Telework Rates Have Stabilized at Twice Pre-Pandemic Levels — And Transport Planners Are Still Catching Up
A March 2026 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office puts hard numbers on what transit agencies and metropolitan planners have been navigating since 2020: telework rates tripled during the pandemic and have not come back down to earth.
According to American Community Survey data analyzed by GAO, the share of workers who primarily worked from home stood at 5.7 percent in 2019. By 2021 it had reached 17.9 percent. By 2024 it had declined to 13.3 percent — still more than twice the pre-pandemic baseline, and showing no strong sign of further convergence.
The trend was not uniform across community sizes. Large communities — those with populations of one million or more — saw the sharpest increases. Average telework rates in large communities climbed from 6.2 percent in 2019 to 20.5 percent in 2021, settling at 15.0 percent in 2024. Medium and small communities saw smaller swings, though all community sizes ended 2024 well above their 2019 levels.
The concentration of telework among higher-income, higher-education workers explains much of the large-city skew. GAO estimated that 43 percent of workers in large communities held at least a bachelor’s degree in 2024, compared to 35 percent in medium communities and 32 percent in small communities. Workers in information, finance, and professional services — industries with the highest telework adoption — are disproportionately located in major metros.
Variation within size categories was also significant. The Denver MPO saw telework rates rise an estimated 13.6 percentage points between 2019 and 2024. The New Orleans MPO, also a large community, saw an increase of only 4.7 percentage points over the same period. Of the 410 communities GAO analyzed, 404 recorded positive estimated changes. The six with negative readings were not statistically distinguishable from zero.
The policy implication is direct: transportation planning assumptions built on pre-2020 commuting behavior are structurally outdated in most American cities. The question is whether the institutions responsible for travel demand forecasting have updated their models accordingly. The GAO’s answer, on the whole, is that they have not — and that federal guidance promised by law in 2023 has not arrived.