Bosses were hopeful Labor Day weekend might be a turning point, with big firms and Wall Street Banks behind the push to bring workers back to the office. COVID-19 was described as becoming "manageable," while the need for face-to-face collaboration was stressed.
However, subsequent weeks showed a minimal uptick in back-to-office trends.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, remote work was most often a perk reserved for top executives and the upper echelons of tech work. Workers have been reluctant to give up their newfound workplace flexibility, according to some of the only available data on office occupancy rates.
That data comes from Kastle Systems, a commercial office building tech services company. Its systems showed employers in major cities outside of Texas have struggled to get more than 50% of workers back into physical offices. Where Austin, Houston, and Dallas have seen the highest occupancy rates, San Jose, California; San Francisco; and Philadelphia have had some of the lowest office occupancy levels compared to pre-pandemic.
Stacker used Census Bureau data to explore changes in teleworking trends across the U.S. Drawing from the Household Pulse Survey, we analyzed data for each state showing how many people live in a household where someone was teleworking. This story focuses on showing the percentage of people who live in a household where someone teleworks three or more times per week, along with households where no one is working from home.
In the early weeks of the pandemic, office occupancies ebbed and flowed with each wave of illness. Now, nearly 1 in 5 U.S. employees is working from home most of the time, according to November Census Pulse survey data.
The fewest employees reported heading back into offices in southern and midwestern states. They're states with higher gas prices, many rural and remote communities, and large influxes of new residents who flocked to the areas during the pandemic housing boom.
States are ranked by the change between Nov. 2-14, 2022 (most recent data available), and June 1-13, 2022 (the oldest data available), for the percentage of people living in a household where someone teleworks three or more times per week.
