95% of Grand Rapids’s working residents leave town for work
Most working residents leave Grand Rapids for work: only 5% work in town. The top destinations are Grand Rapids (30%), Kentwood (8%) and Cascade (7%). Half commute less than 7 miles.
What kind of work town is Grand Rapids?
Read from the numbers below. The page puts what stands out first.
About 20 minutes each way, quicker than most of Michigan
From the Census survey of workers who don’t work from home.
Round trip, about 230 workdays a year: roughly 6.4 full days in the car, bus or train.
Average commute minutes, one way
of Grand Rapids workers work from home, vs 14% across Michigan. Their commute is the hallway.
Mostly services: health care, schools and offices
10,017 jobs are based in Grand Rapids. Here is what they are, next to the jobs Grand Rapids’s own residents hold wherever they work.
What kind of work
What it pays
Who does it
Jobs based in Grand Rapids, 2011 → 2021: 7,224 → 10,017. Big swings can come from how a large employer reports its locations, not only from real openings or closings.
Primary jobs covered by unemployment insurance (not the self-employed). Pay is monthly earnings. LEHD 2021.
30% of working residents work in Grand Rapids
A thicker line means more commuters. Switch between where residents work and where the people who work here live.
Where Grand Rapids clocks in
8% of workers
7% of workersLines run between town centers. The top 10 towns each way; “Everywhere else” is the rest, including other states.
Half of Grand Rapids commutes less than 7 miles
Every working resident’s trip, home to work, as the crow flies. Roads add to it, so real drives run longer.
About 16% show a job over 50 miles away. Some of that is real, and some is employers that report every worker at a head office, so a few long commutes are on paper only.
Straight-line distance from each worker’s home block to their main job’s block. LEHD 2021.
Grand Rapids fills up on a workday
On a workday 7,002 residents head out to work, 393 work right here, and 9,624 people come in from elsewhere.
About 22,000 people are in Grand Rapids on a workday afternoon, 14% more than live here.
About as many jobs as working residents (1.35 per resident).
Workday population = residents − those who work elsewhere + those who come in (the Census “commuter-adjusted” method). Residents: Census survey; commuters: LEHD 2021, primary jobs.
23% of Grand Rapids works in a bordering town
The biggest share goes to Kentwood (8%). Darker towns draw more of Grand Rapids’s workers. Tap a town to see its commute.
Average commute minutes, one way
What this data can and can’t tell you
- Every worker, home to work. The Census links each worker’s home block to their main job’s block, for jobs covered by unemployment insurance. That’s most jobs, but not the self-employed.
- Where the employer says. A job counts where the employer reports it. Some big employers report one address for many sites, which can make a few commutes look longer than they are.
- Two surveys. Flows, distances and jobs: LEHD 2021. Commute time, working from home and working out of state: the Census American Community Survey.
- Straight lines. Distances are as the crow flies between home and work. Roads, rivers and traffic make the real trip longer.
More of Grand Rapids
Commuter talk
Getting to work from Grand Rapids, from the people who make the trip.
Your answer becomes a post in Town Square.
Flows, distances and jobs: U.S. Census Bureau, LEHD Origin-Destination Employment Statistics (LODES 8), 2021, primary jobs. Commute time, working from home and working out of state: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey 5-year estimates. Distances are straight lines between home and work; real drives run longer.