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. 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%.
An optional field under "Advanced assumptions" lets you subtract extra work-from-home costs (electricity, heat, internet) if you want to account for them. It's off by default: those costs are genuinely hard to isolate from what you'd pay anyway, and are usually small relative to commuting costs.
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).
When roughly 65,000 Amazon employees returned to Seattle-area offices, commute times in the Seattle-Bellevue area rose 15-20% in a matter of weeks (INRIX). On Highway 520, Tuesday-morning speeds fell from about 35 mph to 15 mph in a single month (KOMO), and the city measured a 5-9% jump in overall traffic over the same period (Seattle Times). U.S. traffic congestion cost the economy $74 billion in 2024 overall (KBS).
Burning a gallon of gasoline releases about 8,887 grams of CO2. A typical car driven a typical American's annual mileage adds roughly 4.6 metric tons of CO2 a year, which is what about 210 trees would need to absorb over that same year to offset it (EPA vehicle emissions data, EPA equivalencies calculator). Every unnecessary day of driving to an office that didn't need you there in person adds directly to that total, for you and for everyone else stuck in the same traffic.
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).