The London commuter is a man in his forties working in finance or insurance
Who is the average London commuter? He’s a man, probably working in finance or insurance, and likely to be in his thirties or forties.
Thanks to new data broken out from the 2011 Census, we know a little more about who’s making those daily round trips – and how far they’re travelling.
If you work in the City, you’re about three times more likely to be commuting to your office from a home outside of London than, say, a schoolteacher.
On average, one in five London workers are commuting into the capital every day, but among finance and insurance workers, that figure goes up to 29 per cent.
You might not be surprised to hear that London commuters cover a pretty hefty distance to get to work. But just how far? London Datastore has put it into astronomical perspective for us:
In the week before census those working in London travelled a total of 39.7 million miles from their residences to their work. Assuming that this distance was travelled twice a day, in a five day week London workers commuted the equivalent of travelling from Earth to the Sun and back.
Breaking it down by gender, 62 per cent of commuters are male. They’re also significantly older than their London-resident colleagues.
So what kind of jobs are they commuting to? Well, finance and insurance workers are much likelier than people in other industries to be travelling to work from outside the capital.
