Employee Commuting (Scope 3 Category 7) — Definition and GHG Accounting Context
Every working day, a company’s staff make their way to work and home again — most by car, some by train or bus, a few on foot. No vehicle in that daily tide belongs to the company, yet the emissions are a direct consequence of employing people at a particular place. And since the pandemic, a second question sits alongside it: what about the days people work from home?
Scope 3 Category 7 is where both are counted: the emissions of employees commuting between home and work — and the energy they use working from home.
Scope 3 Category 7 (employee commuting) covers the emissions from employees travelling between home and the workplace in vehicles the company does not operate — cars, motorbikes, buses, and trains. The GHG Protocol also recommends including home-working energy, counted per full-time-equivalent working hour. It is estimated from employee surveys and average commuting patterns, and is distinct from Category 6 (business travel).
Definition — What Category 7 Covers
The GHG Protocol Scope 3 Standard defines Category 7, employee commuting, as the greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation of employees between their homes and their worksites, in vehicles not owned or operated by the reporting company. That is the daily commute by car, motorbike, bus, train, tram, cycle, or on foot. The standard also recommends — and DEFRA now provides factors for — the emissions from employees teleworking, the home energy used while working remotely.
Because the commuter’s car, the bus, and the train are not operated by the company, these are indirect emissions in its value chain. The company neither burns the fuel nor buys the ticket, but the pattern of where and how its people get to work flows from decisions it makes — office location, hybrid-work policy, parking, travel subsidies — which is why the category belongs in its inventory.
Category 7 is the regular home-to-work journey and its remote-work counterpart. A trip an employee takes for work — a flight to a client, rail to another office — is Category 6, business travel, a separate category.
Commuting vs Business Travel (Cat 7 vs Cat 6)
The two employee-movement categories are easy to conflate but draw on entirely different data:
| Category 7 — Employee Commuting | Category 6 — Business Travel | |
|---|---|---|
| What it covers | Regular travel between home and workplace | Travel for work — meetings, sites, conferences |
| Home-working energy | Included (recommended) | Not applicable |
| Data source | Employee surveys, headcount, average patterns | Travel-booking and expense records |
| Who arranges it | The employee’s own routine | The company (booked / reimbursed) |
The daily drive to the office is Category 7; a flight to a conference is Category 6. The split matters because commuting data is notoriously hard to gather — it lives with employees, not in a booking system — so the two categories are usually owned and estimated by different teams using different methods.
Emissions by Commuting Mode
Commuting emissions turn on how people travel. The chart below compares DEFRA 2026 factors for the common modes. Read the units carefully: car and motorbike factors are per vehicle-kilometre, while bus and rail are per passenger-kilometre — a distinction that is itself the biggest lever in the category.
Bar widths are proportional to the factor (car = 100%). Values render live from DEFRA 2026 (AR5 100-year GWP basis). Because the car figure is per vehicle, a lone driver carries the whole amount — but car-sharing divides it: two people in one car roughly halves each person’s commuting footprint, bringing solo driving down toward the rail figure. Walking and cycling are counted as effectively zero.
Home-Working: The Modern Addition
Hybrid and remote work reshaped Category 7, and the GHG Protocol’s recommendation to include home-working energy makes the effect explicit. DEFRA publishes a homeworking factor per full-time-equivalent working hour, split between heating the home and running office equipment. The striking feature is how lopsided the split is.
Heating a home during working hours dwarfs the electricity a laptop and monitor draw — it is roughly 93% of the combined 0.32393 kg CO₂e per hour. The consequence is counter-intuitive: remote work does not automatically cut emissions. It removes the commute but adds home heating, and on a cold day, for someone with a short public-transport commute, working from home can emit more than going in. The net effect depends on the commute displaced and the season.
Whether a home-working day cuts a Category 7 footprint depends on what commute it replaces. It clearly helps for a long solo car commute; it may do little, or even add, for a short walk or a train ride — especially in a poorly insulated home in winter. Report both the commuting and home-working components rather than assuming remote days are free.
How Category 7 Emissions Are Estimated
Category 7 is the hardest Scope 3 category to get primary data for, because the activity lives with employees rather than in any company system. The GHG Protocol sets out two methods, and most companies lean on surveys and averages.
| Method | Data used | Data quality | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Distance-based | Commuting distance and mode (from a survey) × a DEFRA factor | Higher | Where an employee travel survey exists |
| Average-data | Headcount × average commuting distance and modal split for the region | Lower | Screening, or where no survey has been run |
| Home-working | Home-working days × hours × the DEFRA per-FTE-hour factor | — | The teleworking component, from HR / attendance data |
Build a commuting-and-home-working estimate from a modal survey and hybrid-work pattern in the Category 7 employee-commuting & WFH calculator, with the full approach in the commuting & WFH methodology.
Worked Micro-Example
A hybrid employee works three days in the office and two from home. The office days involve a 20 km each-way solo drive (petrol car); the home days are eight working hours each. (Distances illustrative; factors are the live DEFRA values above.)
Commute = 3 days × 40 km × 0.16152 kg CO₂e/km (car, petrol, solo) = 19.4 kg CO₂e
Home-working = 2 days × 8 hours × 0.32393 kg CO₂e/hour = 5.2 kg CO₂e
Weekly total ≈ 24.6 kg CO₂e
For comparison, five office days would be 5 × 40 km × 0.16152 = 32.3 kg — so hybrid working saves ~24% here, and car-sharing the office days would roughly halve the commute again
All booked to Category 7; a work trip that week would instead be Category 6
The example shows both halves of the category and the tradeoff between them: the two home days remove commute emissions but add a smaller home-heating charge, and the mode and occupancy of the office commute dominate the total.
Common Confusions
- Confusing it with business travel. The home-to-work journey is Category 7; a trip taken for work is Category 6.
- Assuming remote work is zero-carbon. Home-working adds heating and equipment energy; it only cuts the footprint if it displaces a higher-carbon commute.
- Mixing vehicle-km and passenger-km. Car factors are per vehicle; bus and rail are per passenger. Divide a car figure by occupancy before comparing.
- Forgetting home-working entirely. In a hybrid workforce the teleworking component can rival the commute — omitting it understates the category.
- Counting a company car here. A vehicle the company owns and operates is Scope 1; an employee’s own car used to commute is Category 7.
- Over-claiming survey precision. Commuting data is inherently estimated from surveys and averages — state the method and its uncertainty rather than implying meter-level accuracy.
Related Terms, Standards, and Tools
Category 7 sits alongside the other employee-movement and transport terms — business travel, the passenger-kilometre unit it shares, and the DEFRA commuting and home-working factors — with the calculator and methodology that quantify both halves.
Frequently Asked Questions
Scope 3 Category 7 is the greenhouse gas emissions from employees travelling between home and the workplace in vehicles the company does not operate — cars, motorbikes, buses, trams, and trains — over the reporting year. The GHG Protocol also recommends including the energy employees use working from home, counted per full-time-equivalent working hour. Because the vehicles and homes are not operated by the company, these are indirect Scope 3 emissions, driven by decisions such as office location and hybrid-work policy. A company car the business operates is Scope 1 instead.
Employee commuting (Category 7) is the regular journey between home and the workplace. Business travel (Category 6) is travel undertaken for work — flights to meetings, rail to a client site, a hotel for a conference. The daily drive to the office is Category 7; a flight to a conference is Category 6. They are separate categories because they use different data: employee surveys and headcount for commuting, travel-booking and expense records for business travel.
Yes — the GHG Protocol recommends including home-working (teleworking) energy within Category 7, and DEFRA publishes a factor for it per full-time-equivalent working hour, split between home heating and office equipment. Heating dominates: it is roughly 93% of the combined figure. Because of that, remote work does not automatically reduce emissions — it removes the commute but adds home heating, so the net effect depends on the commute displaced and the season.
Commuting is the hardest Scope 3 category for primary data because the activity lives with employees, not company systems. The distance-based method uses an employee travel survey — distance and mode per person — multiplied by DEFRA factors. Where no survey exists, the average-data method applies average commuting distances and a regional modal split to headcount, for screening. The home-working component comes from HR or attendance data on remote days and hours. State the method and its uncertainty rather than implying precision the survey cannot support.
Not always. A home-working day removes the commute but adds home-heating and equipment energy, counted per working hour. For a long solo car commute, remote work clearly cuts the footprint. For a short walk or a train ride — especially in a poorly insulated home in winter — it may save little or even add emissions. The honest approach is to report both the commuting and home-working components and let the net fall where the data puts it, rather than assuming remote days are carbon-free.