Teleworking Facts
- According to World at Work, a human resources association, 17.2 million Americans worked at home in 2008, meaning that they worked at home for an employer at least one day per month. This is a 39 percent increase over 2006, when 12.4 million Americans telecommuted.
Self-employed home workers and small business owners who work at home totaled 16.6 million in 2008, up from 16.2 million in 2006. The total of all teleworkers in 2008, 33.8 million, represents a 17 percent increase over 2006.
Most telecommuters work in their homes, with some reporting that they work in a customer's place of business or in their cars. - In 2008, 61 percent of employed telecommuters were male and 39 percent were female. The median age was 38; the mean age was 40.3. Eight percent were age 55 and over, 48 percent were age 35 to 54, and 42 percent were age 18 to 34.
Teleworkers with who had not had any higher education made up 23 percent of the total in 2008, while 28 percent had some college or vocational school, 50 percent held undergraduate college degrees and 15 percent held post-graduate degrees.
While 5 percent of telecommuters refused to divulge their incomes, 10 percent of the remaining home workers earned less than $40,000, 32 percent earned more than $40,000 but less than $75,000, and 52 percent earned $75,000 or more. - World at Work surveyed respondents concerning work they performed in an office that could be performed by teleworking. In 2008, 38 percent of those polled who didn't currently telecommute reported that they believed they could perform some of their work at home, but 61 percent said they couldn't perform their jobs remotely.
Of those who thought they could do some of their work at home, most estimated that 40 percent of their tasks would qualify, and some said that 80 percent of their work could be done at home. Fifty percent of the respondents said they'd be interested in working from home if their employers permitted it, but 61 percent said they weren't willing to take a pay cut in exchange for telecommuting two days a week. - According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), in 2008, 21 percent of all employed persons did all or some of their work at home. For full-time workers, that translated into an average of three hours of work per day, with men averaging 3.13 hours and women averaging 2.86 hours. Travel time was excluded, and the workers might have worked at more than one location. The figures referred to all workers age 15 and over, of all educational levels.
- According to the Telework Coalition, the types of jobs most often linked to telecommuting are computer programmers, lawyers, customer service representatives, salespersons, accountants and auditors, online jobs such as content writers and editors, coders and webmasters, designers and artists, and help-desk agents.