For the first time since the pandemic ruptured commuting patterns across the country, more San Francisco workers took public transit to work than worked from home in 2024, according to newly released U.S. census data.
The data, which comes from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, shows that about 21% of San Franciscans reported working from home in 2024, continuing a decline since remote work peaked at a whopping 45% in 2021. Meanwhile, public transit usage has seen the inverse trend: last year, 25% of people reported commuting by transit, up from the 2021 low of just 11%.
The survey asks a sample of people in the U.S. how they usually got to work the week before responding. The estimates represent people who live in each place, not just work there.
Though it’s climbing, public transit usage in the city was still far below what it was before the pandemic, when an estimated 36% of San Franciscans reported taking transit to get to work, just ahead of the share who drove. That made San Francisco the only county outside the New York City area where more commuters used public transit than driving.
That is no longer the case.
Although it’s down sharply, working from home remains well above the 2019 rate, which was just 7%. Driving to work, meanwhile, has remained fairly steady over the same period: in 2019, about 35% of people in San Francisco drove either alone or by carpool to work. After a slight dip to 32% in 2021, that number came back up to 35%, and has hovered around that ever since, suggesting that working from home, rather than driving, has had the most significant impact on rates of transit usage.
The declining work-from-home numbers back up anecdotal evidence about companies large and small, as well as City Hall, enforcing return-to-office mandates for at least a few days a week.
Still, San Francisco’s work-from-home rates far outstrip the state and the nation at large. Though remote work spiked everywhere in 2021, San Francisco’s peak — 45% of workers — was more than double the state and nationwide rates. Since then, San Francisco’s rate has dropped at a faster pace, and the gap between the city and the rest of the country has narrowed, though S.F. still has a higher share of remote workers.
Nonetheless, San Francisco is no longer exceptional as a work-from-home hotspot. Within California, Nevada, Marin, and Placer counties all had slightly higher rates than San Francisco last year. Counties with robust agriculture industries, like Merced, Tulare, and Kings, on the other hand, had very low working from home rates, all at 6% or lower.
Among other major U.S. cities, Austin, Texas, plus Denver and Seattle had higher work-from-home rates in 2024 than San Francisco, with 25% for Austin and Denver and 24% for Seattle. Despite their knowledge-heavy economies, New York and San Jose reported some of the lowest rates of working from home, both at about 13%.