High-Income Consumers 78% More Likely to Work Remotely Than Low-Income Consumers

How consumers at different income levels behave around and interact with the connected economy diverges considerably, as new PYMNTS data shows.

For example, the study “The ConnectedEconomy™ Monthly Report: Digitally Divided – Work, Health and the Income Gap,” based on surveys of over 2,700 U.S. consumers, found that divide is prevalent in the remote work realm, which in itself indicates differing levels of engagement with the broader digital connected economy.

To level-set the numbers, we found that ConnectedEconomy™ participation among consumers making $100,000 or more is now close to 55% (54.7%), which is nearly twice the size of the share of low-income consumers, defined as those earning less than $50,000 annually.

The pandemic remote work trend comes into play here, as the study states that “high-income consumers are using digital more, partly because they are still working from home, while low-income consumers are increasingly returning to jobs requiring them to work on-site.”

We found that high-income consumers, defined as making $100,000 or more annually, are 78% more likely than low-income consumers to have jobs they can perform from home, as 71% of high-income consumers — an estimated 45 million people — currently do “at least some of their work remotely from home — up 10% year over year.”

By comparison, only 40% of low-income consumers worked remotely from home in January 2023, representing a drop of 15% year over year.

We observed this split between the behaviors of high-income and low-income consumers in other areas, particularly travel and accessing digital healthcare.

Per the study, “An average of 46% of high-income consumers used websites, apps, aggregators or other digital tools to plan or book travel tickets or accommodations — up 19% from last year. Low-income consumers’ use of digital for travel is relatively unchanged in comparison, indicating that they could be opting out of traveling in favor of lower-cost options.”

Similarly, we found that 59% of high-income consumers “used digital to access healthcare services or communicate with their providers in January 2023 — up from 50% in January 2022. Just 35% of low-income consumers used digital to access healthcare services or communicate with their providers in January 2023 — up from 32% in January 2022.”

Get the Study: The ConnectedEconomy™ Monthly Report: Digitally Divided – Work, Health and the Income Gap