FEBRUARY 20, 2024 ­— The U.S. Census Bureau today released a brief highlighting the latest available statistics on commuting behavior in the United States and Puerto Rico from the 2022 American Community Survey (ACS). The brief, Commuting in the United States: 2022, explores recent commuting trends using estimates from the 2022 ACS, 1-year dataset, with comparisons to 2019 and 2021. The analysis shows changes in the way people travel to work since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic along with several key commuting characteristics, including means of transportation to work, travel time to work, and time of departure from home to go to work.

Highlights:

• Almost 140 million people in the United States routinely commuted to work in 2022, and more than 20 million worked from home.
• Among U.S. workers, 15.2% worked from home in 2022, down from almost 17.9% in 2021 but still far higher than the 5.7% that worked from home before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019. Among workers in Puerto Rico, 5.9% worked from home in 2022, down from 7.4% in 2021 but more than twice the 2019 share of 2.4%.
• The share of U.S. workers driving alone to work was 68.7% in 2022, about 7 percentage points less than the 75.9% in 2019. In Puerto Rico, 82.7% of workers drove alone to their place of work in 2022, compared to 84.3% in 2019, a decline of less than 2 percentage points.
• Public transportation commuting in the United States remained well below the 2019 share of 5.0% of workers at 3.1% in 2022. This represented an increase from the 2.5% of workers commuting by public transportation in 2021. In Puerto Rico, less than 1% of workers commuted by public transportation in 2021 and 2022, compared to 1.2% in 2019.
• In each of seven U.S. metropolitan areas with the most public transportation commuters, more workers commuted by public transportation in 2022 compared to 2021. However, public transportation commuting did not rebound to 2019 levels in any of these seven metro areas. In the New York metro, there were roughly 700,000 fewer transit commuters in 2022 than in 2019.
• Average one-way commuting time among those who traveled to a workplace increased by almost 1 minute from 25.6 minutes in 2021 to 26.4 minutes in 2022, still well short of its historic high of 27.6 minutes in 2019.
• With more than 20 million people working from home in 2022, about 9 million fewer commuters departed their homes for the workplace during the core commuting hours of 6 a.m. to 8:59 a.m. in 2022 than in 2019.

The American Community Survey provides a wide range of statistics about the nation’s people and housing, such as language spoken at home, education, commuting, employment, mortgage status and rent, income, poverty, and health insurance coverage. It is the only source of local estimates for most of the 40-plus topics it covers.

No news release associated with this data series. Tip sheet only.