Best Metros for Remote Workers: Where Fast Internet Meets Affordable Homes
The results present some interesting opportunities for digital nomads looking for a new home base.
“Work from anywhere with an internet connection” is a common refrain in today’s growing tech economy. If you want both a fast internet connection and an affordable home, use this list to discover the location of your new remote “office.”
We ranked the country’s largest 100 metro areas using Speedtest‘s “Speed Score” over fixed broadband in September 2018. (Speed Score is a weighted measure of mean download and upload speeds that also considers performance at the lowest and highest tiers.) Then we compared that ranking to Zillow’s median home value for each area.
Metros that ranked comparatively high for Speed Score and low for median home value made our list. The results present some interesting opportunities for digital nomads looking for a new home base.
Chattanooga takes the number one spot with a blend of fast internet speeds and affordable housing stock that make working from home easy and appealing. Shreveport is number two and Kansas City places third. Five of the top 10 metros were located in the Southeast and three in the Southwest. The western U.S. was notably absent from the top 10.
More affordable and fast cities if you plan to work from home
If you didn’t find your new best life on the map above, here is the full list of 25 places remote workers could consider. Each has the fast internet speeds that will keep you connected and the affordable home values that could help you reimagine your budget. (Based on September 2018 data from Speedtest and Zillow.)
| WFH Rank | MSA Name | Speed Score | Gigabit? | Median Home Value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Chattanooga, TN | 151.23 | Y | $141,700 |
| 2 | Shreveport, LA | 107.66 | N | $103,300 |
| 3 | Kansas City, MO-KS | 128.76 | Y | $195,900 |
| 4 | El Paso, TX | 90.47 | N | $120,800 |
| 5 | Pittsburgh, PA | 102.14 | Y | $146,200 |
| 6 | San Antonio, TX | 119.97 | Y | $201,400 |
| 7 | Oklahoma City, OK | 95.13 | Y | $144,200 |
| 8 | Jacksonville, FL | 113.16 | Y | $210,200 |
| 9 | Piedmont Triad, NC | 89.50 | Y | $137,000 |
| 10 | Charlotte-Gastonia, NC | 115.59 | Y | $221,100 |
| 11 | York, PA | 103.04 | Y | $180,100 |
| 12 | Wilmington, DE-NJ-MD | 110.73 | Y | $219,800 |
| 13 | Harrisburg, PA | 100.22 | Y | $172,300 |
| 14 | Raleigh-Durham, NC | 128.91 | Y | $263,400 |
| 15 | Houston, TX | 104.94 | Y | $206,900 |
| 16 | Syracuse, NY | 82.75 | N | $128,800 |
| 17 | Philadelphia, PA | 110.86 | Y | $238,400 |
| 18 | Baton Rouge, LA | 90.86 | Y | $162,400 |
| 19 | Davenport-Rock Island-Moline, IA/IL | 83.85 | Y | $129,800 |
| 20 | Wichita, KS | 87.14 | Y | $143,600 |
| 21 | Youngstown-Warren, OH | 72.48 | N | $89,900 |
| 22 | Louisville, KY-IN | 91.04 | Y | $170,400 |
| 23 | Richmond, VA | 110.72 | Y | $235,900 |
| 24 | Atlanta, GA | 104.45 | Y | $216,700 |
| 25 | Baltimore, MD | 111.66 | Y | $260,500 |
The Southeast picks up another seven metros when looking at the full list of the 25 best metros for remote workers, for a grand total of 12. North Carolina is home to three. Because the Louisville, Ky., metro straddles a regional border, we counted it in both the Southeast and the Midwest.
The Midwest and the Northeast are each home to five metros that made our list of best places to work from home. While the metros in the Midwest are spread widely, there’s a concentration of three contenders in southeastern Pennsylvania. Add those to Baltimore, Md., and Wilmington, Del., and you have a nice cluster of places to work from home that are less than a day by train from one of a certain mega retailer’s new headquarters.
Four metros on our list of 25 best metros for remote workers are in the Southwest, three of them in Texas. Sadly, the western U.S. loses out completely. Although left coast tech hubs like Silicon Valley and Seattle have access to internet speeds that make developers drool, high median home prices keep them out of the running. Instead, these digital strongholds could become the kinds of places that remote workers flee in the great rush toward more livable second cities.
Nine of the metros on our list are located in the Rust Belt. Could an economic resurgence be in the cards in these former manufacturing powerhouses? Maybe. What is certain is that these metros all contain two important ingredients to attract the kinds of people who innovate, create and build.
Do they have gigabit?
We all love fast internet, but not all metros have the infrastructure in place to offer gigabit speeds. If you need (or want) these super-fast speeds for work (or play), the “Gigabit?” column shows a “Y” for all metros where we saw at least 100 samples where download speeds exceeded 750 Mbps. Only four of the metros on our list failed to meet that threshold.
Of course access to gigabit is not always uniform across cities, so check with local internet service providers (ISPs) to verify these speeds are available at your new address.
