wfh life
Austin logs on among the top 20 most prominent remote workforces in the U.S.
Working from home in Austin has many advantages – like avoiding traffic and being choosy about which food trucks to frequent. According to a new SmartAsset study, Austin has the 19th highest concentration of remote workers in the nation (out of 344 cities).
More than 30 percent of all workers in Austin, or approximately 181,680 people, work from home, SmartAsset found.
For the Austin employees who do have to factor daily travel to work into their schedule, the average commute time is 22.4 minutes. The city's commute time was just under the national mean.
"With the most recent U.S. Census Bureau designating the average commute time to work across large cities at 25 minutes, remote workers may save four hours per week or more compared to their in-person counterparts," the report's author wrote.
Austin has had mixed success with its remote workers over the past few years. Although it has a proportionally high number of them, Forbes decided the conditions of the remote work were just better than average. Millennials, who have been leading the charge out of the office, have stopped moving to Austin in such large droves. Austin was, however, the top destination on a housing app for digital nomads for at least part of last year.
Frisco was the Texas city with the most prominent volume of remote workers and came in No. 2 in the nationwide list. Nearly 40 percent of the Dallas suburb is working from home, but the actual number (46,381) is much less than Austin's. They also spend more time (27.6 minutes) on their commutes.
In Central Texas, working from home is notable but not as prominent as North Texas seems to be, based on the list. Round Rock made No. 31, with 27.2 percent of its workforce operating remotely. Next up is College Station at No. 131 — a big jump — with only 16 percent of its population working from home.
San Antonians have been spending a lot of time at work, as No. 173 on the list. Only 13.6 percent were working remotely. Waco didn't even make it into the top 200 (ending up at No. 221).
The city with the highest percentage of remote workers in the U.S. is Cary, North Carolina; 41.4 percent of all workers in Cary work from home, or 40,900 people. Commuters in Cary also have a better-than-average commute time of 22.2 minutes.
The U.S. city with the lowest percentage of remote workers is Beaumont, Texas. Only 3.7 percent of all workers in Beaumont work remotely, which is 1,751 people. Perhaps this is a hangover from its days as an oil boomtown, but no city can run from the call of remote jobs forever.
The top 10 cities with the greatest remote workforces in the nation are:
- No. 1 – Cary, North Carolina
- No. 2 – Frisco, Texas
- No. 3 – Bellevue, Washington
- No. 4 – Berkeley, California
- No. 5 – Seattle, Washington
- No. 6 – Arlington, Virginia
- No. 7 – Fremont, California
- No. 8. – Scottsdale, Arizona
- No. 9 – Carlsbad, California
- No. 10 – Washington, D.C.