Thirty-six percent of the Puget Sound region’s employees work from home one or more days a week —  a 16% drop in telework rates since 2021, the Puget Sound Regional Council (PSRC) found in a recent study.

For its Puget Sound Trend report, PSRC examined the telework rates by the region and smaller areas.

Based on its regional travel survey, PSRC said that commuting and working from home at least once a week has grown since 2019. In 2019, 23% of the workers worked from home at least one day a week. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, much of the region’s workforce retreated to working at home at least part of the time. As COVID restrictions began to relax, people returned at a steady pace. In 2021, hybrid rates and working from home jumped to 52%, but have declined since, the report said.

Other findings:

– The share of people who always worked from home in 2023 was smaller than at the pandemic’s peak, but still about double what it was in 2019.

– Working from home in the region varies by location. Kitsap and Pierce counties have the smallest percentage of hybrid workers, with 77% of employees doing their jobs fully in person. For the area described as Snohomish-King Suburban, the percentage was 63% fully in person. This is in contrast to Bellevue and downtown Seattle, which have rates of 41% and 33% of people working in person. However, downtown Seattle has the lowest rate of workers fully working at home, with 2%.

The regional travel survey collects day-to-day information from households in the central Puget Sound region: how residents travel, where they go and how long it takes – even where residents choose to live and whether they get home deliveries, Data from the four most recent household travel surveys (2017-2019-2021-2023) are available for download in PSRC’s Data Portal.