Just as we start commuting more regularly again, here come more data toremind us exactly how much we commuted before! Last week, the Census Bureau released a 2019 update to its local employment and household dynamics (LEHD) data. This series offers comparisons of worker residence to job location, as well as current and historical information on types of jobs, wage ranges for those jobs, distance/directions to those jobs, as well as small area origins and destinations for commutes. The Bureau’s On the Map tool offers a lot of different visualization options at a variety of geographic scales (so perfect for nerding out on a holiday). Here are your county-level headlines:

1. In all but one of the 12 jurisdictions tracked in Chart 1 (ARC counties plus the City of Atlanta), the majority of resident workers left their county of residence to go to their job.
2. Only in Fulton County does a higher share of the county workforce stay within the county to work than the share leaving the county for work. This is almost certainly due in large part to a combination of the relatively large share of all regional jobs are found in Fulton and the large geographic size and span of the county.
3. Cobb and Gwinnett — also two of the region and state’s largest counties from a geographic perspective — had a higher than average share of workersworking within the county.  At the opposite end of the spectrum, in both Rockdale and Douglas County, fewer than two of every 10 resident workers stayed in their home county to work.

Please note that data for the 11-county area are basically a weighted average across the ten counties, meaning that, for the average 10 workers residing in the ARC area, about six of them work outside their county of residence.

The final two charts track change in inflow and outflow between 2010 and 2019. Chart 2 shows that both the number of workers staying home (internal jobs) and the number of workers leaving the local area (external jobs) increased from 2010 to 2019. But in a large majority of jurisdictions, the number of resident workers traveling outside of their county to work (read: commute) is growing at a much faster rate. In only Fulton, the City of Atlanta, and Gwinnett did the number of in-county jobs filled by the resident workforce increase at a faster rate than the number of external jobs to which those workers commuted. Chart 3 provides all the relevant background raw data for the 20-county area for the 2010 to 2019 evaluation period.