Getting to work
How Charleston travels to work, by what means, and for how long.
On this page
At a glance
Mean travel time
24.2 min
ACS 2020–24
Drove alone
68.1%
2019–23
Worked from home
17.6%
2019–23
Commute under 20 min
44.6%
2019–23
Composition
How people get there
The figures behind the chart
| Share of workers | Value |
|---|---|
| Drove alone | 68.1% |
| Carpooled | 6.5% |
| Worked from home | 17.6% |
| Walked | 4.1% |
| Public transit | 0.9% |
| Bicycle | 1.5% |
| Taxi, motorcycle, other | 1.2% |
2019–23 · B08301
Composition
How long it takes
The figures behind the chart
| Share of commuters | Value |
|---|---|
| Under 10 minutes | 11.8% |
| 10–19 minutes | 32.8% |
| 20–29 minutes | 24.8% |
| 30–44 minutes | 19% |
| 45–59 minutes | 7.2% |
| 60 minutes or more | 4.4% |
2019–23 · B08303
Reading it
What’s notable
68.1% of workers drive to work alone, 17.6% work from home, 0.9% take transit, 4.1% walk. That is the shape of nearly every mid-sized American city built after the war: the car is not the leading option, it is effectively the only one, and the alternatives round to noise.
44.6% of commuters are at work within twenty minutes, and only 11.6% travel forty-five minutes or more. Short commutes are the compensation for car dependence here - the traffic is unavoidable but it is brief.
One structural caveat: this counts where workers *live*, not where they work. Someone living in Charleston and commuting to a plant outside the county appears here; someone driving in from elsewhere does not. For a city that is a regional employment center, that makes the traffic on the ground heavier than these numbers imply.
Sources
These are estimates. Most figures here come from surveys of a sample, not a count of everyone, and different rows carry different vintages - each number shows its own rather than being averaged into a single date.
Data retrieved: July 29, 2026
Questions
What is the average commute in Charleston, SC?+
Mean travel time to work is 24.2 minutes one way, per the American Community Survey. That excludes people who work from home.
How many people take public transit in Charleston?+
0.9% of workers commute by public transit. That is a small enough share that the survey's margin of error is a meaningful fraction of the estimate, so treat it as an order of magnitude rather than a precise count.
How many people work from home?+
17.6% of workers - roughly 14,581 people. These are five-year estimates spanning the period when remote work expanded sharply, so a single recent year would likely read differently.
Does this count people who commute into the city?+
No. The survey asks residents where and how they travel to work, so it captures outbound commuters and misses inbound ones entirely. A city that employs more people than it houses will have more traffic than these figures suggest.