Remote Work Carbon Savings Calculator

The biggest saving comes from eliminating commuting — particularly car journeys — which are a major source of personal CO₂ emissions. Even after accounting for the extra home heating and electricity used during remote work days, most people who drive to work come out significantly ahead on emissions by working from home.

Not necessarily. If your electricity grid is powered mostly by coal, or if you heat a large home with gas or oil, the additional home energy use can offset a meaningful portion of commute savings. The calculator accounts for your grid's carbon intensity and home energy use to give you a net figure. People with short commutes or clean-energy grids see the smallest net savings.

Research suggests an additional 2–5 kWh per remote work day for a typical home worker, covering a computer, monitor, lighting, and space heating or cooling. The default value in this calculator is 3.5 kWh/day, which is a commonly cited midpoint. You can adjust this to match your own setup.

Suburban and rural households tend to have larger homes, greater reliance on cars, and fewer public transit options — all of which increase both commute emissions and home energy use. Research (Jones 2013) shows household carbon footprints are roughly 25% higher in suburbs than in urban cores, and this calculator applies that adjustment based on your selected area type.

The calculator uses standard emission factors: petrol car ~171 gCO₂/km, diesel car ~161 gCO₂/km, hybrid ~103 gCO₂/km, electric car ~53 gCO₂/km (grid-dependent), public transit ~89 gCO₂/km, motorcycle ~114 gCO₂/km, and zero for cycling or walking. These are based on widely used sources such as the UK Government GHG conversion factors and the IPCC.

Set the <strong>Number of Employees</strong> field to the size of your team or company. The results will scale all outputs — total CO₂ savings, trees equivalent, and cars off the road — to reflect the collective impact of your workforce working remotely for the specified number of days per week.

A single mature tree absorbs approximately 21 kg of CO₂ per year. The 'trees equivalent' figure shows how many trees would need to be planted and grown for a year to sequester the same amount of carbon you are saving through remote work. It's a useful way to visualise the real-world impact of your emissions reduction.

Yes — the outputs provide a useful starting estimate for scope 3 (employee commuting) emissions reductions. For a formal sustainability report, you should complement this with actual employee commute surveys, exact grid carbon intensity data for your region, and validated emission factors from sources such as the GHG Protocol or your national environmental agency.