Remote Work Costing Manhattan More Than $12 Billion a Year, Report Says

The shift to remote work in Manhattan means the island’s office workers are spending about $12 billion less every year than they did before the pandemic, according to a new Bloomberg News study.

Workers are spending about 30% less time in the office, which has cut their annual near-the-office spending on food, entertainment and the like by an average of nearly $4,700 per person, according to Bloomberg’s analysis of data from Stanford University.

While the same is happening is other big cities, the cost on a per-person basis is more than 50% worse in NYC than anywhere else, Bloomberg found.

The study tracks with other data sets that suggest, nearly three years after New York City’s first COVID case, people simply have not returned to full-time in-office work.

The Partnership for New York City surveyed 140 major employers in January and found only 52% of Manhattan office workers are actually in the office on any given weekday, and less than 10% are back full time.

Getting people back to work is a cornerstone of Mayor Eric Adams’ economic recovery plans for the city, though the needle has moved relatively little in his first year in office. The city is now turning its focus to converting empty office space to housing in some cases.