Growth in Home-Based Work Decreased Manhattan's Commuter-Adjusted Population by 800,000

The increase in remote work following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has drawn attention to the impact of the shift away from traditional centralized employment locations in U.S. cities.

One way of gauging the magnitude of this change is through the commuter-adjusted population estimate, which refers to the number of people in a geographic area during normal business hours. This estimate includes residents of an area who do not work and workers who work in an area regardless of whether they live there, and excludes workers who live but do not work in an area.

This analysis uses 2019 and 2021 American Community Survey (ACS) 1-year estimates to highlight how the dramatic increase in home-based work during the COVID-19 pandemic changed the population distribution of certain key metros during a typical workday.

Kings County, better known as Brooklyn, was the county in the New York metro area with the largest absolute increase in resident and commuter-adjusted population.

The commuter-adjusted population is not a complete measure of how an area’s population may change during a typical working day. It does not account for students, customers, tourists and other transient visitors or for day-to-day differences in workers’ schedules.

Still, the commuter-adjusted population provides a glimpse of how an area’s composition may change due to regular travel to and from the workplace.

The commuter-adjusted population is calculated by adding the people who live in an area to the total number of people working in an area, and then subtracting the total number of people who both live and work in the area.

The examples below describe changes to resident and commuter-adjusted population between 2019 and 2021 in some of the nation’s most populous metro areas. A positive number indicates population increase and a negative number population decrease.

In many cases, changes to the commuter-adjusted population reflect changes to total population. Areas where the commuter-adjusted population changed significantly between 2019 and 2021 may highlight places where home-based work has become more prevalent.

We refer to resident population throughout this article as anyone who resides in an area, regardless of whether or where they work.

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