New census data suggests remote work in America has passed its peak.
In Seattle, the amount of people working remotely fell sharply in 2023.
The number of Seattle residents who worked remotely most days fell from an estimated 165,000 in 2022 to about 133,000 last year. This represents a 20% decline.
Remote workers made up 28.5% of the 466,000 working people who live in Seattle, which is huge. However, that’s down from 36% in 2022.
Nationally, around 22.5 million Americans worked remotely in 2023, down by about 1.9 million from 2022.
Why did this happen? Amazon, Seattle’s largest employer, played a huge role.
In May 2023, the company required employees to work from the office at least three days a week. The company then announced that next year, employees would have to be in the office full time.
Still, we are a long way off from the prepandemic number of remote workers. In 2019, only 36,000, or 8% of Seattle residents in the workforce, worked from home.
The RTO mandates had a huge impact on the central city. Public transit was the biggest gainer in the raw number of commuters.
Around 66,000 Seattle residents used transit to commute most days in 2023. That´s up by more than 13,000, or 25.7% from the year before.
Even so, transit use is still way down from 2019, when around 116,000 city residents took the train, bus.
