Half of those in employment work from home at least occasionally
Five-year study finds homeworking is reshaping when, how far and by what mode people commute, while leaving most wider travel and car ownership largely unchanged.
Half of those in employment now work from home (WFH) at least occasionally, a study for the RAC Foundation has found. WFH rose during the pandemic and has remained at the current levels since mid-2022.
That is one of the conclusions of Working from Home and Post-Pandemic Travel Behaviour by Dr Llinos Brown and Professor Jillian Anable of the University of Leeds. The study was commissioned by the RAC Foundation.
The research is based on longitudinal data from the Transport, Travel and Social Adaptation Study 2020-25, established by the Institute for Transport Studies at the University of Leeds. This followed the same people through seven survey waves between 2020 and 2025, allowing researchers to distinguish changes associated with working from home from those caused by changing jobs, moving workplace or moving house – a distinction that most one-off surveys cannot make.
Fewer commutes can mean longer commutes
The longer the commute to the place of employment, the more time is spent working from home.
For those who spend at least some time working from home and live within a five-mile commute of ‘the office’ just over one in five days is spent WFH.
For those who are at least 100 miles from their place of employment the number of WFH days averages almost three per week.
The most frequent homeworkers showed the clearest shift over the five year period: their average commute time rose from about 25 minutes before the pandemic to nearly 40 minutes in July 2025.
WFH means more public transport
Those working from home most frequently also used public transport more on the days they travelled. The longer the commute the more likely it is to be carried out by public transport, particularly on the railway.
In 2025, 18% of people working from home at least three days a week mainly commuted by train, compared with 4% of people who never worked from home.
This combination – fewer journeys, but longer and more expensive ones – creates a different market for rail and urban public transport. It also helps explain why 20% of those who had increased their homeworking had stopped buying a season ticket.
A new weekly peak – and a less predictable daily one
Working from home has not simply taken commuting trips off the transport network. It has created a new pattern of longer, less frequent and more rail-oriented commutes, concentrated in the middle of the week and increasingly undertaken as part of split working days.
Among people who worked from home at least one day a week in 2025, Tuesday and Wednesday were the most common workplace days, while Friday was by far the least common. The result is a transport week with demand concentrated from Tuesday to Thursday and flatter peaks on Mondays and Fridays.
At the same time, 35.5% of hybrid workers said they sometimes worked part of the same day at home and part in the workplace. Around 30% expected to have no days spent exclusively at their workplace. These patterns can reduce conventional peak-hour travel, but they do not necessarily eliminate the journey. Instead, they make demand more fluid and harder for operators to predict across the day.
Homeworking is not, on its own, a route out of car dependence
The central finding is that the ‘hybrid’ pattern of working some days from home and some in the workplace is reorganising the commute but having much less influence on non-work travel, shopping, exercise, social activity or household car ownership.
While there has been an overall reduction in the frequency of trips across all modes of transport (except walking) by the whole population since the start of the pandemic this is not particularly associated with people who WFH.
The report authors say that the fall in the number of trips is associated with wider behavioural changes in society:
“Overall, individuals were engaging less frequently in physical shopping, exercise and in-person social activities than they did pre–pandemic.”
The authors go on to note:
“While WFH is associated with lower levels of car commuting, it does not appear to be linked to lower levels of car ownership. This is somewhat unexpected, as reduced commuting might be expected to reduce the need to own a car.
“Instead, households appear to retain vehicles even when commuting becomes less frequent, highlighting the role of non-work travel needs in car ownership and use.”
Steve Gooding, director of the RAC Foundation, said:
“For millions of workers the most pronounced long term side effect from Covid19 is to be found in their working lives with half of those in employment now routinely working from home at least some of the time.
“But despite this shift, and a more general post-pandemic fall in the number of journeys we make, we still see traffic at record levels and the number of cars on the UK’s roads – 34.6 million – is the highest ever. In large part this is likely to be down to the nation’s growing population.
“Working from home looks like an employment pattern that is here to stay for many jobs, but that of itself isn’t going to address our transport challenges.”
According to the Office for National Statistics, the 2025 mid-year population estimate for the UK was 69.5 million compared with 67.1 million for 2020.
Professor Jillian Anable, co-author of the report, said:
“The important story is not how many people now work at home, it is that hybrid working has changed the shape of demand on the transport system: we now have a more pronounced midweek peak, more split-days, and less predictable journey patterns, and a group of workers travelling less often but over longer distances and with greater reliance on rail.
“That means homeworking should not be treated as a simple substitute for transport policy – it may reduce some driving, but it does not by itself reduce car ownership or most non-work travel. Operators and policymakers need to plan for a different pattern of demand, not assume that demand has disappeared.”
Dr Llinos Brown, co-author of the report, said:
“Following the same people over five years enabled us to test whether apparent homeworking effects remained once job changes and house moves were taken out of the picture. The clearest and most durable impacts were on the commute. Many other post-pandemic changes in travel and daily life were shared by people regardless of whether they worked from home more, less or not at all. The implication is that cutting commute trips alone will not necessarily persuade households to give up a car, because vehicles are retained for the many non-work journeys that continue to shape everyday life.”
ENDS
Media contacts
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Notes to editors
The report can be downloaded here:
https://www.racfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/WFH_and_post_pandemic_travel_behaviour-Brown_and_Anable_September_2026.pdf
Report. Working from home and post-pandemic travel behaviour: Evidence from the TRANSAS longitudinal panel (2020-2025), by Dr Llinos Brown and Professor Jillian Anable, University of Leeds; commissioned by the RAC Foundation.
Study design. TRANSAS is a longitudinal online panel covering residents of ten city-regions in England and Scotland. Seven waves were conducted between July 2020 and July 2025. Wave 1 collected retrospective pre-pandemic information as well as lockdown-period behaviour.
Samples. The 2025 working sample comprised 1,443 people. Longitudinal analysis included 2,692 people responding in both 2020 and 2025; 1,026 were working at both timepoints. Robustness checks restricted analysis to people with stable jobs, workplace locations and/or home locations.
Interpretation. The panel is not nationally representative: it covers ten UK city-regions, is based on self-reported online survey data, and experienced attrition over five years. The report therefore describes robust patterns within the participating cohort rather than population estimates for the whole UK.
The RAC Foundation is a transport policy and research organisation which explores the economic, mobility, safety and environmental issues relating to roads and their users.
It is a registered charity. Charity number: 1002705.
The Foundation publishes independent and authoritative research with which it promotes informed debate and advocates policy in the interest of the responsible motorist. For more information visit www.racfoundation.org