NYC Remote Work and Commuting: Census Microdata
Public-use microdata from the article “Who still goes to the office”
Not synthetic. Disclosure-protected survey records published by a government statistical agency, cut to the people or households we looked at.
- Records
- Public-use microdata
- Place
- New York City
- Version
- 1.12,
- Licence
- CC BY 4.0; code MIT
- Built for
- Who still goes to the office (version 1.12)
Working from home has settled rather than faded, and it has settled on the better paid. In 2026 about a quarter of New Yorkers at work spend some or all of the week working from home, one in ten all of it, as in 2025. Before the pandemic the share was the same at every pay level; now it climbs with pay. Seven in eight still travel to work, and the commute that shrank is the one to Manhattan.
The article's own data file, microdata cut to what it analyses, and the script that computes every figure in it. Computed from: ACS 2015–2024 one-year PUMS, NYC and metro-area resident workers, with the 2019 and 2024 files for the comparisons; CPS basic monthly files June 2024 to August 2026 for the telework question; MTA daily ridership to 30 September 2026.
Files
| File | Rows | Size | What it holds |
|---|---|---|---|
| data.csv | 66,499 | 11.4 MB | The microdata the article's figures are computed from. |
| analysis.py | 56 KB | The script that computes every figure in the article (MIT). |
Columns
data.csv: The data (22 columns)
row_id, year, weight, borough, worked_from_home, mode, mode_group, one_way_minutes, workplace_manhattan, physically_commutes_to_manhattan, own_earnings_2024, earnings_band, occupation_group, industry_sector, office_based_industry, class_of_worker, usual_hours, race_ethnicity, foreign_born, bachelors_or_higher, age, sex. The article and its script
define each one.
Sources
- U.S. Census Bureau — Means of Transportation to Work (B08301), New York city, ACS 2019 1-year
- U.S. Census Bureau — Means of Transportation to Work (B08301), New York city and United States, ACS 2024 1-year
- U.S. Census Bureau — the same table for 2021, 2022 and 2023 (1-year summary files)
- U.S. Census Bureau — ACS 2015–2024 1-Year PUMS (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut), person files with replicate weights
- U.S. Census Bureau and Bureau of Labor Statistics — Current Population Survey basic monthly public-use files, June 2024 to August 2026, with the telework items
- U.S. Census Bureau — Current Population Survey Telework Items, technical documentation (January 2024)
- Metropolitan Transportation Authority — MTA Daily Ridership and Traffic: Beginning 2020 (data.ny.gov), retrieved 4 October 2026, counts to 30 September 2026
- Metropolitan Transportation Authority — MTA Daily Ridership Data: 2020–2025 (data.ny.gov)
- Partnership for New York City — Return to Office Survey Results, March 2025
- Kastle Systems — Back to Work Barometer hits all-time post-pandemic highs (week of 8 December 2025)
- Office of the NYC Comptroller — Spotlight: New York City's Office Market (May 2024)
- PropertyShark (Yardi Research) — NYC Office Market Report, Q1 2026 (27 May 2026)
- PropertyShark (Hubble and Yardi Research) — Q2 NYC Office Market Report (28 July 2026), second quarter of 2026
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — American Time Use Survey, 2025 results, Table 6 (25 June 2026)
- U.S. Census Bureau — American Community Survey news: 2026 updates, update of 6 August 2026
- U.S. Census Bureau — Cartographic Boundary File, 2020 Public Use Microdata Areas, New York, 1:500,000, GENZ2020 release; the 2020 PUMA definitions used by the ACS from the 2022 files
Licence and credit
The survey records are the publishing agency's, redistributed as published; the columns we derived are CC BY 4.0; the script is MIT. Public-use microdata are disclosure-protected records derived from survey responses, published by the issuing agency so that no respondent can be identified; synthetic records are generated by SparkyData and correspond to no real person, household or address. Neither may be used to identify anyone.
Credit it as:
SparkyData (2026). NYC Remote Work and Commuting: Census Microdata (version 1.12). Data CC BY 4.0.
https://sparkydata.dev/data/nyc-remote-work-and-commuting-census-microdataThe article gives the charts, the uncertainty of each comparison and a changelog. Corrections and questions: sparkytech.dev@gmail.com, or see corrections.