The U.S. Census Bureau recently put out a report on the current figures of how many people across the country are working from home. The biggest finding was that the number of people primarily working from home tripled from 2019 to 2021. While this is not a surprise to most of us, what is a shocker is that in Massachusetts nearly 25% of all workers were primarily working from home last year.
23.7% of the Massachusetts workforce was primarily working from home last year. In fact, we were tied for fourth, alongside Colorado, with Washington and Maryland topping the list.
And if you dig down to the individual town level, two cities in the state are also at the top of the list of municipalities who love working from home. Cambridge came in at number 15 and Newton is number 17, with 44% and 43% respectively. So, what that means is that in these cities, last year, nearly half of their entire working population was working from home rather than going into their offices. In a place like Cambridge this was extremely noticeable as restaurants and bars were much quieter throughout the year in 2021. However, we can see that the trend is declining as many of those same places are nearly back to pre-pandemic levels.
Nationwide there were about 9 million remote workers in 2019 and last year there were about 27.6 million—a trend that we are all aware of, but the numbers are still quite staggering.
Whether you are still working from home or not, we have seen that many people are venturing out once again. We recently interviewed some of Boston top chefs and it looks like their restaurants are busy once again. Are you back to your pre-pandemic routines?