“A profit maximizing firm, out of its own self interest, has an incentive to experiment with work from home arrangements. While companies grapple with what to do with empty office space, remote work is here to stay, Kahn says. “You could live 80 miles, 100 miles from the city center-this just opens up a huge range of possibilities” for smaller cities, towns and suburbs. “If you only have to go to the headquarters two days a week, or even less, you can live really far,” says Matthew Kahn, an economics professor at the University of Southern California who wrote a book about what remote work will look like in five to ten years. With remote work remaining commonplace, some experts believe it could benefit distant suburbs or less expensive cities in major metropolitan areas, such as Baltimore, which could become more attractive to occasional Washington D.C. The dynamic between workers and employers has shifted as both realize they do not need to be in an office for work to be as efficient.

In May, a report from rental site Apartment List found that the San Francisco-Oakland-Berkeley area was the last city in the U.S. Los Angeles (#17), for instance, topped San Francisco (#19), as traditionally sky-high rents in the Bay Area–a place filled with tech-heavy workplaces that allow for remote work-softened somewhat. cities, Cordova says, inflation is impacting prices in some places more than others while rental housing costs are shifting. In addition to cost of living data, Mercer said in a statement that its employee mobility research shows the war in Ukraine, exchange rate variations and inflation are shrinking workers’ pay and savings. He says some employers are saying “okay, well, it would be helpful to understand where my employees can get the most bang for their buck.” “One of the big things that happened as a result of the pandemic is that people woke up-and employers also woke up-and realized you can work from anywhere,' says Vince Cordova, a partner at Mercer’s CareerPractice group.

Cost of living index global cities