Employees in jobs suited to remote work became more likely to live at least 50 kilometers from their workplaces during the pandemic, a Swedish study finds. For employers, the results point to a recruitment market that can extend beyond the limits of a daily commute.
The research, published September 22 in The Annals of Regional Science, followed 900,873 employees aged 25 to 64 using Swedish records from 2015 to 2021.
It examined the distance between home and workplace, rather than how frequently employees traveled. Someone classified as a long-distance commuter could have attended the office only occasionally.
That leaves businesses with a practical question: how should they recruit, organize teams and set attendance policies when employees can live farther away?
A small probability increased substantially
Eleanor Johansson, Pia Nilsson, Johan P. Larsson, Lucia Naldi and Hans Westlund compared employees in occupations with different potential for working from home.
A one-standard-deviation increase in remote-work potential, a statistical measure of variation between occupations, was associated with an approximately 0.18-percentage-point increase in the probability of becoming a new long-distance commuter during the pandemic.
The pre-pandemic probability was about 0.3%, making the estimated increase roughly 59% relative to that starting point. It does not mean that 59% of employees moved farther from work.
The study measured occupational suitability for home working, not each person’s actual schedule. Its records end in 2021, so it cannot establish how those employees’ arrangements developed through 2026.
A longer distance can mean fewer miles traveled
Hybrid work combines attendance at an employer’s premises with work performed elsewhere, usually at home. Reducing the number of office days changes the trade-off between housing location and travel.
Consider a hypothetical employee living 80 kilometers from an office. Five round trips each week would cover 800 kilometers. Two would cover 320 kilometers, assuming the same route and no other work journeys.
The home-to-work distance stays unchanged, while weekly travel falls by 60%. Conversely, moving much farther away could absorb some or all of the savings from fewer journeys.
Distance alone therefore cannot establish a remote worker’s transport costs, travel time or emissions. A short journey on foot and an occasional long car trip have different consequences.
For employers, an attendance requirement expressed as days per week may matter more to a distant applicant than the office’s location by itself. Unexpected extra visits can also make an otherwise workable arrangement difficult.
US and German research finds related changes
A separate US working paper, The New Geography of Labor Markets, found that average home-to-employer distance rose more than 70% between 2019 and 2024 in its matched employer-employee dataset.
By 2024, 12% of employees hired after March 2020 lived at least 50 miles from their employer, three times the pre-pandemic share. The increase was especially pronounced among higher-paid workers and in finance, information and professional services.
Those figures describe the researchers’ sample, rather than an official estimate for every American employee. The paper, revised in November 2025, is working-paper evidence rather than a published journal article.
A German study published in the Journal of Urban Economics in March 2026 also found that home-to-work distances increased more strongly in occupations compatible with home working after the pandemic. The relationship strengthened from 2021 and was much larger for new jobs.
Together, the studies suggest that geographical flexibility concerns both where existing employees live and the jobs people can accept when they change employers. They do not show that every occupation or country follows the same pattern.
A wider hiring area brings obligations
An employer seeking a specialist can potentially consider candidates who would reject five days of commuting but accept one or two. Applicants may gain access to better-matched jobs without moving their households.
That opportunity depends on the work. Equipment maintenance, patient care, construction and many customer-facing tasks require physical attendance. Even computer-based roles can involve meetings or activities that are difficult to arrange remotely.
Businesses also need to decide how a dispersed team will coordinate projects, train recruits and handle urgent work. A wider recruitment area is useful only if the operating arrangements support the people hired from it.
Clear policies help applicants judge those arrangements. Employers can specify expected attendance, how much notice additional visits require and which responsibilities depend on being on-site.
As MBN’s earlier reporting on employers reducing remote-work opportunities explains, companies also weigh supervision and collaboration. A change in attendance policy can become a much larger issue for someone who has organized family life around living farther away.
Cheaper housing for one household can raise costs for another
Remote-capable employees may retain an urban job while choosing a larger or less expensive home elsewhere. Communities receiving those residents can gain customers for stores, restaurants and local services.
But housing supply matters. A January 2026 analysis by Wenli Li and Yichen Su, published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, explains how migration can raise demand in receiving areas and put pressure on prices when construction does not keep up.
The authors describe an uneven adjustment. Higher-income households have been important drivers of moves toward suburbs and smaller communities, while residents without remote-capable jobs cannot necessarily make the same choices.
Moving to a cheaper area can improve one household’s budget while making housing harder to afford for a local worker. The outcome depends on the scale of arrivals, incomes and how readily additional homes become available.
Attendance patterns matter as much as addresses
For a downtown restaurant, the relevant question is how many workers visit nearby offices on a given day. For a regional rail operator, it is when passengers travel and how often they buy tickets.
A change in residential geography cannot answer either question on its own. Businesses and local authorities need information about actual attendance and journeys before making decisions about premises or transport capacity.
The same applies to an employer’s recruitment policy. A distant employee may be able to meet the job’s requirements reliably, while another may find the travel unsustainable. Knowing the address is only the beginning of that assessment.
