Commuting to Vancouver: Only 9% of Surrey Works There (and Other Surprises, Mapped)

Only 9.0% of Surrey's commuters work in the City of Vancouver. In Abbotsford it's 1.1%. The commute everyone pictures, suburb to downtown, is a lot smaller than the traffic makes it feel.

Statistics Canada publishes a table most people never open: for every city in the country, how many residents usually work in every other city. It comes from the 2021 Census and runs to 26 million rows, most of them zeros. I pulled every flow that starts or ends in BC and mapped where Metro Vancouver actually goes to work.

The short version: Vancouver is a big job magnet, but it's not the only one. Richmond, Burnaby and Delta all pull in more workers than they send out, Surrey sends nearly as many people to Delta as to Vancouver, and 17,770 Vancouver residents reverse-commute to Richmond. Tap your city on the map, then find your commute twins.

The map: pick a city, see where it works

The map opens on Surrey, the region's biggest pool of commuters outside Vancouver (177,695 people with a usual place of work). 46.7% of them work in Surrey itself. The rest spread out in every direction: Vancouver (16,025), Delta (15,760), Langley Township (12,430), Richmond (12,000) and Burnaby (11,585). Delta's industrial land along the river and Tilbury pulls almost exactly as many Surrey workers as all of Vancouver does.

Switch to % working in own city and the pattern flips. Vancouver keeps 67.3% of its commuters at home, the highest share in the region, and Richmond keeps 60.9%. At the other end, Langley City (18.3%), Port Moody (18.7%) and White Rock (19.5%) send more than four out of five commuters somewhere else. That's what small cities wedged between bigger ones look like.

Who commutes into Vancouver

225,555 people had a usual place of work in the City of Vancouver in 2021. 130,595 of them (57.9%) also lived there. The other 94,960 came in from somewhere else: 91,675 from the rest of Metro Vancouver and 3,285 from beyond it.

Among the region's cities, Burnaby is the biggest feeder by a distance, 22,005 people, which makes Burnaby to Vancouver the busiest flow between any two places in BC. Surrey is second with 16,025, even though Surrey has 2.5 times as many commuters as Burnaby. Proximity wins: 31.2% of Burnaby's commuters work in Vancouver, against 9.0% of Surrey's. After Burnaby come West Vancouver (26.5%) and North Vancouver District (23.1%): for a lot of North Shore commuters, work is one bridge away.

Source: Statistics Canada, 2021 Census, table 98-10-0459-01 (commuting flows between census subdivisions, all genders). Analysis by EstateBlock. Commuters = employed residents aged 15+ with a usual place of work. Anmore, Belcarra, Bowen Island and Lions Bay left out (fewer than 1,000 commuters each), and so is the UBC area (Electoral Area A, not a municipality), where 37.9% of 3,130 commuters work in Vancouver.

Job magnets and bedroom communities

Divide the number of people who work in a city by the number of its residents who commute to a usual workplace, and you get a rough job-magnet score. Above 1, the city pulls in more workers than it sends out. Below 1, it leans toward being a bedroom community, at least on weekdays.

Richmond tops the list at 1.43: 85,465 people work there, against 59,675 Richmond residents with a usual workplace. YVR, the Fraser River industrial land and the offices along No. 3 Road and Bridgeport do a lot of pulling. Delta (1.24), Burnaby (1.23) and Langley City (1.18) come next, then Vancouver and West Vancouver (both 1.16). The UBC area (Metro Vancouver's Electoral Area A) is off the chart at 2.90, because a university and hospital campus employs far more people than live around it.

The bedroom end: Maple Ridge (0.63), Port Moody (0.70), Surrey (0.72) and Coquitlam (0.75). For every 100 Maple Ridge residents commuting to a usual workplace, the city has about 63 jobs of the same kind. Surrey is a big job centre in its own right (128,360 people work there), but it has even more commuters to keep busy.

The reverse commute is bigger than you think

Here's the number that surprised me most. 17,770 Vancouver residents usually work in Richmond. Only 13,575 Richmond residents go the other way. Vancouver to Richmond is the second-busiest flow in the whole province, ahead of Surrey to Vancouver. Vancouver to Burnaby (16,615) isn't far behind Burnaby to Vancouver (22,005) either.

So the city isn't just a destination. It's also one of the region's biggest suppliers of suburban workers. If you work at the airport or in Richmond, a Vancouver address near the Canada Line, in Marpole or along Cambie, puts you on the quiet side of the rush.

Source: Statistics Canada, 2021 Census, table 98-10-0459-01 (commuting flows between census subdivisions, all genders). Analysis by EstateBlock. Ranked by the bigger direction. Residents aged 15+ with a usual place of work.

Commuting to Vancouver from the Fraser Valley, Squamish and even Calgary

27,750 people living outside Metro Vancouver had a usual workplace inside it. Abbotsford supplies almost half of them (13,240), then Mission (4,970), Chilliwack (3,055) and Squamish (1,285).

Very few of them go all the way to Vancouver. Of Abbotsford's 49,235 commuters, 530 work in the City of Vancouver, 1.1%. The big Abbotsford flows are to Langley Township (5,650) and Surrey (3,160). Mission sends 2.6% to Vancouver, Chilliwack 0.7% and Squamish 4.9%. If someone tells you they commute from Chilliwack to Vancouver, they're one of 195.

Source: Statistics Canada, 2021 Census, table 98-10-0459-01 (commuting flows between census subdivisions, all genders). Analysis by EstateBlock. Bowen Island has only 870 commuters, so its share is approximate.

Then there's the truly long haul. 580 people who lived in Calgary said their usual place of work was in Metro Vancouver (215 of them in the City of Vancouver). Edmonton adds 260 and Toronto 150. It runs the other way too: 1,435 Metro Vancouver residents had a usual workplace outside BC, led by Toronto (335), Edmonton (190), Calgary (180) and Wood Buffalo, the Fort McMurray oil sands municipality (145). My guess is rotation work, airline crews and people who split the week between two cities; the census doesn't say. Nobody is driving the Coquihalla daily. I hope.

Source: Statistics Canada, 2021 Census, table 98-10-0459-01 (commuting flows between census subdivisions, all genders). Analysis by EstateBlock. Places with at least 50 such residents. Usual place of work as reported in the census.

What this means if you're buying

For the time side of this, see my post on Canada's longest commutes, where Maple Ridge leaves for work first. For prices, there's the Greater Vancouver market update, the Surrey market report, Burnaby real estate, Richmond real estate and the Fraser Valley board stats. Browse Burnaby condos, Richmond townhouses, Abbotsford listings or Surrey houses on EstateBlock, or get an instant evaluation of your current home.

How I did this

All commuting numbers come from Statistics Canada table 98-10-0459-01, "Commuting flow from geography of residence to geography of work by gender: Census subdivisions", from the 2021 Census. I downloaded the full table (CSV download) on October 23, 2026, kept every non-zero flow that starts or ends in BC (4,438 of them), and used the total for all genders. Place names and codes come from Statistics Canada's Web Data Service metadata for the same table.

Who's counted: employed people aged 15 and over in private households who have a usual place of work. People who worked from home, had no fixed workplace or worked outside Canada aren't in the table. A city's "commuters" here means its residents with a usual place of work, and "jobs" means people with a usual place of work in that city. Both are sums of the flows, and Statistics Canada randomly rounds every count to a multiple of 5 or 10, so totals can be off by a little.

The big caveat: the census asked about work in May 2021, during the pandemic, when 24.3% of Canadian workers were working from home (Statistics Canada, The Daily). Office-heavy downtown flows were probably smaller than in a normal year, so treat the Vancouver numbers as a floor rather than a ceiling. The 2026 Census will tell us how much came back; I'll update this post when it's out. "Metro Vancouver" here means the 21 member municipalities, the UBC area (Electoral Area A), and First Nations reserves and Tsawwassen First Nation lands in the region. Municipal boundaries are from the BC Data Catalogue's administrative boundaries, simplified for the map.

The job-magnet labels (ratio of 1.15 or more = job magnet, 0.85 or less = bedroom community) are my own cut-offs, and the jokes are mine too. The numbers are the census's.