The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 
has been doing an American Time Use Survey for five years now, and the 2007 numbers came out a few weeks ago. I had to dig through some of the stats for a semi-related story, and it turns out that the number of full-time workers who work from home on an average day has been slowly climbing since BLS began measuring this in 2003. But in 2007, the number dropped (see graph). The data aren’t fine-grained enough to explain why this happened, and the decrease may not even be statistically significant, as it’s still near last year’s 1 in 5 figure. Still, it’ll be interesting to see if those numbers recover this year given the fact that so many workplaces are encouraging telecommuting. And yes, these figures do cover people who work from home in addition to at the office — the average amount of time working from home is 2-3 hours per day.
In case you’re curious, the number of U.S. home-based businesses is flat, as least as far as the most recent statistics available are concerned. In both 1992 and 2002, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, half of all U.S. businesses (there are something like 27 million of them) were work-at-home businesses. You’d think that the number of home-based businesses is exploding with the rise of the Internet, but it may be that it’s only replacing the huge numbers of, for example, craft catalog businesses that are dying off. There likely won’t be solid data on this until the next census (2010), so we’ll have to wait four years before we know more.
