By George W. Hammond, Ph.D., Director and Research Professor, EBRC
In 2017, 61,066 Arizona residents held jobs located in other states, primarily California
The pandemic has focused attention on remote work, also known as working from home. This can take many different forms. A remote worker might both live in Arizona and have a job located here. A remote worker might also live in Arizona and have a job located in another state. The reverse might also be true: a resident of another state might have a job located in Arizona.
The American Community Survey provides data on the number of residents of a state or local area that work from home, but it does not tell us where the job is located. It turns out that the U.S. Census Bureau also maintains a dataset that can give us a sense of how many state residents have jobs located here and how many have jobs located in other states. However, one drawback of these data for this purpose is that we cannot use it to explore work from home at the same time. In other words, an Arizona resident with a job in California might be working entirely remotely, but we cannot rule out that the resident is actually traveling to California to work. It seems unlikely but remains a possibility.
One easy way to access these data is through the Census Bureau’s On The Map website. The estimates on the site arise from the linkage of state and federal administrative data sets on the location of jobs and the place of residence of workers. Unemployment insurance records and the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages are the primary source of information on the location of jobs. A variety of federal administrative data sets provide the place of residence of workers. All data used are subject to strict confidentiality requirements.
These data suggested that there were 2.233 million Arizona residents working at private sector primary jobs in 2017 (latest year available). Of that total, 2.173 million worked at jobs located in the state and 61,066 worked at jobs in other states (including the District of Columbia). There were 30,297 residents of the Phoenix MSA with out-of-state jobs in 2017 and 5,657 in the Tucson MSA.
Exhibit 1 shows the top 10 states with jobs held by residents of Arizona, Phoenix, and Tucson in 2017. California employed the most Arizonans in 2017. For the state, Nevada and New Mexico rounded out the top three. For Phoenix and Tucson, New Mexico and Texas were the second and third largest employers.
Exhibit 1: Arizona Residents with Jobs in Other States, Top 10 States, Private Sector Primary Jobs, LEHD, 2017
Exhibit 2: Arizona Residents with Jobs in Other States by Census Region, Private Sector Primary Jobs, LEHD, 2017
Exhibit 3: Arizona Residents with Jobs in Other States by State, Private Sector Primary Jobs, LEHD, 2017
