Commuting Costs Employees Thousands in Lost Time, Study Reveals Impact on Work-Life Balance

_Commuting takes time and costs employees more than $8,000 per year, a new study found. _

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Trina Paul

Sat, February 14, 2026 at 4:52 AM GMT+9 2 min read

Key Takeaways

For the average worker, commuting may not just be an inconvenience—it amounts to roughly $8,100 in lost time each year.

As some large employers call workers back to the office full-time, the debate continues over the effects of remote or hybrid policies on productivity, collaboration, and creativity.

How much time do you spend on your daily commute? 15 minutes? An hour?

Time spent commuting can feel like lost time, and an analysis by MyPerfectResume, a resume-builder website, attempts to quantify its value.

What This Means For You

Time spent commuting can quietly erode earnings, especially in high-cost metro areas. As return-to-office mandates expand, workers may need to weigh lost time against salary and flexibility.

The analysis relies on data from the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By determining the average time people spend commuting in metro areas and the average hourly wage in those areas, the analysis calculates the dollar value of a worker’s commuting time over a year.

For the average worker, commuting time costs them $8,158 annually, assuming the average worker earns $36.53 per hour and commutes 223 hours per year.

In pricier metro areas, the time-value cost of commuting was even higher.

In the San Jose metro area of California, the time lost to commuting was worth more than $13,250 to the average worker. In the New York City metro area, workers had the longest average commute, spending 36 minutes one-way or 300 hours annually, for a time-value cost of nearly $12,200.

Over the past year, many large companies— like JPMorgan, Amazon, and Dell—have pushed workers to return to the office five days a week.

Opponents of hybrid and work-from-home policies, like JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, have argued that these policies hurt creativity and productivity in the office. Plus, some research indicates that working remotely reduces the amount of feedback workers receive, which can be especially detrimental to younger workers.

In contrast, academics like Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford economics professor whose research has focused on remote work, have found that workers with a hybrid schedule (three days a week in person) are no less productive than those who work fully in person and are far less prone to quit.

Read the original article on Investopedia

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