Cost of RTO
Gas, transit, parking, food, coffee, clothing, and unpaid commute time all add up. This calculator estimates the real annual cost of going into the office compared to working from home.
Calculate my RTO cost ↓This calculator estimates recurring costs tied to in-office work: transportation, parking, food, vehicle wear, clothing, and the value of unpaid commute time. It subtracts estimated extra work-from-home costs (electricity, heat, internet) so the comparison is more realistic: working from home isn't free either. Commute time is valued at 50% of your wage by default, following official U.S. DOT guidance for local personal travel. You can change this to 0% or 100%.
Default values are pre-filled from public data for whichever country you select above, and every field is editable. Vehicle maintenance cost and fuel efficiency use U.S. figures for both countries in the absence of a Canada-specific equivalent. Tax rate is a rough estimate only. Actual rates vary widely by state/province and income, so adjust it to your own bracket.
This is an estimate, not financial advice. Your exact costs will vary.
This isn't a fight between people who want to work from home and people who never could. Nurses, EMTs, and tradespeople never had that option. Their average one-way commute (24–32 minutes for nurses) is already comparable to, or longer than, the national average. Every unnecessary RTO mandate adds more cars to the same roads they depend on to reach patients and emergencies. Unneeded commuting makes things worse for everyone, not just the people forced back into an office.
None of the 9,700+ U.S. federal buildings reviewed under the 2024 USE IT Act met the government's own 60% utilization threshold, and underused federal office space wastes an estimated $1.34 billion a year (GSA, GovExec). In Canada, roughly half of federal office space was underused before the pandemic. Hitting the reduction target would save $3.9 billion over a decade, but in-office mandates are actively getting in the way of selling off that space (CBC).
Amazon's return-to-office mandate alone added tens of thousands of commuters to Seattle's morning traffic, pushing commute times up 20% versus 2019 (Spokesman-Review); U.S. traffic congestion cost the economy $74 billion in 2024 (KBS). When 17,000 federal workers returned to Washington's Navy Yard in 2025, it caused a congestion spike overnight (FOX 5 DC).
Traffic congestion adds an estimated 10 minutes, on average, to emergency response times. In 2024, nearly half of U.S. first-responder agencies reported slower response times than the year before, and most pointed to traffic congestion as the reason (Safety21, Carnegie Mellon).
Remote work had opened high-skill jobs to people outside major cities, with the biggest gains for lower-income workers and those in areas with few local opportunities (research on remote work and career mobility). As remote and hybrid job postings shrink, that door is closing again, and most rural workers can't simply relocate to follow the jobs back to the city (FlexJobs).