The real cost of working from home in Lahore
Load shedding is back at 2.25 hours a day. What that plus the electricity slab actually costs a person who works from home, with the numbers.
Scheduled load shedding came back to Lahore in April 2026 — around 2.25 hours a day during peak evening hours across LESCO and the other distribution companies. The Power Division was explicit about the reasoning: it was that, or roughly PKR 3 per unit added to everyone’s bill.
For most households that is an inconvenience. If you work from home, it is a working day with a hole in it, and the hole is not the expensive part.
What working from home actually costs
The reason home working feels free is that the costs are already on bills you were going to pay anyway. Pull them apart and they are real.
Electricity, at the wrong end of the slab
Pakistan’s domestic tariff is banded, and the bands bite hard. The average base tariff sits around PKR 31.59 per unit for 2026, but domestic consumers in the upper slabs pay up to PKR 47.69 per unit. That is the number that matters, because working from home is exactly what pushes a household into a higher slab.
An air conditioner, a desktop or laptop, lights and a router running through the working day, five or six days a week, is not marginal consumption. It is a second household’s worth of daytime load added to a bill that was previously mostly evenings — and it is charged at your highest rate, not your average one.
Backup, which is a capital cost pretending to be free
Then the power goes, and you need it not to matter. A UPS large enough to carry a router and a laptop through a two-hour outage is one order of expense; one that also carries an inverter AC is another entirely, and the batteries are a consumable that need replacing every few years. Solar changes the arithmetic but front-loads it into a number most people do not want to spend to make one room work.
Internet, twice
If your income depends on being online, one connection is not a plan. Serious home workers end up paying for a primary line and a mobile backup, and discover during the first outage that the ONT needs power too — so the UPS has to carry that as well.
The part nobody bills you for
Two and a quarter hours a day, five days a week, is roughly forty-five hours a month of your working time sitting inside a scheduled outage. Some of it you will work through on a laptop battery. Some of it you will lose to a call that dropped, an upload that failed, or the twenty minutes it takes to get your concentration back afterwards.
Put any hourly rate you like on that. It will dwarf the electricity.
What a coworking space is actually selling
Not desks. Desks are cheap and you have one at home. What you are buying is the guarantee that the working day happens, and it comes down to a short list of unglamorous things:
- Power backup that carries the whole floor — desks, lights, air conditioning and the internet, not just the sockets. If the AC dies during an outage, in a Lahore summer, the room empties anyway.
- An internet connection somebody else is responsible for. When it breaks it is not your afternoon that goes into diagnosing it.
- Cooling that is already running. Between May and September this is not comfort, it is whether the room is usable.
- A door, when you need one. Client calls and interviews do not go well from a room where someone else lives.
Those are the four we built around, and they are the ones we would tell you to interrogate at any space you visit, including this one. Ask what the backup actually covers. Ask what happened during the last long outage.
The comparison, honestly
A shared desk here starts at PKR 9,999 a month, which is about PKR 385 per working day. That is not free, and we are not going to claim it is cheaper than your spare room, because on the electricity bill alone it might not be.
What it does buy is that the two and a quarter hours stop being yours to solve. Whether that trade is worth it depends entirely on what your time is worth and how much of your income depends on being reachable — which is a calculation only you can do, and one you should do with real numbers rather than a feeling.
If it comes out in favour of home, stay home. That is a perfectly good answer, and we would rather you reached it before paying us than after.
If you want to test it
A day pass is PKR 1,999 and commits you to nothing. Come on a day the schedule says your area is due an outage — that is the honest test, and it is the one we would run.
Desk&Wifi is on the second floor at 31-C, facing Al-Fatah in Bahria Town, Lahore. What is included is written out in full, hours and all.
Tariff and load-shedding figures are from published 2026 reporting on NEPRA rates and the Power Division’s April 2026 schedule; slabs are revised periodically, so check your own bill for the rate that applies to you.