Everyday
What if I worked from home one more day?
Short answer: each extra day at home saves two legs of your commute and a day’s costs. A 35-minute trip each way is 70 minutes back for every day you don’t travel. Enter your minutes and daily cost below.
How much commuting time and cost might not be spent with extra home-working days?
Commuting is a round trip that repeats on the days you go in. One extra day at home is therefore two legs of travel and one day’s worth of the costs you attach to being in the workplace — a ticket, fuel, a sandwich, a parking session. The National Travel Survey still finds commuting among the longer-distance purposes of travel, but the minutes and pounds are yours, not a national average pretending to be your street. This experiment compares the estimated time and cost of adding between one and four home-working days each week over a working year you choose. It does not claim home working is more productive or cheaper once heating and lunch are counted; those sit in other experiments if you want them.
Written and checked by Aivora Digital · Last updated:
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Results update as you move the controls.
Ticket, fuel, parking, a bought lunch — your bundle.
Your result
54 hours
estimated commuting time not spent
46 office-day round trips avoided.
- Estimated cost not spent
- £368
- Extra home days
- 46
- Round trip
- 70 min
- Hours not travelling
- 53.7 h
£8.00 per extra home day.
1 a week across 46 weeks.
What does that mean?
Adding 1 home-working day a week over 46 weeks is an estimated 54 hours not spent on the commute and £368 not spent on your office-day costs. Compare the estimated difference; it is not a verdict that home working is the better pattern, and household energy on those days is not subtracted.
At a glance
- Hours not commuting54 hours
- Office-day cost (£)£368
Timeline
Each extra day
70 minutes off the calendar
£8.00 of the costs you attached to being in the workplace.
46 weeks
46 round trips
54 hours and £368 on these assumptions.
Compare scenarios
Two legs, every extra day
The clock uses your one-way minutes and doubles them. A 35-minute each-way trip is 70 minutes off the calendar for each day not travelled. ONS analysis of commuting has long shown that door-to-door times vary sharply by place and mode; the slider is there because a London Underground hour and a market-town drive are not interchangeable defaults.
Cost per day is a bundle you define
The default £8 might be a return bus, a parking session, or fuel plus a bought lunch. A rail season ticket that you already hold will not shrink by one day unless you can buy a different product, so be careful not to count a sunk ticket as a saving. Raise the figure if congestion charges or childcare wraparound sit on office days only.
Weeks, not a slogan
Forty-six weeks is a simple working year after a typical holiday allowance. Bank holidays, office-closure days and the days you already work from home should be kept out of “extra days” — this page only models the additional ones. Extra household heating on home days is not subtracted here.
How we calculated this
Extra commuting days avoided = extra home days per week × weeks. Time not spent travelling = extra days × two × one-way minutes, converted to hours. Cost not spent = extra days × cost per day. The cost slider is whatever you treat as avoidable on a home day. Heating at home, lunches you would buy anyway, and season tickets already paid are out of scope unless you fold them into the day-cost. This experiment provides estimates for educational purposes and is not financial advice. Actual results vary depending on rates, fees, taxes, inflation and individual circumstances.
Assumptions and limitations
This is a simplified estimate. Actual results depend on factors the model does not include.
This experiment provides estimates for educational purposes and is not financial advice. Actual results vary depending on rates, fees, taxes, inflation and individual circumstances.
- Each extra home day avoids one round-trip commute.
- One-way minutes are door to door, including walking to a stop or parking.
- Cost per day is an avoidable office-day cost you choose, not a national fare.
- Default 46 weeks stands in for a working year after holidays.
- No productivity, wellbeing or household-energy adjustment is applied.
- Existing home-working days are not counted; only extra ones.
Sources
- Department for Transport — National Travel Survey 2023
Commuting remains one of the longer-distance trip purposes; average travel time in England was about 58 minutes a day in 2023.
- Office for National Statistics — commuting analysis
Shows how commute length varies, and why a single default time is a poor substitute for the minutes you actually spend.
- RAC Foundation — motoring price index
Context for drivers who treat fuel and related costs as the office-day bundle.
Go further
Related experiments that pick up where this one leaves off.
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