The Cities Where the Most People Work From Home

Remote work did not spread evenly. Five years after it went mainstream, the share of workers who primarily work from home ranges from a rounding error in some places to nearly two in five in others, and the map of where it stuck is remarkably specific. According to the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey, the cities with the most people working from home are almost all affluent, highly educated suburbs of the country's knowledge-economy metros. Below are the leaders among cities of at least 50,000 residents, a floor that keeps tiny bedroom communities from dominating the list.

The cities with the most people working from home

Remote work clusters where the tech and knowledge economy lives

The list reads like a directory of the suburbs where software engineers, consultants, and finance professionals live. The top two, Sammamish and Redmond, sit in the Seattle orbit next to Microsoft's campus. Atlanta's northern tech suburbs, Johns Creek and Alpharetta, both clear 36 percent. The Dallas boomtowns of Frisco and Celina appear, as does the Raleigh pair of Cary and Apex beside the Research Triangle. Every one of these is a high-income, high-degree community, which is the single best predictor of who works from home: the jobs that can be done remotely are disproportionately the well-paid, college-degree jobs.

Two flavors of remote-work city

The leaders split into two types. Most are spacious, family-oriented suburbs where remote work means a home office in a large house, places like Sammamish, Johns Creek, and Frisco. A few are dense, expensive close-in cities where it means a laptop in an apartment, above all Hoboken across the river from Manhattan, Santa Monica, and Berkeley. What unites them is not density or geography but the composition of the workforce.

The trend has real consequences for the places on this list, from lighter rush-hour traffic to booming demand for local coffee shops and coworking space to upward pressure on home prices as remote workers bid for houses with an extra room. It is a thread running through our look at the fast-changing suburbs in the fastest-gentrifying cities in America. See the complete ranking, every city scored, at most work-from-home cities, or the metro view at most work-from-home metros.

Sources

Figures are the share of workers whose primary means of commuting is working from home, from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey, most recent release. The ranking is limited to cities with at least 50,000 residents. Full ranking: most work-from-home cities.