These days, 35% of workers call their home their workplace. Remote work stuck after the Covid-19 pandemic. The work from home numbers are expected to increase in the next year, so it’s clear this trend is going nowhere. Not every state will be as convenient to work from home. The team at Ooma decided to analyze which states were the best and worst to work from home from using a scoring system.
To create this score they used these factors to judge each state on:
- Average monthly salary
- Median monthly rent
- Salary-to-rent ratio
- Electricity utility prices
- Internet speeds
- Taxes and government charges on wireless services
These were the states that scored the highest: - North Dakota
- South Dakota
- Oklahoma
- Vermont
- Kentucky
- Missouri
- Delaware
- South Carolina
- Oregon
- Idaho
These states scored highly for cheap utilities, low cost of living, and good Internet speeds. As for the states with the worst scores, these took the top ten spots:
- California
- Hawaii
- Florida
- Connecticut
- New Hampshire
- New Jersey
- Utah
- New York
- Maryland
- Alaska
The state with the highest numbers of workers at home is Colorado, but it didn’t make the top ten of the list due to higher costs of living. There are other issues that could make a state less desirable to work from home in. Sometimes workers are double taxed if they work in a different state than their office headquarters. This is the case in Connecticut, Delaware, Nebraska, New York, and Pennsylvania. Always consider these tax laws before moving to a new state with the intention to work remotely. The most convenient states to work from home in are those that don’t have income tax like Nevada, Washington, South Dakota, and Alaska. You should also make sure that wherever you move to has decent phone and Internet coverage.
