What does time at home mean?
The answer depends on what we measure. A diary can tell us how many hours someone spends inside their dwelling. GPS can track a radius around it. Travel surveys count journeys, while census data follows changes of address. Together these measures describe how home organizes daily life, although none can substitute for another.
- Time in the home
- Hours inside the dwelling, usually from a 24-hour diary. Sleep counts. Strong evidence
- Time within a radius
- Clock time or GPS points inside 200 m, 1 km and so on. This needs continuous tracking. Partial, small studies
- Trips by length
- Counts of journeys. A short trip can start far from home. Strong, but a different question
- Where you live
- Moves, and distance to a parent or a birthplace. This tracks the address, not the hours. Strong for the US
Seven in ten hours are spent at home
The US, Canadian and British diary surveys were taken twenty years apart, yet they land within about a point of each other. The share of the day spent at home is close to seven in ten. For the average person, that is roughly 16.8 hours every day.
- At home
- Other indoor places
- In a vehicle
- Outdoors
- Away (Britain: not split)
- Not recorded
"90% indoors" is about 87–89% in any building.
That means offices, schools, shops and gyms as well as the home. The EPA's round figure comes from this indoor total 10. The home alone accounts for roughly 19 points less.
Remove sleep and the home still holds about 8 waking hours.
In Canada, sleep takes 35.9% of the day. The other 34% is waking time at home, which is more than work, school, shops and vehicles combined 2.
The balance changes over a lifetime
Age changes the share more than country does. Working-age adults spend the least time at home, though even they average about sixteen hours a day there. The number rises after sixty, when the home occupies an even larger part of daily experience.
Daily life extends beyond the front door
A dwelling is only one part of its setting. Streets, shops, parks, schools and workplaces determine what is within easy reach. Measuring this wider area requires GPS tracking. The available studies are small, local and short, and each draws the boundary around home differently. Pick a study below to see how the findings change with that boundary.
- Within 125 m 51%
- 125 m to 1.7 km 12%
- Beyond 1.7 km 37%
Share of recorded time only. Devices logged about 8.2 valid hours a day, so much of the night, which is mostly spent at home, is missing. The true 24-hour share at home is probably higher.
Mobile-phone studies find that people repeatedly return to a small number of places, and that each person has a characteristic range 11. The range varies enormously, however, and call records cannot tell us how many hours someone spent in each place.
Most journeys stay local
England's National Travel Survey shows that most trips are local. It also shows that travelling takes up only about an hour a day. Where a home sits therefore shapes more than the hours indoors. It also sets the starting point for most journeys and determines which everyday destinations are nearby.
One day, 1,440 minutes
Trips by length, England, 2023
Home is usually a stable setting
No study has tracked how a whole lifetime of hours divides up by distance. Changes of address offer the nearest substitute. In the United States, 92% of people lived at the same address as a year earlier. Of those who moved, just over half stayed in the same county. The setting of daily life tends to persist from one year to the next.
500 Americans, one year (2023)
Median distance to a living mother
At ages 45 to 54, 16% lived more than 500 miles from their mother, and 8% still lived with her. Between 18 and 54, a quarter of all life-years were spent within five miles of her but in a separate household 9.
What the evidence can support
It counts every building: 86.9% in the US and 88.9% in Canada 12. It is often misread as time at home, which is closer to 70%.
No national study of clock time supports a universal radius. GPS studies are local, and their boundaries run from 125 m to 1 km. Phone data shows that ranges vary widely from person to person.
The closest real measures are birth-state residence and distance to a mother. Both leave a large minority living far away, and neither measures hours.
Give the setting its due
A home is more than an address or an asset. It is the setting for most of our time.
We routinely give more deliberate thought to careers, cars and holidays than to the physical setting in which most of life unfolds. The time-use evidence suggests that this order deserves reconsideration. About two-thirds of a day passes inside the home, while its location shapes access to the people and places that fill many of the remaining hours.
The evidence does not prescribe a particular kind of home. It does not favor owning over renting, a large house over a small one, or the countryside over a city. Those choices depend on the life a person wants and can afford. What the numbers establish is the weight of the decision. Light, noise, comfort, privacy, layout and proximity to everyday destinations are repeated experiences, not minor details around a financial transaction.
The most defensible summary is "about 70% of the day inside the home." The diary data comes from the US, Canada and Britain. Climate, working patterns and urban form may shift the balance elsewhere, but the consistency across these surveys makes the home difficult to treat as background.
Sources
- Klepeis et al. (2001), National Human Activity Pattern Survey. US, 1992–94, 9,386 respondents, 24-hour recall diaries.
- Matz et al. (2014), Canadian Human Activity Pattern Survey 2. 2010–11, 5,011 diaries, summer and winter. Low response rate, weighted.
- Lader, Short & Gershuny (2006), ONS Time Use Survey 2005. Great Britain, ages 16 and over, 4,941 diaries, location recorded only as home or elsewhere.
- Hurvitz et al. (2014), Preventive Medicine 69. King County, WA, 611 adults, 7 days of GPS and accelerometer data, about 8.2 valid hours a day.
- GPS heat-exposure study (2024), J. Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology. San Diego County, 599 adults aged 35–80, 14-day tracking; non-wear time counted as home.
- Vazquez-Prokopec et al. (2013), PLOS ONE. Iquitos, Peru, 582 residents, about 15 days; loggers off from midnight to 6 a.m.
- Department for Transport (2024), National Travel Survey 2023. Residents of England, interview plus 7-day diary.
- US Census Bureau, Geographic Mobility 2023 (CPS ASEC), with historical Table A-1, 1948–2023.
- Choi et al. (2021), Demographic Research 45. Panel Study of Income Dynamics, 166,098 person-years.
- US EPA, Indoor Air Quality, source of the "about 90% indoors" figure.
- González, Hidalgo & Barabási (2008), Nature 453. 100,000 mobile-phone users over six months.
- Dėdelė et al. (2018), Applied Sciences. Kaunas, 125 adults, 7-day GPS: about 70% of time at home, a close match for the diary surveys.