Remote Workers Gain Wealth of Free Time

Remote workers work an average of 2 hours and 18 minutes less each day than those who commute to an office, report

With all the controversy surrounding Elon Musk demanding employees come back to the office, TodayTesting.com has released a new report showing that on average, full-time employees who work from home will have exactly 777 hours, 46 minutes, and 9 seconds of extra free time each year compared to their office-bound counterparts.

That’s the equivalent of over 32 days of extra time that remote workers get to enjoy however they want.

Everybody knows working from home offers a wealth of benefits. No commute (which can save you a ton of money), no office politics, and (best of all) no need to get dressed for work.

But what’s often overlooked is the fact that working from home also gives you a massive amount of extra free time.

The Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, Calif., metro area, is listed among the top 20 metro areas where workers lose the most free time by working in an office. Workers in this metro area spend 257 hours commuting annually, 815 extra hours spent annually working and commuting versus remote workers and lose 1, 529 days’ worth of free time by working in an office versus remotely over lifetime.

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows full-time workers who work from home spend about 28% less time each day working than those who go into the office, but not only that, at-home remote workers don’t have to spend time commuting each day either.

Notable Findings in the new report shows that:

• People working from home, work an average of 2 hours and 18 minutes less each day than those who commute to an office. That’s a difference of 11.5 hours each week.
• Full-time workers who are remote and work from home get an extra 16.1 hours of free time each week.
• Workers in the San Francisco metro area, the location of Twitter HQ, lose 818 hours a year commuting on average.
• Workers in the East Stroudsburg, PA Metro Area stand to gain the most over their lifetime (1632 days), followed by workers in New Jersey, New York, and Washington, D.C. metro areas.

You can view the entire report.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics most recent American Time Use Survey, full-time employed individuals who work from home put in an average of 5.88 hours per day. That’s about 5 hours and 53 minutes. On the other hand, full-time employed individuals who go into an office work an average of 8.18 hours per day. That’s about 8 hours and 11 minutes.

Methodology

Here’s how TodayTesting.com came up with its calculations.

It started with the assumption that the average American works 242.8 days per year. It got that by multiplying 52 weeks x 5 days a week and then subtracting the 17.2 days of vacation workers take per year on average.

Then it used data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing time spent working each day by employed persons working at home and in the workplace. It also factored in data from the US Census Bureau on average commute times across the country.