Your Life
How Much Time Have You Spent Commuting?
Thirty minutes each way, five days a week, is about 232 hours a year after 5.6 weeks of holiday, or 2,320 hours (about 97 days) over ten years. The average commuting trip in England took 31.5 minutes in 2025. Change the sliders below for your own journey.
How much time have you spent commuting?
This experiment adds up the time you have spent travelling to and from work. Enter your one-way journey time, how many days a week you go in and how many weeks of holiday you take, and it totals the hours across the years you have done it. In England the average commuting trip took 31.5 minutes in 2025, including waiting time, according to the Department for Transport’s National Travel Survey. For someone who travels in and back that is about an hour a day. Your own trip may be very different, so use the door-to-door minutes from a normal week.
Written and checked by Aivora Digital · Last updated:
Change this
Results update as you move the controls.
Your result
97 days
spent commuting
97 days of 24-hour time
- Hours
- 2,320
- Clock years
- 0.26
- Round trips
- 2,320
- Hours in a typical year
- 232
60 minutes a commuting day
What does that mean?
30 minutes each way, 5 days a week for 10 years, comes to 2,320 hours, or 97 days of 24-hour time. Your trip is shorter than the England average of 31.5 minutes.
Timeline
1 year
232 hours
About 10 days if this week stayed as it is.
5 years
48 days
48 days of two-way travel.
10 years
97 days
The full stretch on the sliders, holidays already removed.
Compare
| England average, 31.5 minutes one way (2025) | 102 days |
|---|---|
| 15 minutes one way | 48 days |
| 30 minutes one way | 97 days |
| 60 minutes one way | 193 days |
Two journeys every working day
The calculator doubles the one-way minutes you enter. A 30-minute trip is an hour of the day, five days a week. Statutory holiday of 5.6 weeks (28 days on a five-day week, which can include bank holidays) takes the year from 260 weekdays to 232 commuting days. If you only travel in three days a week, set the days slider to three rather than averaging it in your head.
How your commute compares
The National Travel Survey for 2025 puts the average commuting trip in England at 31.5 minutes and 9.2 miles. It varies a lot by where you live: 43.5 minutes for London residents, 32.6 minutes in the South East and 25.5 minutes in the North East. The length of a commute has barely changed since 2019, when it was 31.2 minutes, but people make fewer of them: 112 commuting trips per person in 2025, against 140 in 2019. Full-time workers averaged 247 one-way commuting trips in 2025. That is an average across everyone in full-time work, including people who mostly work from home.
Does commuting count as working time?
Usually not. Acas says regular travel between home and a fixed place of work does not normally count as working time, although an employer can choose to count it. Travel during the working day does count, for example from the office to a meeting. Workers with no fixed workplace, such as care workers or plumbers going from job to job, are likely to have their travel from home to work counted as working time.
What a shorter trip would give back
The sums are simple multiplication, so halving the minutes halves the total. Dropping one commuting day a week cuts a five-day pattern by a fifth. The related experiments on working from home, walking and train vs driving compare the cost and time of a different pattern. This page totals the pattern you have already lived.
Worked example: ten years of a 30-minute commute
Start with 30 minutes each way, five days a week and 5.6 weeks of holiday, which leaves 46.4 working weeks a year.
- One year: 46.4 weeks × 5 days × 60 minutes = 13,920 minutes, or 232 hours.
- Ten years: 2,320 hours. Divided by 24, that is about 97 days of round-the-clock time.
- At the London average of 43.5 minutes each way, the same ten years comes to 3,364 hours, about 140 days.
- Going in three days a week instead of five cuts the ten-year total to 1,392 hours.
- A 40-year working life at the England average of 31.5 minutes, five days a week, is 9,744 hours, about 406 days.
A typical full-time commute adds up to more than a year of round-the-clock time over a working life. Every five minutes you take off each journey saves about 39 hours a year on a five-day week.
What people get wrong
- “The average UK commute is about an hour each way.”
- The average commuting trip in England took 31.5 minutes in 2025, including waiting time. About an hour is the typical round trip. London residents averaged 43.5 minutes each way.
- “There are 260 commuting days in a year.”
- There are 260 weekdays (52 × 5). Take off 5.6 weeks of statutory holiday, which is 28 days on a five-day week, and a full-time worker has 232 commuting days at most, before sick days or working from home.
- “My commute counts towards the 48-hour week.”
- Not usually. Regular travel to a fixed workplace does not normally count as working time under the Working Time Regulations. It does count for most people with no fixed workplace who travel between jobs.
Common questions
What is the average commute time in the UK?
The latest official figure covers England: the average commuting trip took 31.5 minutes in 2025 and covered 9.2 miles, according to the Department for Transport’s National Travel Survey. That includes time spent waiting. London residents averaged 43.5 minutes and people in the rest of England 28.9 minutes.
How do I calculate my commute time over a year?
Multiply your one-way minutes by 2, then by the days you travel each week, then by your working weeks, and divide by 60 for hours. For 30 minutes each way, five days a week and 46.4 working weeks: 30 × 2 × 5 × 46.4 ÷ 60 = 232 hours.
How do I estimate my commute time accurately?
Time your door-to-door journey on a normal week, including the walk to the station or car park, waiting on the platform and finding a space, then take the average. A journey planner gives the travel part, but not your walking and waiting. If delays are common on your route, add a typical buffer rather than the worst day.
How much time does the average person spend commuting in a year?
Averaged over everyone in England, including people who do not work, the National Travel Survey records 59 hours a year of commuting in 2025, and 95 hours for London residents. For someone who travels five days a week at the average 31.5 minutes each way, it is about 244 hours a year.
How we calculated this
Hours = years commuting × (52 − weeks of holiday) × commuting days a week × (one-way minutes × 2 ÷ 60). Days and years of clock time use 24-hour days and 365.25-day years. Delays, cancellations and one-off trips are not added. The commute is assumed identical in both directions.
Assumptions and limitations
This is a simplified estimate. Actual results depend on factors the model does not include.
- Every working day in the period uses the same one-way time.
- Holiday weeks remove whole commuting weeks, matching the work-hours experiment.
- Remote days are handled by lowering days per week, not by a separate toggle.
- Waiting, walking to the stop and parking are included only if you put them in the minutes. The National Travel Survey averages include waiting time.
- Overtime evenings and weekend working are excluded unless days per week is raised.
- The result counts time, not cost, emissions or stress.
Sources
- Department for Transport: National Travel Survey 2025
Average commuting trip of 31.5 minutes and 9.2 miles in England in 2025, with 112 commuting trips per person.
- Department for Transport: NTS04 trip purpose tables
Tables NTS0403 (trip time and length by purpose, 2002 onwards), NTS0412 (commuting by employment status) and NTS0413 (commuting by region, including 43.5 minutes for London).
- ONS: Travel to work, England and Wales (Census 2021)
How people travelled to work on Census Day, including the large working-from-home share in 2021.
- ONS: Time use in the UK
Average daily time spent travelling, as a separate activity from paid work.
- GOV.UK: Holiday entitlement
Used for the default 5.6 holiday weeks, which also remove commuting days in this model.
- Acas: Working time rules
Regular commuting to a fixed workplace is usually not working time.
- Acas: Working time for someone who travels for their job
Travel between home and work is likely to count as working time for workers with no fixed place of work.
Go further
Related experiments that pick up where this one leaves off.
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