all sorts of professions to set up home offices. By 2019, about 9 million people primarily worked at home, according to the Census Bureau. That number rose to 27.6 million in 2021.
The people who work at home are more likely to be college educated and highly paid and to work in fields such as science, management, information and finance, according to the Census Bureau report, all characteristics more common in places such as the Triangle.
Indeed, even before the pandemic, one in 10 Triangle workers were based at home. That was the second highest percentage of any metro area of a million or more residents in the country, behind only Austin, Texas.
This story was originally published April 17, 2023 at 6:00 AM.
