Cost of teleworking

To most people number one benefit of teleworking is saving money on gas. Is it really? Let us calculate exactly how much money are we saving or maybe losing by telecommuting.

Let us start with cost of commuting. I have researched that national average commute distance is 16 miles one way. Multiply by 2 (back and forth) gives 32 miles. National average fuel efficiency in a light duty vehicle in 2012 is 33.8 mpg. Current gas price for unleaded is around $3.50 per gallon. 32 miles and 33.8 mpg give roughly 1 gallon and easy calculation tells us that you are going to spend and average of $3.50 for gas.

Usually, you have to multiply whatever amount of money you spend on gas by 2 to get a true amount of money driving costs you. This second $3.50 will go towards vehicle maintenance and cost of your car because after driving a certain distance, it won’t go any further and you will need to buy a new one.

That is a total of about $7.00 a day for commuting. This is obviously just a rough estimate using national averages but sounds about right in my case. You should be able to calculate your cost on your own.

This would make you think that you save the calculated amount per day by telecommuting. However, there are hidden costs of telecommuting that we aren’t aware of. Here are most significant ones:

• Having to heat or cool your house (compared to being able to leave the heating or cooling turned off when at work site)
• Using the bathroom throughout the day. This includes water, toilet paper and soap. We are not even counting the fact that you’ll need plumbing service quicker as parts will get used faster. You will probably need to clean the bathroom more often, too.
• Using electricity for computer, lights etc.
• Often companies provide breakfast, coffee, snacks or soda that telecommuters cannot benefit from. To be even, telecommuters need to buy those things themselves.
• Sometimes necessity of using your own computer, having to get Internet or phone service or improve current Internet service speed, get extra minutes on your personal phone etc.

Because it is really hard to get these specific numbers, especially things like what percentage of people are getting snacks at their companies and how much they are worth, I decided to use my own numbers and you can plug in yours.

• Having to heat or cool your house is a big thing. I realized that on hottest summer days, leaving the air conditioner off can save me even $10 on electricity bill. Similarly on winter with a gas bill. However, because not every day is the hottest or coldest day of the year, I am going to assume $4 per day for heating or cooling.
• Without considering what exactly business is going to be done in the bathroom, I am assuming that in average I am going to use 40 gallons of water per day for flushing toilet and washing hands. Water costs 2 cents per 10 gallons in average, which ends up with 8 cents for water. A roll of toilet paper costs $1.07 in average. Using an average of quarter of it per day will cost 27 cents. Then, you will need to wash your hands with soap. In my opinion, a bar soap lasts for about 100 uses and I will need to use it about 10 times for easy calculation. With an average price of a bar of soap being $1.00, that’s extra 10 cents for the day. That’s a total of 45 cents for bathroom business.
• Additional electricity for computer and lights can be calculated quite easily. My computer has a 300 W power adapter, but never entire 300 W of power is being used. Let’s assume that in average only half of this amount is being used. In addition to that, there’s a monitor that uses around 100 W of power. This ends up with 250 W of power pulled. Let’s add another 50 W for lights and we have 300 W total. That amount times 8 hours of work gives 2,400 Wh or 2.4 kWh of power used. With a national average of 11 cents per kWh we end up with 26 cents spent on electricity.
• My company is very generous with additional food and drinks provided. We have breakfast every morning, free coffee, soda and snacks. If I wanted to make my own breakfast at home with items bought at grocery store, it would still cost around $3 together with coffee. Going to a coffee shop would be way more but let’s stick with home made stuff. Additional snacks and soda will cost another $2-3. This is a total of $6 per day in average for groceries.
• Lastly, every day I telecommute, I make a phone call that lasts about 15 minutes and occasionally I have call-in meetings. Because of this, I needed to take a $10 more expensive plan (that’s $10 extra per month) just for the 2 days a week I telecommute. This gives $1.25 per day for extra phone bill.

So let us sum this up and we get $11.96 per day in actual cost of telecommuting. That compared to $7.00 for commuting actually means that I lose about $5.00 every day I telecommute and not save $7.00. You obviously should plug in your own numbers. However, I doubt you will come up with saving money unless you travel far to work and your company doesn’t provide you with much.

Therefore, at the end, the only thing that we are really saving through telecommuting is time and patience otherwise we would lost in daily rush hour traffic.