The share of Seattle residents who work remotely dropped sharply in 2024, the third consecutive year of significant declines, new census data shows. At the same time, walking and biking to work both surged among Seattle residents last year, bringing them back to their prepandemic levels.
The COVID-19 pandemic transformed remote work from a niche to the norm. In 2019, before the pandemic hit, only about 36,000 Seattle residents, or 8% of the working population, worked remotely most days of the week. In 2021, during pandemic lockdowns, that number jumped to 205,000, or 48% of Seattle workers. The Census Bureau did not publish work-from-home figures for 2020, which would have likely been even higher.
Since then, as companies began to reopen offices and call back their employees, the remote work numbers have dropped each year. In 2024, about 116,100 Seattle residents typically worked from home, down from 132,700, a 13% decline.
Nationally, remote work also declined in 2024, but by a modest 2%. In total, around 22 million Americans worked from home last year.
Even with the decline locally, Seattle still had a higher share of its labor force working remotely than most big cities, with 24% of city residents working remotely most days. In 2024, Seattle ranked sixth among the 50 most-populous U.S. cities for the percentage of residents who worked from home. Atlanta was No. 1, at around 26%. El Paso, Texas, was at the opposite end of the spectrum, at just 7%.
When remote work surged during the pandemic, the numbers for commute modes shrank, including walking and biking to work. Both of these increased significantly last year in Seattle, bringing them back to around where they were before the pandemic.
Around 51,000 Seattle residents walked to work last year, up from 39,400 in 2024, a 29% increase. In 2024, nearly 11% of working Seattle residents walked to work most days — that ranked as the third-highest percentage among the 50 largest U.S. cities, behind Boston and Washington, D.C.
Bike commuting saw an even bigger increase, up 32% to 16,700 Seattle residents. That pencils out to 3.5% of Seattle workers, which ranked as the third-highest share among the 50 largest cities, behind Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. Portland, which used to have the highest share of bike commuters in the nation — it was higher than 7% around 10 years ago — was slightly behind Seattle in 2024.
About 41% of Seattle city residents drove alone to work most days last year — the number grew from about 180,400 in 2023 to 193,300 in 2024, a 7% increase. Seattle had the fifth-lowest share of residents who drove alone to work last year, among the 50 largest U.S. cities. New York was the lowest at around 21%, and Oklahoma City was the highest, at 76%.
Around 71,700 Seattle residents, or 15% of workers, used public transit to commute last year, effectively unchanged from 2023. Around 5,600 people, or 1% of Seattle workers, commuted by taxi, motorcycle or other means in 2024, which was not a statistically significant change from 2023.
Carpooling saw the biggest decline of any commute mode in Seattle, falling 21% last year. Around 21,100 Seattle residents carpooled in 2024, which is slightly less than 5% of the working population. Among the 50 largest cities, Seattle had the third-lowest share of residents who carpooled. New York and Washington, D.C., were slightly lower.
© 2025 The Seattle Times. Visit www.seattletimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
