The choice that decides your answer
Almost every commute calculator online disagrees with almost every other one, and the reason is nearly always the same single assumption: what a mile of driving costs.
| Basis | Per mile | 15 miles each way, 5 days |
|---|---|---|
| You keep the car anyway | ~$0.24 | $1,728 a year |
| You could go without a car | ~$0.70 | $5,040 a year |
Both are correct, for different people. The higher figure includes buying the car, insuring it, taxing it and watching it lose value. If none of that changes when you stop commuting, then those costs are there anyway and the commute is only adding fuel and wear.
So the honest question is not what a mile costs. It is whether working from home would genuinely let you get rid of a vehicle. For most households with one car and two adults who both need to get places, it would not, and the lower figure is the right one. For a second car bought solely to get one person to an office, it absolutely would.
Lunch is a difference, not a price
This is the other place these calculations get inflated. You eat lunch whether you are at a desk in an office or a desk at home. The cost of going in is not the twelve dollars you spend on a sandwich, it is twelve dollars minus what making lunch would have cost.
If a bought lunch is $12 and a made one is $4, the commute costs $8, not $12. Over 240 office days that is the difference between $1,920 and $2,880, which is real money to be wrong about.
Working from home is not free either
The honest side of the ledger that enthusiastic articles leave out. You are heating, cooling and lighting a house that would otherwise be nearly empty for nine hours, and running a computer and a couple of monitors all day.
It is usually a few dollars a day rather than the tens people fear, because the house is partly conditioned anyway and computers draw less than they look like they should. In spring and autumn it is close to nothing. In a cold January or a hot August it is the largest it gets. This page subtracts it rather than pretending it is zero.
The biggest number is not money
Half an hour each way, five days a week, forty eight weeks a year:
Six weeks. Not of leisure, not of work, just of sitting in a car or a carriage getting somewhere. At $30 an hour that is $7,200 of your time, which on the numbers above is more than every cash cost of the commute put together.
Nobody pays you that money and it never appears in a bank account, which is exactly why this page keeps it in a separate line rather than folding it into the total. But leaving it out completely is how a long commute ends up looking affordable.
The tax rule people get wrong
If you are a W-2 employee, you cannot deduct any of your home working costs. Not the desk, not the chair, not a share of the electricity, not the internet. The 2017 tax act suspended that deduction and the 2025 act made the suspension permanent from 2026, so it is not a thing that is coming back.
If you are self employed, a freelancer or a contractor, you can still claim the business-use share of your home, either by the simplified square footage method or by working out actual expenses.
A few states, California among them, still allow unreimbursed employee expenses on the state return even though the federal return does not. If you are in one of them it is worth asking about, because it is one of the few places the answer differs.
The employer side of the same sum
Switch the mode at the top and it runs the other direction: what a desk costs against what supporting somebody at home costs. Space at a few hundred square feet a head, plus the facilities that keep a building running, against a stipend and some equipment.
The output worth having from that mode is not really the difference. It is the break-even stipend: the monthly amount you could pay someone before remote stopped being the cheaper option. That number tends to be considerably larger than the stipends actually being offered, and it changes the shape of the conversation.
What that mode deliberately does not do is put a figure on hiring reach, retention, or whether the work goes better with everyone in a room. Those are the things that actually decide the question, they are real, and inventing a number for them would be arithmetic pretending to be evidence.
For the mileage rates themselves, the mileage reimbursement calculator covers what an employer can pay you tax free, and if the commute is part of a bigger decision about a job offer, take home pay is the other half of it.