A report found that forcing remote employees to return to the office can cost them thousands of dollars a year because of the time they spend commuting.
The landscape of the workplace has changed a lot in recent years. Some companies were already leaning toward remote work models for their employees before the pandemic, but many had not even considered it until the lockdown forced them to rethink how they did business.
Now, nearly six years later, it feels like remote jobs are in increasingly short supply. Many job seekers want the benefits that come from working from home, but companies just aren’t willing to let them. This back and forth has led to shifting policies for many companies, and it turns out that they’re impacting workers a lot more than you might think.
The average employee who has to return to the office loses over $8,000 a year.
RTO mandates seem like they’re just a part of working life now. A 2025 report from CBRE found that 77% of employees were expected to work in the office a minimum of three times a week.
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As the saying goes, time is money, and time is something that workers are losing a lot of with RTO policies. According to a report from My Perfect Resume, the average U.S. worker spends 223 hours commuting to and from work each year. That’s the equivalent of six 40-hour workweeks, all unpaid. Using the national average wage, My Perfect Resume was able to calculate how much money could be earned during that time, and it came out to a whopping $8,158.
Of course, distances and costs are always location dependent, and it turns out that things are even worse in certain areas. Unsurprisingly, workers in New York City have the longest commute to deal with, which adds up to about 300 hours annually. Additionally, the “time value” cost of the commute is closer to $12,000 in San Jose, San Francisco, and NYC.
Commuting wasn’t an issue before, but knowing remote work is possible and saves money has them concerned.
Of course, workers have been commuting to their jobs for ages now. Some jobs just can’t be done from home, and that wasn’t even an option until more recent years due to technological limitations. No one really complained at the time because that’s just how things went. Remote workers were more like unicorns than the norm.
All of that changed during the pandemic, though. Some people found themselves working remotely for the very first time in their lives, and it opened their eyes to how efficient the process could be.
The report noted, “Many employees who transitioned to remote work during the pandemic experienced firsthand how much time they regained. Reinstating commutes can feel like an unacknowledged loss of autonomy and balance.”
So, many people didn’t realize how big a deal commuting was until they were able to stop doing it. Now that they’ve seen both sides of the situation, they would much rather work from home.
Working remotely is better for both employers and employees.
CEO Steve Cox, a member of Fast Company’s Executive Board, shared his own thoughts on RTO mandates and how they may be hurting companies instead of helping. “Apart from those roles where being in person is required, hard-and-fast rules about returning to the office make it harder to recruit,” he said. “To be an employer of choice, offer choice … It will be the difference between engaged employees and those planning to leave.”
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This isn’t surprising given the data. Gallup found that 60% of workers who could do their jobs remotely wish to work in a hybrid capacity, while 33% want to work completely remotely. Fewer than 10% of employees actually wanted to work in the office.
Being able to work remotely is a huge perk that many people covet. It’s true that it puts a lot of money back in workers’ pockets that would otherwise be wasted on commuting, but it also provides people with the flexibility they need to maintain a healthy work-life balance. Hopefully, employers will catch on to this.
Mary-Faith Martinez is a writer with a bachelor’s degree in English and Journalism who covers news, psychology, lifestyle, and human interest topics.
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