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Southern Maine has one of the highest rates of remote work in the country

Luciana Santerre
/
Maine Public

A new report finds Southern Maine has one of the highest shares of remote workers in the country.

A group that tracks the co-working industry said that more than 18% of workers in southern Maine worked remotely in 2023.

That's nearly triple the number recorded before the pandemic.

Peter Kolaczynski helped assemble the report for CoworkingMag. He said Portland falls into a real estate category called a tertiary market — smaller and less expensive than many major cities — that drew newcomers during the pandemic.

"It's a tertiary market that's attractive to people, because they can now work from home, right?" he said.

Kolaczynski said that stands in contrast to cities with big tech industries, where many workers already living locally were quickly able to go remote when the pandemic hit.

"Areas that are more conducive to tech companies and tech work - Austin, San Francisco, Salt Lake City," he said.

The findings align with state data documenting a boom in remote work in Maine during the pandemic.

The group based the report on U.S. Census data for metropolitan areas with populations greater than half a million people.

The Portland-South Portland metro area, as defined by the Census, encompasses Cumberland, York, and Sagadahoc Counties.

In southern Maine and across the country, the data shows the share of remote workers peaked during the early years of the pandemic, and has fallen gradually since then.