Cross-Regional Home–Work Links

Summary

ReThinkNYC graphics that report home–work links draw on the U.S. Census Bureau’s record of where people live and where they hold their main job. Each link pairs a home location with a workplace. Counting those links across the region shows how much of the labor market already crosses state and county lines, and in which direction.

Source

U.S. Census Bureau LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES 8)

Year

2023

Job type

Primary jobs (JT01): one job per worker

Unit

Home–work link: one worker’s home paired with that worker’s workplace

Selected regional total

296,619 links across 18 directional markets

Does not measure

Daily trips, travel mode, route, Penn Station use or ridership

Data source

The LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES) link each worker’s home census block to the census block of that worker’s job. The Census Bureau assembles the records from state unemployment insurance wage filings and federal employment records, then releases them by state and year. The 2023 files became available in December 2025.

The analysis uses the JT01 job type, which counts primary jobs: for a worker with more than one job, only the highest-paying one counts. That choice ties each link to one person and keeps people with second jobs from being counted twice.

Each state releases two origin-destination files. The main file covers workers who live and work in the same state. The auxiliary file covers workers who work in the state but live in another one. Cross-state links, such as a New Jersey resident working in Queens, come from the auxiliary files, so the analysis combines both.

Coverage. LODES covers wage and salary jobs reported to state unemployment insurance systems and federal civilian employment. It leaves out self-employed workers and some other categories. The Census Bureau adds statistical noise to protect confidentiality, which makes block-level figures less precise than totals for counties or larger areas.

Geography

Every link is assigned to a market based on the county of the home block and the county of the work block. The markets used in ReThinkNYC graphics are:

Manhattan appears in none of the selected markets. The analysis focuses on links between places outside Manhattan rather than on commutes into it.

How we count

A directional count runs from the home market to the work market: New Jersey → Brooklyn counts New Jersey residents who work in Brooklyn. A two-way count adds both directions. The analysis selects 18 directional markets, or nine two-way pairs, that together contain 296,619 links.

That total is the sum of the selected markets. It is not a count of every cross-county journey in the region, and adding markets from other tables to it does not produce a valid regional total.

New Jersey markets

Six of the nine pairs involve New Jersey. Together they contain 206,692 two-way links: 114,180 New Jersey residents work in the other six markets, and 92,512 residents of those markets work in New Jersey.

Brooklyn is New Jersey’s largest two-way market, and its links run nearly even in each direction. Brooklyn does not sit on the main line through Penn Station, so graphics that present these links as a through-running market can show the total with or without it.

Validation

The New Jersey–Long Island market was calculated twice, by different methods. Francesca Hales’s regional table counts 35,240 two-way links. Liam Blank’s separate county-by-county calculation counts 35,185. The two differ by 55 links, or 0.16 percent, which supports a common source definition: LODES 8, 2023, JT01 primary jobs, main and auxiliary files combined.

Rail-corridor screen

A narrower test keeps only New Jersey–Long Island links where both the home block and the work block lie within 1.6 kilometers (about one mile) of a mapped regional rail line. 9,031 links pass, or 25.6 percent of the market.

The screen measures closeness to a rail line, not to a station. It does not show that a useful train stops nearby or that anyone rides one today. It narrows the market ahead of station-access and service analysis.

Limits

A home–work link records where a person lives and works. It says nothing about how or how often that person travels.

Not tripsA link counts a worker, not a daily journey. Remote and hybrid workers appear even on days they stay home.
Not mode or routeThe records do not show whether a worker drives, rides a train or takes a bus, or which route they use.
Not Penn Station useNothing in the data shows whether a trip passes through Penn Station.
Not ridershipForecasting riders requires a defined service plan with frequency, travel time, transfers, fares, reliability and station access.
Not induced demandThe counts reflect today’s rail network. They cannot show how many new links faster, simpler trips would create.
Not the whole regionTotals cover the selected markets only, not every origin and destination in the metropolitan area.

Other estimates

The Effective Transit Alliance’s 2023 report Modernizing New York Commuter Rail cites roughly 400,000 cross-regional commutes, based on 2019 LEHD data and broader geographic definitions. The report does not publish the table behind that figure. The difference between that estimate and the 296,619 links counted here reflects different years, geographies and market selections, not a measured decline. A direct comparison would require running the 2019 data through the same 18 markets.

Counts of all jobs (LODES job type JT00) run higher than primary-job counts because workers with more than one job appear more than once. Each ReThinkNYC graphic states which measure it uses.

Citation

Blank, Liam, and Francesca Hales. 2026. “Cross-Regional Home–Work Links: Data and Methods.” ReThinkNYC. Data: U.S. Census Bureau, LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES 8), 2023, primary jobs (JT01).

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Questions about the data: rethinknyc.org