Working for the government simply grew more costly.
Federal workers under a return-to- office mandate issued by the Trump White House on Monday are adjusting to rising annual spending for transportation, food, clothing, and child care that had previously been cut by working remotely – by anywhere from hundreds to thousands of dollars.
Based on average price data countrywide, baseline estimates given to MarketWatch from the consulting firm Global Workplace Analytics reveal that hybrid employees who worked from home twice a week saved anywhere from $305 to $2,357 annually on travel, parking, meals, and work attire.
Although the travel-cost estimate did not include tolls for highways and bridges, not all workers pay these costs if they drive; others utilize public transit. In a hearing about the work-from– home federal workforce earlier this month, Republican former Congress member from Virginia Tom Davis, president of the Washington, D.C., economic-development group Federal City Council, observed that he had paid $30 in tolls on his commute into the city that day. He said some people spend as much as $50 during D.C. region peak travel hours.
Davis stated at the hearing, “There’s no question from an employee point of view and a traffic point of view [that] sending everybody back to work is going to have an impact.”
One study of parents in hybrid occupations found that the savings on child care by hybrid workers—which equal an estimated $7,000 annually—were not taken into consideration in Global Workplace Analytics’ projections. Price-index data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that child-care expenses in 2024 were 21% more than those in 2019.
Returning to the office will be significantly more costly for workers whose transportation and caring costs exceed average.
The White House did not reply right away to a comment request.
Even as corporate offices have usually become more flexible since the epidemic, big firms including JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Amazon (AMZN), AT&T (T) and Southwest Airlines (LUV) are also mandating employees to return to the office.
In a 2024 worker survey by videoconferencing company Owl Labs, 41% of hybrid and remote workers said they would consider returning to the office if offered more compensation; 26% said they would return if employers paid for transportation; 26% said they would return if free food were offered.
Data from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management shows that almost one million government employees still work remotely for part of their work week. Of all the government employees in fiscal 2023, 43% occasionally teleworked. Of those workers, 58% did so at least three days a week, 10% once or twice a week, 7% teleworked no more than once a month, and others did so depending more on situation than on habit. Furthermore, 7% of federal employees were categorized as remote—that is, they are not regularly expected to work from an agency worksite.
According to Reuters, some unionized federal workers have contracts allowing them to work remotely or a hybrid schedule and will probably be able to keep this work pattern until the agreements expire or the Trump government renegotiates the terms.
Some federal employees said on internet forums they were being unfairly singled out by the new government. Those who claimed they live too far from the office felt they were under pressure to quit.
Kate Lister, president of Global Workplace Analytics, told MarketNews they might not be mistaken. Lister stated, “We know the intention of the new administration – there’s a bill called the ‘Drain the Swamp Act.'” Under the proposed law, government office space would be sold off supposing a reduced workforce and federal workers would be obliged to return into offices. “We know they wish for a lot of resignations. It’s less expensive than severance,” she remarked.
In an October Pew poll, 46% of workers who work from home at least some of the time indicated they were unlikely to stay at their job if their company no longer let them work from home – including 49% of women, who often take on majority of caring tasks at home.
“Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome,” Tesla (TSLA) and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, at the time co-leaders of President Donald Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Ramaswamy just left their position at the entity) wrote in a November opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal.
Apart from missed income, employees also lose time for personal development. Global Workplace Analytics projects, based on an eight-hour workday, hybrid employees working from home twice a week receive back anywhere from 9.2 days to 28.9 days annually.
“Rather than undoing decades of progress in workplace policies that have benefited both employees and their employers, I encourage the Trump administration to rethink its approach and focus on what it can do to make government programs work better for the American people,” said Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, a federal employee union in a statement.
