- Only if you're fully remote. Workers who work from home 5 or more days a week drive 29.8% less than workers who never work from home (19.4 vs. 27.6 miles/day).
- But workers who work from home just 1–2 days a week actually drive 36.9% more than full-time in-office workers (37.8 vs. 27.6 miles/day), the opposite of what "hybrid work" would suggest.
- Light-hybrid workers (1–2 days home) drive almost double what fully remote workers drive (95.1% more).
- The relationship isn't a straight line: driving rises from full-time in-office, peaks at light-hybrid, falls back at heavy-hybrid (3–4 days home), and only drops sharply once someone is fully remote.
01 Introduction
The assumption behind most remote-work coverage is simple: the more days someone works from home, the less they drive. The 2022 National Household Travel Survey lets that assumption actually be tested, since it asks workers directly how often they work from home, from "never" to "five or more days a week." The answer confirms the assumption at one extreme and completely contradicts it in the middle.
FHWA/BTS, 2022 National Household Travel Survey, public-use person file, variable WKFMHM22.02 The Non-Obvious Curve
Comparing average daily personal-vehicle-driver miles across all four work-from-home frequency groups shows driving actually rising at first as work-from-home frequency increases, before falling off a cliff only once someone works from home essentially every day.
Calculated by this site: FHWA/BTS 2022 NHTS person file (perv2pub.csv, WKFMHM22, restricted to WORKER=01) joined to the public-use daily trip file (tripv2pub.csv) by household and person ID, summing TRPMILES and TRVLCMIN for personal-vehicle (TRPTRANS 01, 02, 03, 04, 06, car, van, SUV, pickup, or RV) trips where DRIVER=01, weighted by WTPERFIN.| Work-From-Home Frequency | Avg. Daily Miles | Avg. Daily Minutes |
|---|---|---|
| Never | 27.6 | 53.4 |
| 1–2 days/week | 37.8 | 68.9 |
| 3–4 days/week | 30.4 | 54.3 |
| 5+ days/week (fully remote) | 19.4 | 39.4 |
Estimate your own vehicle's true annual driving cost.
Use the Calculator03 Why This Isn't a Straight Line
If work-from-home simply subtracted commute miles one-for-one, the table above would decline steadily from "Never" to "5+ days a week." Instead, the 1–2 days a week group is the single highest-mileage group in the entire table, driving more than people who never work from home at all, and nearly twice as much as people who work from home essentially full time.
FHWA/BTS 2022 NHTS person and trip files, cross-referenced by this site, weighted by WTPERFIN.The sample sizes support treating this as a real pattern rather than noise: the "Never" group has 4,366 unweighted person-records, "1–2 days/week" has 1,120, "3–4 days/week" has 610, and "5+ days/week" has 1,687, together representing over 158 million weighted workers.
FHWA/BTS 2022 NHTS person file, unweighted record counts and weighted population totals by WKFMHM22 group.04 What This Means
The common shorthand that "remote work reduces driving" is only reliably true at the fully-remote end of the spectrum. A worker or employer estimating fuel savings, vehicle wear, or commute cost from a partial return-to-office or hybrid policy shouldn't assume driving falls in proportion to the number of days spent at home; based on this data, a light hybrid schedule may not reduce a worker's driving at all, and could plausibly increase it if it enables a longer-distance move. Only a genuinely full-time remote arrangement shows the driving reduction most people expect from "working from home."
05 Data Sources
- Federal Highway Administration / Bureau of Transportation Statistics: 2022 National Household Travel Survey, public-use person file (variables WKFMHM22, WORKER) and daily trip file (variables TRPMILES, TRVLCMIN, TRPTRANS, DRIVER). nhts.ornl.gov
- This site's related analysis: How Americans Get to Work, Average Commute Time and Distance in the U.S., and How Many Hours Do Americans Spend Driving Each Year?.