In some parts of Virginia, one-quarter of the workforce now works remotely

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The pandemic has changed the nature of work across Virginia.

Even with the pandemic (if not COVID) now in the past, remote work has become commonplace across much of the state — but not necessarily in the rural areas that had hoped to benefit most from a Zoom-era migration of keyboard jockeys.

How commonplace: In some localities in Northern Virginia, one-quarter of the workforce now works remotely. 

And in some places — almost entirely north of the James River — remote workers now appear to constitute the biggest sector of the workforce.

The number of remote workers has grown in almost every part of the state, but parts of Southwest and Southside have a far lower percentage than elsewhere. 

Before we get into the details, let’s go over what we know and what we don’t know. The data we’re about to look at comes from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey that came out just before last year’s end. As the name suggests, this is a survey, not a headcount of every household, so there are limitations to the data, especially in smaller communities. However, this is both new data and the best data available. It also lets us compare 2022, when the pandemic was winding down, with 2019, the year before the pandemic. We know nationally that remote work has declined since the height of the pandemic, but overall, remote work has now settled in to become routine in many professions — and localities.

However, nailing down the exact number is harder than you’d think it would be. Hamilton Lombard, a demographer with the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, advises that these figures probably understate the true number of remote workers. The Census Bureau “has tended to underestimate the percent of remote workers by about half, in large part I think because of the considerable number of remote workers that occasionally go into the office.” In that case, you might need to double some of these figures.

Here are some observations:

Remote work has grown the most in Northern Virginia

In 2019, the county with the biggest percentage of remote workers was Nelson County — 11.74% of the workforce worked remotely. Why Nelson? If you look at a map from that 2019 survey, it starts to make sense: The biggest concentration of counties with lots of remote workers were around Charlottesville, and some counties by the Chesapeake Bay. Demographers have come to call these “rural resort” communities — shorthand for cool places to live that are near a lot of amenities.

When we look at the 2022 data, we see that:

a) the number of remote workers in those localities has grown — a lot; and 

b) they’ve all been surpassed by localities in Northern Virginia.

In 2019, Arlington County had 6.71% of its workforce working remotely, a healthy figure at the time but not enough to make the state’s top 10. By 2022, Arlington had 26.99% of its workforce working remotely, the highest percentage in the state — and one of the highest in the country. We see similar, just slightly lower, figures across Northern Virginia.

In 2019, only one of the 10 localities with the biggest share of remote workers was in Northern Virginia. By 2022, six were.

Here’s another way to look at that shift: Only two of the localities that were in the Top 10 for biggest share of remote workers in 2019 were in the Top 10 in 2022.

Here’s how I read that: The shift to remote work has mostly come where those workers already are. We’ve certainly seen a Zoom-era migration out of metro areas and into rural ones — we had some stats on that last year and expect more soon — but to the extent that some of those people are remote workers, they represent only a tiny fraction of the overall number of remote workers. 

That sets up a big question: Will those remote workers in Northern Virginia stay there? Now, I admit to bias since I’m writing this from the backwoods of Botetourt County, but if you’re working remotely, why not do it in a low-cost locality rather than a high-cost one? Perhaps, over time, some of those Northern Virginia remote workers will gravitate elsewhere, but I’m also asking a simple question about a complicated situation. If one person in a two-person household is working remotely, the family’s not likely to move if the other person has an in-person job they don’t want to leave. And while it seems strange to me, some people may prefer to live in Ballston rather than Botetourt. They may be quite satisfied with not having to take the Metro into the District every day, just as I’m quite satisfied not having to drive into Roanoke every day.

Still, the point is the shift to remote work has come mostly in Northern Virginia, and hasn’t benefited rural Virginia as much as some might have thought it would. I’ll return to rural Virginia, but first, some other Northern Virginia data:

Northern Virginia has one of the highest percentage of remote workers in the country

It’s not uncommon to find suburban localities outside major metros where about one-fifth of the workforce works remotely. This happens mostly around high-growth localities: Atlanta; Charlotte, North Carolina; Jacksonville, Florida; Nashville, Tennessee; and Raleigh, North Carolina, stand out east of the Mississippi for having suburbs where the share of remote workers usually ranges from 20% to 22%, with occasional outliers such as Forsyth County, Georgia, where the share is 25.8%. West of the Mississippi, we see similar figures in suburbs around Austin, Texas; Dallas; Denver; Portland, Oregon; Salt Lake City, Utah; Seattle; and San Francisco, with Marin County on the northern end of the Golden Gate Bridge rising to 25.9%. Suburbs around older cities, such as Boston, Chicago and New York, have lower percentages of remote workers — somewhere in the teens.

Among metro areas, Arlington and Falls Church have the highest share of remote workers in the country. However, the overall highest percentages for remote workers are in Montana, where Liberty County along the Canadian border tops out at 34.32%. That brings us to this … 

Remote work is no longer just a western phenomenon.

Before the pandemic, the states with the highest share of remote workers were mostly out West. Seven of the top 10 states were in the Rockies or on the West Coast.

Colorado 9.1%
Arizona at 7.6%
Idaho, Utah 7.4%
Oregon and New Hampshire 7.3%.
Georgia 6.9%
North Carolina 6.7%
Montana, Washington 6.5%

Now we see some Eastern states elbowing their way into the Top 10 — including Virginia and Maryland, which reflects how much remote work has grown around the nation’s capital on both sides of the Potomac:

Colorado 21.2%
Washington 20.5%
Maryland 19.2%
Arizona 19.2%
Oregon 19.0%
Massachusetts 18.4%
Virginia 18.2%
New Hampshire 17.3%
California, Minnesota 17.2%

If the District of Columbia were a state, it would top the list at 33.8%.

The only rural localities with extraordinarily high percentages of remote workers are out West.

Not surprisingly given the figures above, when we dig into the data we find that the rural localities with the highest shares of remote workers are western ones. Here’s where Montana stands out.

Montana has three counties where the share of remote workers tops 30%, and five others where the share ranges from 22.16% to 27.23%. Now, I’m well aware of the so-called “tyranny of small numbers” — it’s easier to get a high percentage when you’re working with small populations, and some of these counties are quite small, population-wise. So are counties in Idaho and South Dakota that show up around the 30% mark. However, we have some small counties, too, and they don’t show up nearly that high. Liberty County, Montana, has a population of just under 2,000, putting it close to our least-populous county, Highland County, where the population is just over 2,000. In our Highland County, though, 15.28% of the workforce works remotely — less than half the percentage in Liberty County. Our Bath County has a population of about 4,200 and has just 4.18% of the workforce working remotely. Custer County, Idaho, is almost the same size, but has 28.04% of the workforce working remotely. Our Craig County isn’t much bigger and has just 4.18% of its workforce working remotely. 

If this happened just a few times, I’d write this off to the warning I issued earlier about the data not being as reliable in small counties. However, this happens over and over, which makes me think something is going on here. We know that Idaho and Montana have long been desirable destinations for people moving out of California or West Coast cities generally. The great philosopher Merle Haggard spoke this years ago in the song “Big City,” where he pined for Big Sky Country instead: “Turn me loose, set me free, somewhere in the middle of Montana.” I suspect that phenomenon probably accounts for a lot of those high percentages in Montana and Idaho (although I’m less sure about South Dakota, which hasn’t been quite as extolled in popular culture).

For localities in rural Virginia that want to attract more remote workers as a way to counteract population declines, the question becomes what do they need to do image-wise to make that happen?

That said … 

Many localities in rural Virginia have seen the number of remote workers more than double. Some have tripled or more.

You can explore all these numbers yourselves in this handy chart.

Prince George County outside Petersburg has seen the number of remote workers grow from 389 to 2,023, an increase of 420.05%. That’s the biggest percentage increase in the state. Two very small localities also registered big percentage increases — 412.5% in Highland County and 333.33% in Bland County — but those come against small population bases. Prince George County is more noteworthy because we’re now talking thousands of remote workers in that rural county. Whatever is driving that may not be confined to Prince George, because Dinwiddie County next door saw its number of remote workers grow from 331 to 1,180, an increase of 256.5%.

It’s not unusual at all to find places of some size where the number of remote workers has doubled or more. Bedford County has seen the number go from 1,632 to 3,290. Montgomery County has seen the number more than double, from 2,035 to 4,561.

The Henry County-Patrick County area has seen a particular rise in remote workers. In Patrick, the number has gone from 242 to 702 — up 190.8%. In Henry County, 387 to 1,107 — up 186.5%. Curiously, one county over in Pittsylvania County, the number has barely budged — from 1,008 to 1,025. Is that a data problem? Or something else? Danville, though, went from 355 to 926, an increase of 160.85%.

Lee County, in Virginia’s southwestern tip, has also seen a big percentage increase — from 227 to 534, an increase of 135.24%. That’s the highest percentage increase in Virginia west of Roanoke County, which went from 2,375 to 5,810 — an increase of 144.63%. 

In some places, remote workers are now the biggest workforce sector

At some point, the number of remote workers in some of these counties is enough to constitute a real economic force. In my own county, Botetourt, the number of remote workers has grown from 995 to 1,607 (I’m one of those). DataUSA says that’s enough to be the fourth-biggest employment sector in the county, behind health care (2,395), manufacturing (2,117) and retail (1,993). (I’m working on the assumption that the health care, manufacturing and retail jobs aren’t remote.) Fourth place seems a pretty standard placement in much of Southwest and Southside Virginia.

There are some places, though, where remote workers are a much bigger part of the workforce.

In Albemarle County, Charlottesville, Chesapeake, Falls Church, Highland County, Lancaster County, Madison County, Mathews County, Northumberland County, Orange County, Rappahannock County, Virginia Beach and Winchester, remote workers now constitute the second-biggest employment sector. 

In Alexandria, Clarke County, Fauquier County, Goochland County, Hanover County, Henrico County, James City County, Middlesex County, Nelson County, New Kent County, Prince William County, Powhatan County, Richmond, Roanoke County, Spotsylvania County and Westmoreland County, remote workers now constitute the single biggest economic sector, if these figures are correct. 

In Fairfax city, Fairfax County and Loudoun County, these rankings are harder to count because the top employment sector is “professional, scientific and technical services” and it’s likely that a lot of those are remote workers. Given that there are more remote workers than in any other economic sector except that one, it’s entirely possible that remote workers come in first there, as well. Still, it’s easier to look at other localities where things such as health care, manufacturing and retail are the top sectors and assume those aren’t remote workers.

I’ll confess to finding some of these figures hard to believe — if so many people in Henrico County are working remotely, why was I stuck in a traffic jam the last time I was there? Still, this is what the numbers show and even if they’re not quite exactly right, it’s clear that in many places remote workers are an economic force, no matter where they’re ranked. I also need only look in downtown Roanoke at my favorite coffee shop to see that something has changed. It used to do a booming lunch trade; now it’s often quiet all day long. Is that because a lot of former downtown workers are now working from home? Probably so. I’m one of those former regular customers. 

There are clear regional disparities.

We see regional disparities in virtually everything, so it’s no surprise we see them here. While we’ve seen rapid growth of remote workers in some places, such as Patrick County and Henry County along the North Carolina line, the percentage of remote workers remains quite low across much of Southwest and Southside. 

West of the Blue Ridge, the highest percentage of remote workers is in tiny Highland County — 15.28%. Six others rank in double digits: Lexington at 12.97%, Roanoke County at 12.5%, Bristol at 10.2%, Botetourt County at 10.15%, Floyd County at 10.14%, Montgomery County at 10.09%. All the other localities are in single digits. Giles County is put at 1.9%. Bland County (even with its high percentage growth), Buchanan County and Dickenson County come in at just under 3%. 

In Southside — well, Southside is fungible geography. If you exclude Chesterfield County (13.91%) as a Richmond suburb, the only south-of-the-James localities in double digits are Powhatan County at 15.77%  and Prince George County at 10.2%. 

The state’s absolute lowest percentage is in Giles County — just 1.9% of the workforce. 

A broader question: If localities in Southwest and Southside want to attract more remote workers, what should they do to make that happen?