Acting Remotely: Pandemic Reshaping How We Work

Editor’s note: This analysis was produced based on searches on Yelp, the online platform to review local services, founded in 2004 and headquartered in San Francisco. •••

The last three years transformed the American workplace, with the pandemic ushering in a great reshuffling as many companies turned to remote work — with some, like Yelp, making this shift permanent. This transition to remote work gave employees new flexibility in deciding where they could live, enabling millions of Americans to relocate their families, which created ripple effects that have reshaped local economies across the U.S.

Yelp analyzed the share of search locations on its platform, evaluating shifts in populations across the U.S. based on where user searches were concentrated in 2019 compared to 2022.

Findings reveal significant population migration from Western (California) and Northeastern states to Southern and Midwestern areas.

Yelp data also uncovers a positive economic impact for local businesses in states that had an increase in share of search locations. These states saw a higher average increase in new business openings across nearly all categories in 2022 compared to 2019 — driven by local and home services business openings, indicating potentially permanent moves.

Looking at internal employee data, Yelp found similar patterns among its workforce, which transitioned to remote work at the onset of the pandemic. The workplace shift prompted an unprecedented geographical spread of Yelp’s employees, with its U.S. workforce now living in more than 1,300 cities across the U.S., Canada and Europe.

Cross-country Moves

In analyzing search location data on Yelp for the three-year period over the course of the pandemic, Yelp’s data science team found that people are leaving traditional business hubs in New York and California for states that provide a lower cost of living such as South Dakota and West Virginia.

Comparing 2022 to 2019, about 25% of U.S. states (including Washington, D.C.) experienced a decrease in their share of search locations, most notably Washington, D.C. (down 26%), New York (down 12%), California (down 12%), Nevada (down 12%) and Oregon (down 12%).

Comparably, the states with the highest increase in their share of search locations are South Dakota (up 56%), North Dakota (up 54%), West Virginia (up 33%), Wyoming (up 31%) and Mississippi (up 29%). Approximately 30% of U.S. cities experienced a decrease in the share of searches compared to 2019, with several of them concentrated in states like New York and California, including Brooklyn, NY (down 48%); San Francisco, (down 25%); Beverly Hills, (down 24%); Santa Monica, (down 23%); Manhattan, NY (down 21%) and Los Angeles, (down 13%).

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