When journey home becomes too expensive: Transport costs splitting Nigerian families

For many Nigerian workers, the journey home after a hard day’s work is no longer merely a commute. It is a financial calculation. Every evening, thousands are confronted with a difficult choice: spend thousands of naira travelling between home and work, endure hours in traffic and arrive home exhausted, or find cheaper accommodation closer to the workplace and stay away from their families during the week.

For an increasing number of workers, the latter has become a painful survival strategy. Some now sleep in modest apartments shared with colleagues. Others stay with friends or relatives. Some, unable to afford additional accommodation, sleep in their workplaces. They return to their spouses and children when they can afford the journey home—often at weekends.

What began as a temporary response to rising transport fares and the spiralling cost of living is gradually becoming a way of life, quietly reshaping family relationships across Lagos and other major Nigerian cities.

For Mr Olawale Lawal, a teacher and father of three, the reality became unavoidable about three years ago. Until then, Lawal travelled five times a week between his home in Ota, Ogun State, and his workplace in Ogba, Lagos. At the time, he spent about N2,500 daily on transportation. But following the sharp increase in transport fares after the removal of fuel subsidy in 2023, the arrangement became increasingly difficult to sustain.

“At a point, going to work from home every day became unsustainable because I realised that more than 50 per cent of my monthly take-home was going into transportation. And that began to affect my ability to meet up with my financial responsibility for the family,” he said.

Faced with the reality of spending a significant portion of his salary merely getting to work, Lawal began looking for an alternative. “As a result, I decided to make arrangements such that I would not have to go home on a daily basis. The first decision was to stay with a family friend in Agege, but after a while, a colleague and I decided to get a manageable apartment at a location close to our place of work where we reside between Mondays and Fridays,” he explained. The arrangement solved one problem, but created another: Lawal could no longer enjoy the everyday presence of his wife and children.

A home reduced to weekends

Lawal’s experience is not unique. When Mr Timilehin Bolarinwa joined his company in 2021, commuting from Alagbado on the Lagos mainland to the Island was, in his estimation, relatively affordable. Despite the distance, he had little reason to complain. But as transportation costs and the general cost of living continued to rise, what was once a routine commute became a financial burden.

His employer initially tried to cushion the effect by providing a staff bus that picked workers living on the mainland from Iyana Ipaja. The arrangement offered some relief, but it was eventually discontinued.

The company, according to Bolarinwa, later adopted a hybrid work arrangement, allowing employees to work remotely two or three days a week, depending on the situation, while reporting physically to the office at least twice weekly.

For Bolarinwa, however, even the reduced number of trips was enough to put a serious dent in his income. “Going to work from home every day will cost an average of N6,500 or approximately N20,000 in three days. That multiplied by four weeks is equal to N80,000. When I considered the cost of transport and the stress of travelling between Alagbado and the Island three times a week, I decided to sleep in the office for those numbers of days,” he said.

The decision may sound extreme, but it illustrates the difficult choices confronting workers whose salaries have failed to keep pace with the cost of moving around Nigerian cities. Across Lagos, the calculation is becoming familiar: how much does it cost to get to work, how much does it cost to return home, and at what point does commuting become more expensive than staying closer to the workplace? For some, the answer has meant temporarily moving away from home.

The price of staying employed

The pressure is particularly severe for workers on low incomes. The National Bureau of Statistics reported that the average fare for a bus journey within Nigerian cities reached N1,431.25 in May 2026, representing a 38.63 per cent increase from N1,032.46 recorded in May 2025.

For workers who depend on two or three different means of transportation to get to work and return home, the actual daily cost can be considerably higher. And transportation is only one part of the problem. With accommodation, food, electricity and other household expenses also rising, workers are being forced to make choices that would previously have been considered unthinkable.

While the national minimum wage is N70,000, many workers still earn less than that amount, particularly in some businesses operating in suburban areas. For such workers, living close to their workplaces may be unaffordable, yet travelling long distances every day can consume a substantial part of their income.

For Ethan Biridi, a resident of Ikola in the Ipaja-Ayobo area of Lagos, the search for better pay came at the cost of daily family life. Biridi left a polythene company in Ipaja for another in Agbara, Ogun State, because of poor remuneration. At his former workplace, he could return home to his wife and children every day. But the salary was insufficient to meet his family responsibilities.

The new job offered better financial prospects but required him to stay away from home for much of the week. “It is not a decision I cherish because I am so fond of my children. So it hurts me a great deal having to leave them for five days and sometimes for six days a week. But the fact remains that it is a choice I have to make to be able to live up to my responsibilities,” he said.

For Biridi, the contradiction is painful: being physically present with his family but unable to adequately provide for them, or earning enough to provide but sacrificing everyday companionship. He chose the latter.

When fathers become weekend parents

The consequences of such arrangements go beyond transport economics. Family life is built around ordinary, seemingly insignificant moments—sharing meals, helping children with homework, attending school events, discussing problems, praying together, watching television, settling disagreements and simply being physically present.

But when one parent is away for most of the week, those moments become less frequent. A marriage that once involved daily companionship can gradually become a weekend relationship. Conversations that would ordinarily happen spontaneously are compressed into the few hours or days when couples are together. Fatigue from work and travelling can further diminish the quality of that limited time.

Biridi has already noticed the impact of his choice on his children. He said his 16-year-old son began displaying what he described as strange and contemptuous behaviour after realising that his father was no longer returning home every day.

According to him, the boy has sometimes taken advantage of what he considers his mother’s leniency. “There was a day his mother called me to inform me that he was yet to return from school at 6.00pm when, in actual sense, he was supposed to be back at home at latest by 4.30pm. By the time he eventually returned at some minutes past 6pm, he had no cogent defence to justify his lateness,” Biridi recalled.

For him, the incident was another reminder of what his absence could mean for his children’s upbringing.

‘My children no longer get the support I used to give them’

For Lawal, the pain is less about missing his family and more about no longer being able to play the role he once considered important in his children’s daily lives. As a teacher, he regarded helping his children with their schoolwork as one of his core responsibilities.

“As a teacher, I believe that my children should benefit more from me. That was one of the reasons I liked to always be around them. But such support is no longer coming from me because I only return home at the weekend,” he said ruefully.

“Of course, I still assist them whenever I am available, but the frequency and the consistency, which I consider very critical at this stage, are no longer there.”

His absence has also affected his relationship with his wife, who works as a seamstress. Lawal recalled that there were times when his wife had to work late, particularly during festive periods, and he would assist with some domestic responsibilities while she concentrated on her work. “That is no longer happening as often as I believe it should,” he said.

In other words, the cost of transportation is not merely measured in naira. It is also measured in missed homework sessions, absent parents, unattended family routines and the gradual erosion of everyday companionship.

‘I am gradually getting used to living alone’

For Bolarinwa, the adjustment has also brought an unexpected burden: learning to live alone. “Living far apart from my immediate family is never a lifestyle I enjoyed,” he said. “But I can say I am gradually getting used to living alone while a bigger part of me is miles away.”

But there is another challenge. After a hectic day at work, he must return to his apartment, prepare his own dinner and think about what he will eat the following day. “This is what I hardly concerned myself about in the past,” he said.

Bolarinwa’s reluctance to eat out makes the situation even more difficult. He said his aversion to eating outside the home was influenced by his upbringing. “Eating out is one practice I seriously detest because even as a child, my parents never encouraged it. In fact, my mother would always complain and express anxiety anytime any of us ate out because, according to her, we did not know the condition under which the food was prepared.”

The result is that a worker who once returned home to a family environment now has to worry about cooking after a long day at work, preparing for the next day and navigating life alone—all in the name of reducing transportation expenses.

But does moving closer really save money?

Yet, not everyone agrees that staying away from home is necessarily the most economical solution. Some argue that relocating temporarily closer to one’s workplace may simply replace transport expenses with accommodation, feeding and other household costs.

The argument is particularly compelling in Lagos, where rent can require a substantial upfront payment.

Yearly rent, coupled with agency and agreement fees and other charges, can amount to more than what some workers would spend on transportation over an entire year.

For Chima Madu who works in Apapa but lives at Meiran, Lagos, the numbers do not justify leaving his family. Madu said he sometimes spends as much as N5,000 a day on transportation but would rather continue commuting than rent another apartment near his workplace. “There are times I spend close to N5,000 on transportation daily. That amounts to over N100,000 in a month and N1.2 million in a year,” he said.

According to him, some of his friends living in and around Apapa pay between N2 million and N2.5 million annually for accommodation. “If I choose to move closer to Ladipo and leave my family, I will be spending about N2 million apart from other regular bills such as electricity, LAWMA, water, security and others, which will amount to duplication because I still have to pay those bills at the other place where my wife and children are. “To me, it does not really work, except one has free accommodation,” he concluded.

A choice no family should have to make

The stories of Lawal, Bolarinwa and Biridi expose a difficult paradox at the heart of Nigeria’s cost-of-living crisis. Workers need higher incomes to cope with rising expenses. But the search for better-paying jobs can take them farther from their homes. Staying close to home may preserve family life but leave them financially strained. Moving closer to work may reduce transport expenses but create additional accommodation and feeding costs—and deprive families of valuable time together.

For some families, there is no perfect solution. The Nigerian worker is therefore caught between two necessities: the need to provide and the need to be present. And increasingly, the cost of doing one appears to be the loss of the other.

For families already struggling to survive, the question is no longer simply, how much does it cost to get to work? It is becoming: how much does it cost to stay close to the people you work so hard to provide for?