Work-from-home time on the decline

The amount of time Americans spent working from home modestly declined in January, according to research from a group of academics who do a monthly survey of workers.

The percentage of paid full days worked from home in January was 27%, compared with 30% a month earlier. Back in 201718, the average was about 5%. It soared to more than 60% when the pandemic started . It has steadily declined since but leveled out to 30% in the past year.

The monthly “Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes” targets U.S. residents, ages 20 to 64, who earned more than $10,000 a year, weighted to match the Consumer Price Index with the Current Population Survey by agesex-education-earnings cells.

Overall, in January, 13% of full-time employees are fully remote, while 59% work full time at their employers’ sites and 28% have a hybrid arrangement, the report said.

Respondents said that their employers were planning for them to work 2.2 days a week at home. Workers wanted to work from home on average of about 2.7 days a week.

The pandemic “permanently increased (working from home), equivalent to almost 40 years of prepandemic growth,” the report said.

The survey also looked at the economic impact on large U.S. cities of the reduction in typical weekday spending by people who are working from home. In San Francisco, it found that reduced spending amounted to $3,040 per person per year.

The report showed San Francisco ranking No. 6 in terms of how much on-site work had decreased, with a 31.2% reduction of in person days at offices. It trailed Washington, D.C. (down 37%), Atlanta (34.9%), Phoenix (34.1%), Los Angeles (32.8%) and New York (32.9%). But many other data gatherers have shown that San Francisco has a lower return-tooffice rate than other cities and that its foot traffic is about 36% of pre-pandemic levels.