Ever wonder why the pickleball courts are packed at 11:30 a.m. on a Tuesday? Here’s a possible explanation.
The number of remote workers in St. Johns County has skyrocketed by an astounding 1021% since 2015, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
In 2015, 4,057 out of 99,970 county workers were remote – or just 4%, according to the figures.
By 2023 — the latest year for which figures are available — the remote worker population had soared tenfold.
That year, 45,507 employees reported that they worked from home out of a total 151,423 — a staggering 30% of the county’s workforce.
The boom correlated with the COVID-19 pandemic, when offices shuttered and major companies permitted staffers to work from home.
Liberated from their cubicles, many workers split from major metropolitan areas close to their offices and fanned out across the country — including to Florida and St. Johns County in particular.
The Nocatee ZIP code of 32081 hosted a particularly high percentage of remote workers in 2023 at 39%, the figures show.
Ponte Vedra Beach’s 32082 ZIP code had a remote worker percentage of 24%, while St. Augustine had a rate of 14%.
But with many major firms commanding staffers to return to brick-and-mortar offices, remote worker counts are expected to slide across the board — and the imminent figures for 2024 are expected to show a marked decrease overall.
