Lifetime of commuting 'costs £50,000'

A CAREER-LONG commute is likely to set a worker back an average of £50,000, according to a survey.

For a Londoner starting work at 18 and finishing at 65, the cost of commuting could reach as high as £66,000, the poll by investing service Nutmeg.com found.

Overall, commuters will spend an average of 10,634 hours travelling to and from work in their lifetime - the equivalent of 443 days.

The survey found that the length, and cost, of a commute was highest in London with those travelling to or in the capital spending more than 13,000 hours commuting in a lifetime.

The daily time spent commuting to and from London is one hour 14 minutes, with travel costing £118 on average.

In contrast, the Liverpool commute is only 42 minutes and costs £72 a month on average, with Liverpudlian workers only notching up 7,532 hours of travel in a lifetime.

Althpough Glasgow commuters travel for longer a day (52 minutes) than those in Liverpool, Glaswegians have the least-expensive commute - at £63 a month or £35,500 in a lifetime.

Of commuters surveyed, 20% said they did so because it was too expensive to buy or rent closer to their workplace. While 51% of Londoners reckoned the cost of travel was too expensive, the happiest commuters appeared to be in Birmingham, with only 25% of them complaining about the expense.

Jams and the cost of travel topped the list of the most annoying things about the daily commute, with delays and dangerous or bad driving coming next.

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

By Peter Woodman, Press Association