Still working from home? Atlanta is a top place for it, ranking says

Not everyone has been able to go back to the office.

An Upwork study revealed that 36.2 million Americans will be working remotely by 2025, an 87% increase from before the coronavirus pandemic emerged.

“As businesses adapt and learn from this remote work experiment, many are altering their long term plans to accommodate this way of working,” Upwork chief economist Adam Ozimek said in a press release. “On work marketplaces like Upwork, we can already see this shift underway with increased demand for remote professionals.”

Knowing that many work-from-home opportunities will continue into the new year, SmartAsset looked into which cities are the best for home working environments in 2021.

“To determine our rankings, we compared 100 of the largest U.S. cities across seven metrics,” the personal finance technology company said in its methodology. “They span work-from-home flexibility prior to and during COVID-19, along with employment opportunities, poverty rates and housing affordability.”

Among the key findings, SmartAsset learned there was a strong showing for North Carolina, as three cities in the Tar Heel State — Raleigh, Durham and Charlotte — ranked in the top 10.

Mid-sized cities also performed well.

Aside from Charlotte, North Carolina and Austin, Texas the cities in the top 10 had a population size ranging from 240,000 to 500,000. It’s likely that those towns offer more space in homes and apartments, making them better suited for working from home.

While Atlanta did not make it into the top 10, it managed to come in at No. 13, tying with Seattle. Under 10% of workers worked from home in Atlanta in 2019 but 36.36% of workers can do so now, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau.

If you’re one of the workers who will continue to keep your home and office in the same place this year, you may want to consider some changes to keep distractions at bay.

Credit: SmartAsset

Credit: SmartAsset