Do I need to survey every employee?

No. A representative sample, scaled up to your headcount, is a common and practical approach. Make sure every site and team is represented, and explain the method and response rate in your plan.

Is homeworking part of employee commuting?

The GHG Protocol treats homeworking as optional within category 7. The UK government publishes a factor for it, 0.32393 kg CO2e per full-time-equivalent working hour in 2026, and many UK Carbon Reduction Plans include it, especially for hybrid teams.

What if staff car share?

Count the car's miles once, against the driver. The passengers' commute is already covered by that car journey.

How often should I repeat the survey?

Once a year is enough for most businesses, timed so the results are ready for your annual Carbon Reduction Plan update. Repeat it sooner if something big changes, such as an office move or a new hybrid working policy.

Employee commuting emissions without surveying everyone

You can estimate employee commuting emissions from a sample: ask a representative group of staff how far they travel, how, and how many days a week they come in, work out their annual distance by mode, scale it up to your full headcount, and multiply by the government conversion factors. Add homeworking hours if you include them, and explain the method in your Carbon Reduction Plan.

Updated 6 October 2026 by the Carbon Recycling team. Figures use the official UK government conversion factors and are checked against the current gov.uk guidance.

Why commuting needs its own approach

Employee commuting is Scope 3 category 7, one of the five categories a PPN 006 Carbon Reduction Plan must include. It is also the one with no paper trail: nobody claims expenses for getting to work, so there is nothing in your accounts to add up. That is why it is the category most often left out, and why our PPN 006 guide lists missing commuting as a common reason plans get marked down.

The fix is a short survey. You don't need every employee to answer. The GHG Protocol's Scope 3 guidance describes collecting commuting data from employees, and scaling up from a representative sample is a common, practical way to do it for a small business.

Four questions are enough

How far is your journey to work, one way? (miles or km)
How do you usually travel? (car, train, bus, walk or cycle, other)
On a typical week, how many days do you travel to the workplace?
On a typical week, how many days do you work from home?

Keep it anonymous and short, and it will get answers. If people use more than one mode, ask for the one they use for the longest part of the journey. If you want to use a better car factor, add an optional question about car size and fuel.

Getting a sample you can rely on

Cover every site and team. A sample made up only of head office staff will miss the people who drive furthest.
Aim for a good response rate. There is no official minimum, but the higher it is, the easier the estimate is to defend. Record the rate.
Scale by the right number. Use headcount if most staff work full time, or full-time equivalents if many work part time.
Write the method down. One or two sentences in your plan: when you surveyed, how many replied, and how you scaled up.

A worked example

A 40-person office business surveys its staff and gets 24 replies. Everyone works 3 days a week in the office and 2 at home, for 46 working weeks a year. Annual distance for each person is one-way distance × 2 × office days × 46. The sample totals are then multiplied by 40 ÷ 24 to cover the whole team.

Mode	Replies	Average one way	Sample a year	Scaled to 40 staff	Factor (kg CO2e)	tCO2e
Car, driving alone	12	9 miles	29,808 miles	49,680 miles	0.26699	13.26
Train	5	25 km	34,500 passenger-km	57,500 passenger-km	0.03092	1.78
Bus	4	6 km	6,624 passenger-km	11,040 passenger-km	0.10151	1.12
Walk or cycle	3	2 miles	1,656 miles	2,760 miles	0	0.00
Homeworking	40	–	–	27,600 hours	0.32393	8.94
Total, category 7						25.10

Car uses the DESNZ 2026 average car (fuel unknown) factor per mile; train and bus use the national rail and average local bus factors per passenger-km; homeworking hours are 40 staff × 2 days × 7.5 hours × 46 weeks.

Two things stand out. The 12 drivers in the sample account for most of the travel emissions, even though the train users travel further, because a car carrying one person has a much higher factor per mile than a seat on a train. And homeworking is not zero: heating and powering home offices adds 8.94 tonnes, a sizeable share for a hybrid team.

Homeworking: include it or not?

The GHG Protocol treats homeworking as optional within category 7. Many UK plans include it, because leaving it out makes hybrid working look carbon-free, which it isn't. Whichever you choose, say so in the plan and keep the same approach every year so your figures stay comparable. The homeworking factor page explains what the government factor covers.

Where commuting fits

Commuting is often the largest of the five PPN 006 Scope 3 categories for an office-based firm. Our post on the five categories PPN 006 asks for shows it alongside the others, and our guide to all 15 Scope 3 categories explains where commuting ends and business travel begins.

How Carbon Recycling helps

Once you have scaled up your survey, enter the totals in Carbon Recycling: car miles under employee cars with the purpose set to commuting, rail and bus in passenger-km, and homeworking in hours. Each lands in category 7 with the right factor for the year, and the Carbon Reduction Plan flags category 7 as not measured until you do.