In 2019, there were 514 census tracts in America where at least one in five workers worked from home. We counted — it's public data, it just takes a warehouse to ask the question.
In the current ACS release, there are 19,882.
That's a 39-fold increase. Nearly a quarter of populated U.S. tracts now have a workforce where remote work isn't a perk somebody's cousin has — it's a fifth of the neighborhood or more, home on a Tuesday, not driving past your site at 7:40am.
A census tract, for reference, is the Census Bureau's neighborhood-sized unit — about 4,000 people on average. It's the resolution where site analysis actually works, and it's the resolution where this shift shows up.
The numbers
Nationally, work-from-home went from 5.1% of workers in 2019 to 14.7% in the current data — roughly triple. But national averages flatten the story. The metros where site selection is most active moved much harder:
- Austin: 8.8% → 26.8%
- Denver: 8.4% → 23.9%
- Charlotte: 6.6% → 21.3%
And the high-WFH tracts aren't sprinkled evenly. In Washington D.C., 82% of tracts now clear the one-in-five bar. Colorado: 48% of tracts. Maryland, Massachusetts, Washington state — all above 39%. Source: IQ Locations analysis of 2024 ACS 5-year data, all 84,000+ populated census tracts.
Why this shows up in your revenue, not just in a spreadsheet
Anything that sells to the morning commute — coffee, breakfast QSR, gas, dry cleaning drop-off — was underwritten on a flow of cars that, in a lot of trade areas, partially stopped existing. A corridor site that penciled at 2019 traffic can be down a fifth of its peak flow with no visible change: same road, same counts on the dated traffic study, different mornings.
The flip side is just as real. Those 19,882 tracts are full of people who are home at 10:30 on a weekday. Mid-morning coffee runs, lunch traffic in residential nodes, weekday gym visits, errands that used to happen near the office and now happen near the house. Neighborhood retail in high-WFH tracts is quietly capturing spend that used to leak to the employment center twelve miles away.
Same category, opposite implications, and the only way to know which side of it a specific address sits on is to pull the tract data for that address. A traffic count won't tell you — it counts cars, not the people who stopped being in them.
One honest caveat: the ACS five-year data is an average of 2020 through 2024, so it slightly lags the present. If anything, the current number of high-WFH tracts is higher than what we counted here.
The seller's brochure will still quote the 2019 traffic study. The tract data is current, it's public, and checking it for an address takes 30 seconds with a demographic report. That's a cheap way to find out whether the morning your pro forma assumes still exists.
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IQ Locations pulls Census demographics, competitor mapping, traffic counts, and income distribution into a scored report for any address in the US. Know what you're getting into before you sign.
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