Most of Washington region’s remote workers are in private sector

The Washington region has among the highest rates of remote work among major US metro areas, something that was not true before early 2020. Remote work rates are lower than they were at the peak of the pandemic, but they’re persisting at a higher level than before it.

While the federal workforce contributes to this increase in remote work, most remote workers are in the private sector. The region’s high levels of remote work are part of a pattern seen in other technology-hub metro areas with large white-collar workforces.

Residents worked from home at near the national average in 2019. Today that number is much higher.

Some Americans have long worked from home, especially in industries where the internet and computer-based workflows make telecommuting relatively easy. However, since the beginning of the global COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, rates of remote work have risen substantially across the country and remain much higher than they were in 2019, when, according to American Community Survey (ACS) 1-year estimates, only 6% of American workers worked from home “most days.”

In 2022, 15% of workers — 150% more than in 2019 — worked from home most days, per ACS 1-year estimates released in late September. This shift has not been evenly distributed geographically, though: as seen in the table below, metro areas with large high-tech sectors, such as San Francisco; Seattle; DC; Austin, Texas; and San Jose, California (Silicon Valley) have had the largest increases in shares of workers working from home, with over 20% of their workforces now working remotely most days.

Although DC is more commonly associated with the federal government than tech jobs, the region has one of the largest high-tech sectors in the country, with roughly the same share of jobs in high-tech sectors, 15%, as San Francisco — especially concentrated in Fairfax and Loudoun Counties in the Tysons-to-Dulles corridor.

Notably, the Washington region’s increase has brought it from the middle of the pack among the country’s 50 largest metro areas to having their fourth-highest work-from-home rate. In 2019, 6% of DC-area workers worked from home, roughly the same as the national share, which put the metro area in 20th place among the 50 largest US metros. Last year, however, 25% of DC-area workers worked from home more than half of the time, 10 percentage points higher than the national rate, putting the metro area in fifth place nationally for work-from-home.

TABLE 1: Increase in Share of Work-from-Home, 2019-2022 for 50 Largest US Metro Areas

Washington region’s work-from-home rates are very high, but not distributed evenly

Remote work rates are higher than the national average across the Washington region, but there is substantial variation in what share of residents work remotely between jurisdictions.

As shown in the table below, more than one-third of workers living in Arlington County and the District worked remotely most days in 2022, while one-fifth or fewer of workers living in Prince William and Prince George’s counties did so.

TABLE 2: 2022 Work-from-Home Rates and Median Incomes for Workers Residing in Large Washington-Area Jurisdictions

Note: Low-population and outlying jurisdictions have been excluded from this analysis.

This difference is predominantly driven by private-sector workers, especially ones in for-profit enterprises. For-profit workers make up the majority of all workers living in each jurisdiction except for the District, where only 41% of workers work for for-profit organizations.

In the four jurisdictions with the highest shares of workers working remotely, between 41% (Arlington County) and 32% (the District) of for-profit workers worked remotely. Only 20% of for-profit workers living in Prince William County and 14% in Prince George’s County worked remotely most days.

Notably, of the eight jurisdictions studied, the two with less than than a quarter of their working residents working remotely also had the lowest median incomes per worker, both for remote workers and for all workers. In each jurisdiction, though, workers working remotely most days made substantially more than the median worker: in the Washington region overall, the median worker had a salary of $67,000 in 2022, compared to $101,000 for the median remote worker.

The federal government is the region’s largest employer, but the majority of remote workers here are private, for-profit

The federal government is the 1,000-pound gorilla of employers in the Washington region. According to the 2022 ACS 1-year estimates, 15% of the region’s workforce is directly employed by the federal government, and many of the area’s private-sector workers are federal contractors or work at organizations that do business with the federal government.

As a result of the federal workforce’s local dominance — particularly in central Washington, which contains large areas consisting nearly entirely of federal offices — federal workers’ remote work has been blamed for the region’s high levels. DC Mayor Muriel Bowser’s heavily-reported call for federal workers to return to the office last January to save the District’s downtown was not entirely unjustified: federal offices are particularly concentrated downtown.

Federal workers in the Washington region did work remotely at higher rates than other workers in 2022 — 32% versus 25% of for-profit workers, 28% of non-profit workers, and 12% of local, county, and state government workers. However, only 19% of workers working from home in the region in 2022 were federal employees, while 56% were employed by for-profit organizations.

This is a consequence both of the fact that 58% of the region’s workers work for for-profit organizations compared to the 15% who are federal employees, and of the fact that the region has some of the highest rates of work-from-home by for-profit workers in the country.

While 15% of for-profit workers nationally work from home, only five metro areas out of the 50 largest have larger shares of for-profit workers working from home than the Washington region’s 25%: Austin, Texas, (29%); San Francisco (28%); Raleigh, North Carolina, (28%); Seattle, (27%); and San Jose, California, (Silicon Valley, 26%), all of which are technology hubs. This fits a broader national pattern, where remote workers are concentrated in metro areas with large white-collar workforces with many jobs that can be done remotely at least some of the time.

The region’s transportation future depends on whether returning commuters use transit or drive

Even if federal remote work rates drop significantly due to the Biden administration’s push to increase federal workers’ days in the office this fall, for-profit and non-profit private-sector employers may keep the region’s remote work rates among the nation’s highest.

Still, more workers are returning to the office, at least on a hybrid schedule, than were earlier in the pandemic. A large share of them are choosing to drive, causing significant increases in roadway congestion.

A number of reforms would help increase transit ridership in a future in which commutes are a smaller share of all trips. Many of these adaptations would also help encourage commuters to use transit, especially in a hybrid work world where flexibility is likely to be especially important for workers who no longer need to make the same commute at the same time five days a week.