Who’s Working from Home?

In a previous blog post, we examined the change in telecommuting rates over time for the Atlanta Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA). That analysis revealed that increases in telecommuting and decreased commuting times (for those who did not work from home) ushered in by the pandemic pulled back a bit in 2022, but mostly persisted.

So, who is making the most of this increased job flexibility? One-year estimates from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey data for 2019 and then 2022 allow us to investigate changes pre- and post-pandemic.

Figure 1 below shows the percentage working from home (WFH) by industry for the Atlanta MSA. We see that nearly every industry– the lone exception being construction– shows considerably higher rates of WFH in 2022 than in 2019:

We can also see above that there are three big “winners” among industries in the WFH sweepstakes: Information technology (IT); Professional, scientific, and management; and administrative and waste management services; and FIRE (aka Finance and insurance, along with real estate/ rental and leasing). Over a third of all workers in each of these industries primarily worked from home in 2022, including nearly half (about 45%) of IT workers. We must recognize that all three of these categories also had the highest incidences of telecommuting before the pandemic, but also worth noting that they nevertheless enjoyed the largest increases between 2019 and 2022. Honorable mention goes to Public Administration, which saw its rate of WFH go up more than fourfold between the two years.

Another cut at the data allows us to examine telecommuting rates by workers’ annual earnings, as shown below in Figure 2.

Figure 2 demonstrates that the incidence of telecommuting in 2022 increased alongside earnings. This is a departure from 2019, when WFH rates were fairly flat across income categories, save the very highest group. Workers earning $75k or more a year also enjoyed the greatest absolute jump in WFH rates, almost 20 percentage points. But because this income group already started from a higher point in 2019, their rate of increase was eclipsed by the $65-75k earnings group, whose WFH incidence went up 325% between the two years.

Finally, we would be remiss if we did not look at the racial component of this change. Figure 3 below shows changes in WFH for workers in the Atlanta MSA by race/ethnicity:

As Figure 3 shows above, Asians had the highest WFH rates in 2022– a change from 2019, when non-Hispanic Whites occupied the top spot. Although all four groups enjoy higher WFH rates in 2022 than in 2019 (and indeed, higher rates in 2022 than the top group in 2019), Asians and Non-Hispanic White workers telecommute at a higher rate than Black or African-American workers and about twice the rate of Hispanic or Latino workers.

The upshot is that while we have seen increases in WFH almost across the board, not surprisingly WFH remains primarily the province of higher-wage, white-collar workers.