Measured, not estimated
Remote work has a geography, and it is mostly one country
Of the remote roles that restrict hiring to a single country, 59.4% name the United States. The phrase “remote job market” describes something far narrower than it sounds, and how narrow depends entirely on where you happen to live.
| Country | Roles | Share of country-locked roles |
|---|---|---|
| the United States | 2,552 | 59.4% |
| the United Kingdom | 224 | 5.2% |
| Canada | 206 | 4.8% |
| France | 204 | 4.7% |
| Germany | 160 | 3.7% |
| Spain | 117 | 2.7% |
| Ireland | 80 | 1.9% |
| Singapore | 76 | 1.8% |
| India | 65 | 1.5% |
| the Netherlands | 57 | 1.3% |
| Japan | 46 | 1.1% |
| Australia | 36 | 0.8% |
| All 67 countries with a country-locked role | 4,298 | 100% |
Five countries hold most of it
The top five — the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France and Germany — account for 77.9% of every remote role that names a country, across 67 countries that appear at all. The distribution has a very long and very thin tail.
This is not a statement about where people want to work remotely. It is a statement about where companies have already built the machinery to employ someone: a registered entity, a payroll, a tax withholding arrangement, a contract template that a local court would recognise.
Why the map looks like this
Hiring someone in a country obliges the employer to that country. Payroll has to be registered, income tax withheld, social contributions paid, local employment protections honoured, and the whole arrangement has to survive an audit. A company does that once per country and then reuses it, which is why remote hiring clusters so tightly around the places where the paperwork already exists.
Employer-of-record services exist to rent that machinery, and they are the reason regional postings — EMEA, LATAM, North America — exist at all. But an EOR costs real money per head, so it tends to be spent on senior roles rather than offered to the whole market.
What this means depending on where you are
If you live in the United States, the remote market is roughly as large as it appears, and a majority of country-restricted postings are open to you. Everywhere else, most of what is advertised as remote is not available, and the gap between the apparent market and the real one widens the further down this table your country sits — or the further off it entirely.
That gap is the reason this site exists. Of 7,505 remote postings we track, 1,497 state no country restriction at all — 19.9% of them. Those are the roles where your address is not the first filter you fail, and they are the only ones listed on the main board.
A note on what is not counted here
This table covers roles that name exactly one country. It deliberately excludes regional postings, which are counted separately, and it excludes the postings that say “remote” and nothing more. That last group is large, and treating it as open would inflate every number on this page. Where a posting does not say, we record that it did not say.
Figures on this page are read from the live board when the page is requested, so they move as the market does rather than describing the day the report was written. Last refreshed .