UK commuters spend over a year travelling to work: Study

UK commuters, on an average, spent over a year of their lives travelling to work - at a total cost of more than £50,000, according to new research.

The average was even higher in London, at 18 months at a cost of more than £66,000.

Investment management firm Nutmeg has revealed the figures in new research.

According to the research, over a lifetime, commuters would spend an average 10,634 hours travelling to and from work, which added up to 443 days, or nearly a year and three months.

The figures were even higher for those travelling to or in London for work who would spend 18 months (or 13,097 hours) on the move, as against 10 and a half months (7,532 hours) for those travelling for work in Liverpool.

London commuters spent most time on the move with an hour and 14 minutes of travel each day on average.

Next in the order were Manchester (1 hour 4 minutes), Bristol (1 hour), Sheffield (59 minutes), Birmingham (56 minutes), Glasgow and Edinburgh (both 52 minutes), and Cardiff (50 minutes). Commutes in Leeds and Liverpool were the shortest at just 42 minutes.

The average spend on commuting to work was £118 a month in London, followed by Manchester (£78), and Bristol (£74). Those who traveled to Glasgow paid the least at £63 a month, just ahead of Birmingham and Cardiff (£64).

Of commuters surveyed, 20 per cent said they did so as buying or renting closer to their workplace was expensive.

While 51 per cent Londoners reported the cost of travel was too expensive, the happiest commuters appeared to be in Birmingham, with only 25 per cent of them complaining about the expense.

Commuters found jams and the cost of travel the most annoying things about the daily commute, with delays and dangerous or bad driving coming next.

There were other bugbears too like length of the journey, overcrowding on trains, music-playing fellow travellers and commuters taking up too much seat room.

A spokesman for rail industry body the Rail Delivery Group said, on average, people travelled just over 10,000 miles a year on an annual season ticket with the average price of a journey around £5 or 24p per mile, which could be half the equivalent of commuting by car.