America’s 10 Best Cities for Remote Workers

The benefits of having a full-time job that doesn’t require you to spend most of your daylight hours crammed in a cubicle—or in an office at all—are abundant. You don’t have to worry about someone stealing your clearly-labeled lunch from the refrigerator, you don’t have to dread rush-hour traffic, and you might not even have to leave your bed.

Having said that, there are still plenty of variables that could make your experience as a remote worker less than stellar, and some of them depend on where you live. If your city has notoriously poor Wi-Fi signals, for example, or a conspicuous lack of coffee shops, you might find yourself fantasizing about a 14th-floor corporate cubicle more than you thought was possible.

To find out where you’d have the best chance of thriving as an off-site employee, digital marketing professional David Cusick analyzed data from the 50 most populated U.S. cities and came up with a list of the overall best locations for remote workers, which he shared on his blog Overheard on Conference Calls. Using information from Yelp, Numbeo's Cost of Living Index, Ookla, and the U.S. Census Bureau, Cusick ranked the cities based on their performance in these five categories: Wi-Fi speed, number of co-working spaces and coffee shops per capita, cost of living, and time saved on commutes.

The winner was Kansas City, Missouri, which, according to this study, has the country’s fastest Wi-Fi speeds—a factor that Cusick weighted double in his points-based ranking system. The runner-up was Salt Lake City, Utah, an ideal place to work from home partially because of its low cost of living. It’s also the northernmost city in the top 10, three of which are in Texas (Austin, San Antonio, and Dallas).

See the rest of the list below, and find out how to boost your remote-work productivity levels here.

1. Kansas City, Missouri

1. Salt Lake City, Utah

1. Austin, Texas

1. Raleigh, North Carolina

1. San Antonio, Texas

1. Denver, Colorado

1. Atlanta, Georgia

1. Richmond, Virginia

1. Dallas, Texas

1. Las Vegas, Nevada