Working from home

The rise of the supercommuter

More people are embracing longer work journeys for

better quality of life

Emma Jacobs MARCH 31 2024

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Enter your email address Sign up

Mohammed Marikar’s typical commute to his office in the City of London takes three and
a half hours. On a bad day, it is more than four.

The senior director at RBC Wealth Management is one of a growing breed of

“supercommuters”, many of whom moved out of town during the pandemic to increase
their living space in more affordable regions, and now travel long distances to their
workplace for part of the week.

The proportion of commuters globally doing a journey of 90-120 minutes at least once a
week has risen from 2.4 per cent in 2020 to just over 4 per cent in 2024, according to
Euromonitor. Those with a commute of more than 120 minutes rose from 2.7 per cent to
3.4 per cent.
Marikar and his wife, who runs her own business, moved with their four children from
Eastcote, north-west London, to north Wales in 2022. Instead of his previous daily
commute of 75 minutes, Marikar gets up at 5am on a Tuesday morning and is at his desk
at about 10am — working a later shift so he can overlap with colleagues in Toronto. He
returns to Wales after work on Thursday. On Mondays and Fridays, he works from home.

Marikar sometimes ponders the wisdom of his move when stuck in gridlock traffic, but on
balance is happy. “You notice a difference in the air. There’s a lot more we can do at the
weekends with the kids.” Even when they lived in London, making it home for dinner was
pretty rare.

Love Whelchel now travels to his job in New York from Miami, having moved from New
Jersey. He typically spends a fortnight at home and then a week commuting. Although he
is away more he says the time he does have with his family is better quality. “It’s given me
some balance and focus. This has been an amazing time to spend with my teenage son.
When I was commuting in New York, I barely saw him.”

Some employers are attempting to ease the financial burden on long-distance commuters
beyond allowing them to work part of the week from home and offering rail season ticket
loans. For Marikar, the game changer has been his company’s electric car financing
arrangement paid through salary sacrifice — an increasingly popular benefit among
employers — that spurred him to switch from trains, which can cost up to about £350 a
week, to driving, which is just under £50. “The journey is longer. [But] I don’t need to stick
to train times. If a train is [delayed] I’m not stuck.”

Max Dawes says his four-hour commute from the Isle of Wight to London is ‘productive for big chunks of time’
Adam Wyman, employment partner at law firm Travers Smith, says companies tend not to
incentivise commuting but will reimburse travel and accommodation for some high
performers. “Businesses that have a skills gap are looking more widely than before. They
can recruit someone in another country and pay for them to come to the office where and
when.” He also observes a post-pandemic trend for some companies to provide
discretionary packages for staff they want to retain who are moving to other countries to
be closer to family.

David Wreford, a partner at consultancy Mercer, says subsidising travel on a larger scale
could be divisive, particularly as there is already a debate over whether pay for remote
workers should be adjusted for locality.

Andrew Wilson, director of communications and responsible banking at Santander UK,

says the pandemic has intensified pre-existing trends. “The whole ‘Willies’ culture [work in
London, live in Edinburgh] has been there for years and lots of people do it given the
importance of London for finance.” However, due to widespread hybrid working, “the
weeks are not as long as they were and there is greater balance”.

Judy Niner, founder of Monday to Friday, which matches people with spare rooms to part-
time renters says “people coming back to the office are tending to stay for fewer nights —
three or even just two nights a week is common, whereas it used to be four or five. They
seem to want to pack their office work into as short a period as possible and get out of the
city and home.”

Long commutes nonetheless can take their toll.

Series: Commuting Is “A very early start to the day means that by the
Back end of a commute day you are tired,” says
Wilson, who leaves his home at 5am on either
Monday or Tuesday to catch the plane from
Edinburgh and returns on Wednesday or
Thursday. Some of his colleagues do the same
between London and Madrid. “When I was
younger it was easier.”

Costs can be high too. While Danny Riding, a

After lockdowns put the brakes on
normal routines, workers are now
back at their desks and need to
travel to get there. But commuting
has changed in unexpected ways.
Part one: Commuting is back —
but not as we know it
Part two: The rise of the
supercommuter
Part three: Zen and the art of the
zoned-out commute
lawyer at Travers Smith, owns a four-bedroom
house in the Welsh countryside, a big trade-up
from his former one-bed rental in London, he
probably pays about £1,500 a month on travel
and renting a room near work. “If you think
about it in those terms, then the house prices
comparison isn’t great.”