What Is the Impact of Working from Home on Daily In-Home and Out-of-Home Activity Time Allocation?

The widespread adoption of working from home (WFH) has reshaped many aspects of daily life, including time allocation to in-home and out-of-home activities. This study investigates how WFH influences time spent across twelve activity categories using data from the fourth wave of the COVID Future Survey, conducted nationwide in the U.S. The analysis focuses on employed individuals who report any frequency of remote work. Respondents detailed their time use on both WFH and non-WFH days for activities such as caregiving, household care, exercise, and socializing. Since time spent on each activity was collected as an ordinal measure, we apply random-effects ordered logit models to account for unobserved individual heterogeneity, controlling for a wide range of sociodemographic, household, housing, employment, and travel-related variables. Results indicate that WFH significantly increases time spent on several in-home activities, including household care, in-home exercise, entertainment, and personal business, as well as on out-of-home activities such as child or adult care and personal business. Conversely, time spent on out-of-home activities like eating out and socializing declines on WFH days. These findings highlight how WFH reshapes daily routines and provide valuable behavioral insights for transportation and urban policy. Incorporating these changes into activity-based travel demand models is essential for accurately forecasting travel patterns, while the results also inform broader planning strategies, such as flexible work scheduling, active travel promotion, and neighborhood-level service design, to ensure that the long-term expansion of WFH supports both mobility efficiency and household well-being.