Any Texan you ask may be surprised to hear the answer to “where’s the best place to work from.” Not necessarily from home, but from home, in Texas itself. The Lone Star state is among the U.S.’s leading hubs to work from home in, according to a new study that analyzes various Texan cities.

For Example, Our Very Own Austin is 9th in the Nation

The capital ranks 9th among the big cities on Texan soil to work from home in. This is according to analysts at SmartAsset. Remote work has become the norm for many Americans. This is information is based on the onset of the Corona Virus pandemic. Therefore, researchers have found with surveys have shown that about half of American workers were working from home in the late spring of 2020.

Increased work flexibility will continue even after the pandemic lessens. This is according to many researchers and the report. Therefore, some cities are better for telecommuting than others are.

In its third annual study, the financial technology company, SmartAsset, crunched the numbers to find the best cities in the U.S. to work from home.

More Texan Folks Were Working From Home Even Before the Pandemic

In cracking the top ten, researchers found Austin among cities that had among the most people working from home well before the pandemic. “Working from home was on the rise in Austin, Texas prior to COVID-19,” researchers wrote. Indeed, the percentage of workers reporting they worked from home increased by 3.7 percent over five years, from 7.1 percent in 2014 to 10.8 percent in 2019. With that increase, Austin had the third-highest 2019 percentage of the workforce who worked from home across all 100 cities, according to the findings. Austin has held strong during the COVID-19 pandemic relative to other cities. That’s what the study found. The city’s unemployment rate was 5.2 percent. It is considered the 14th-lowest of 100 of the largest cities. Therefore, this Texan land is 1.5 percentage points lower than the national average.

SmartAsset researchers have adjusted its methodology to account for the impact of COVID-19 according to the annual study. This includes what is the addition of two metrics. One is the estimated percentage of the workforce that can work from home. The other is the percentage of residences with two or more bedrooms, among other changes.

In its annual study, SmartAsset researchers adjusted our methodology to account for the influence of COVID-19, including the addition of two metrics: The estimated percent of the workforce that is able to work from home and the percentage of residences with two or more bedrooms, among other changes.