Workers in Bronx County, New York average 43.9 minutes each way to their jobs. In Custer County, Montana, the average is 13.6 minutes. That 30.3-minute gap reflects geography, housing costs, transit access, and the spatial mismatch between where workers can afford to live and where jobs are actually located.
The national median commute among counties with populations above 10,000 is 24.9 minutes. The longest-commute counties cluster around dense metro areas where housing pressure has pushed workers far from employment centers. Long Island, the outer D.C. suburbs, and the exurban rings of major Southern cities dominate this list.
Short commutes appear in two very different kinds of places: small rural counties where housing and jobs are close together, and college or government-dominated communities with dense local employment. Neither extreme tells the full economic story on its own.
In counties where workers average more than 40 minutes each way, commuting costs consume a measurable share of household budgets. At 43.9 minutes each way, Bronx County, New York workers spend roughly an extra hour and a half daily in transit, time that compounds across a year into hundreds of hours. Long commutes correlate with higher housing cost burdens in surrounding areas, as workers accept longer drives to access lower-cost housing markets away from job centers. The median household income in Bronx County is $49,036, reflecting the higher wages that pull workers to accept long commutes as a trade-off.
Commute length is not just a convenience issue. Research consistently shows that very long commutes depress labor force participation, particularly among workers with caregiving responsibilities. Counties where commutes exceed 40 minutes tend to post lower female labor force participation rates, as the total daily time cost of working outside the home becomes prohibitive for some households. Examining commute data alongside participation rates reveals where access to local jobs, remote work options, or transit investment could have the greatest impact on bringing more workers into the labor force.
Commute times are a proxy for the spatial relationship between housing markets and labor markets. When those markets align, commutes stay short and workers retain more productive time. When they diverge, as they have in high-cost metro areas over recent decades, commutes lengthen and the burden falls disproportionately on workers who cannot afford to live near their jobs. County-level commute data makes that divergence visible and quantifiable across every part of the country.
Data source: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey (ACS) 5-Year Estimates