Jersey Shore towns fall short of statewide trends in work-from-home adoption

Newly released Census data shows that several Jersey Shore communities are lagging behind statewide trends in the rate of workers who worked from home last year.

Statewide, 22% of people worked from home in 2021, compared with just 5% in 2019 when the data was last reported, according to a New Jersey Monitor report. This left New Jersey with a higher percentage of residents working from home than 43 other states. But how does the Shore area compare with the rest of the state?

Ocean County had just 3 municipalities reported in the new work-from-home data release and each of them has been reliably behind the statewide trend toward increased telework adoption, according to the data.

Lakewood leads Ocean County in WFH

Lakewood led Ocean County with 17.4% of its population working from home in 2021, while Toms River had 16.3% of the population working from home.  Just 10.9% of Brick residents worked from home, according to the data.

Just one Monmouth County town, Middletown Township, was covered by the new Census data release. Middletown had 22.9% of the population working from home, slightly above statewide trends. No data was available for any communities in Atlantic or Cape May counties.

The 2021 data, released last week under the American Community Survey 1-year estimates program covered geographic areas with at least 65,000 residents, which left out many smaller municipalities beneath this threshold whose data was not available at the municipal level.

Nationally, the bureau reports that the number of people working from home tripled between 2019 and 2021, when data was last reported.