Happy Friday! 🎉 Are you working from home today? I took a quick look at what the 2023 New Zealand Census data can tell us about WFH.
The charts below show the proportion of people who responded that they worked at home in the census questions about travel to work. Bear in mind that this is just a snapshot for one day in each year: nominally a Tuesday in early March in each census year, although people may have responded on different days.
All proportions use the number of employed people as the denominator. For a geographic area, we can look at WFH for people who live in the area or for people who work in the area. These rates can be quite different.
- The broad trends show that the proportion of people WFH increased substantially in all regions between 2013 and 2023, based on where people live. But the trend started well before the COVID pandemic.
- In the West Coast and Southland, the proportion of people WFH dropped between 2018 and 2023, but it increased in all other regions. There were sharp increases for people who live in the Auckland and Wellington regions in this period.
- Across regions in 2023, the highest WFH rates were not for people who live in Auckland and Wellington. The top 3 regions were Tasman, Northland, and West Coast. It suggests that WFH is a lifestyle choice for many.
- Looking at the WFH rates for people who worked in the CBD areas of Auckland and Wellington shows a strong increase between 2018 and 2023, but I was quite surprised to see these rates are actually still relatively low!
- WFH generally increases with income in urban areas, but not in rural areas.
- WFH is more generally common for people who live in rural areas compared to urban areas.
- The capital of WFH in New Zealand in 2023 was Ngamatea, with 100% of employed people (all 15 of them) reporting that they worked from home on census day. Ngamatea is a rural area in the North Island, to the south-east of Lake Taupō, and the main (or maybe only) business in the area is a high-country sheep and beef station.