City profile, Charleston, South Carolina
Getting to work
How Charleston travels to work, by what means, and for how long.
On this page
At a glance
Mean travel time
24.2 min
ACS 2020–24
Drove alone
68.1%
2019–23
Worked from home
17.6%
2019–23
Commute under 20 min
44.6%
2019–23
Composition
How people get there
The figures behind the chart
| Share of workers | Value |
|---|---|
| Drove alone | 68.1% |
| Carpooled | 6.5% |
| Worked from home | 17.6% |
| Walked | 4.1% |
| Public transit | 0.9% |
| Bicycle | 1.5% |
| Taxi, motorcycle, other | 1.2% |
2019–23 · B08301
Composition
How long it takes
The figures behind the chart
| Share of commuters | Value |
|---|---|
| Under 10 minutes | 11.8% |
| 10–19 minutes | 32.8% |
| 20–29 minutes | 24.8% |
| 30–44 minutes | 19% |
| 45–59 minutes | 7.2% |
| 60 minutes or more | 4.4% |
2019–23 · B08303
Reading it
What’s notable
68.1% of workers drive to work alone, 17.6% work from home, 0.9% take transit, 4.1% walk. That is the shape of nearly every mid-sized American city built after the war: the car is not the leading option, it is effectively the only one, and the alternatives round to noise.
44.6% of commuters are at work within twenty minutes, and only 11.6% travel forty-five minutes or more. Short commutes are the compensation for car dependence here - the traffic is unavoidable but it is brief.
One structural caveat: this counts where workers *live*, not where they work. Someone living in Charleston and commuting to a plant outside the county appears here; someone driving in from elsewhere does not. For a city that is a regional employment center, that makes the traffic on the ground heavier than these numbers imply.
Sources
These are estimates. Most figures here come from surveys of a sample, not a count of everyone, and different rows carry different vintages - each number shows its own rather than being averaged into a single date.
Data retrieved: July 29, 2026
Questions
What is the average commute in Charleston, SC?
Mean travel time to work is 24.2 minutes one way, per the American Community Survey. That excludes people who work from home.
How many people take public transit in Charleston?
0.9% of workers commute by public transit. That is a small enough share that the survey's margin of error is a meaningful fraction of the estimate, so treat it as an order of magnitude rather than a precise count.
How many people work from home?
17.6% of workers - roughly 14,581 people. These are five-year estimates spanning the period when remote work expanded sharply, so a single recent year would likely read differently.
Does this count people who commute into the city?
No. The survey asks residents where and how they travel to work, so it captures outbound commuters and misses inbound ones entirely. A city that employs more people than it houses will have more traffic than these figures suggest.