Say you tick the remote filter on a job board and get a long list back. You open the first role, and the small print says "US only". The next one says "UK only". The third wants you "within CET ±3 hours". You live somewhere else, so that is three tabs closed and the list is shorter than it looked.
We wanted to know how much shorter, so we counted.
On October 6, 2026 there were 11,704 open tech roles across the 762 companies we track that are hiring. We count roles, not postings, so a role posted in ten cities counts once. 4,122 of those roles are remote in some form, about 35% of the board. That sounds like a lot of choice.
Then we split them:
| Roles | Share of remote roles | |
|---|---|---|
| Remote, but only from a named country, region or time zone | 3,744 | 91% |
| Remote from anywhere | 378 | 9% |
And 378 is the ceiling. When we checked a sample of them by hand, a good chunk turned out to be restricted too (more on that further down, because it involves us getting this wrong first). The honest figure is somewhere between 4% and 8% of remote roles. Call it about one in seventeen.
950 ways to write "not here"
The 3,744 restricted roles sit at 502 companies, and between them they describe where you are allowed to live in 950 different ways. Some of that is real variety. A lot of it is the same rule spelled differently.
The United States dominates:
1,850 of the restricted roles (49%) mention the US.
1,290 of them are the US and nothing else, written as "United States", "US only", "USA", "U.S. only" and so on.
Another 251 are the US plus Canada, in at least eleven spellings ("US and Canada", "United States, Canada", "Canada, United States", "US or Canada", "US/Canada", and six more).
Europe comes second. 1,053 restricted roles mention Europe, EMEA or a European country, and those lists get long ("Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Ukraine" appears on seven roles at one company). India shows up in 193.
Only 243 mention a time zone or working hours at all (6.5%). That is small for a rule people usually explain as "we need a few hours of overlap with the team". If overlap were the main reason, you would expect time zones to be the common way to write it.
A few strings are worth reading on their own:
"US states where Airbnb has a registered entity." This is the most honest restriction on the board, because it says the quiet part: the company can only employ you where it has a legal entity.
A list of eighteen US state abbreviations, from CA to WA. If you live in one of the other 32, the role is not remote for you.
A list of Canadian provinces that names nine of the ten. The missing one is Quebec.
Why it is almost never "anywhere"
Hiring someone in a country means running payroll, tax and benefits there, and following its employment law. Most companies only do that where they already have an entity, or pay a service to do it for them. So "remote" usually means "remote inside the places our paperwork already covers". The Airbnb string is not an outlier, it is the rule written out in full. (We went through the reasons in more depth in an older post on why companies restrict remote jobs by location.)
That also explains the shape of the data. For a US company, US-only is the path of least paperwork, so it is the default. Europe-wide lists exist because some companies have set up in a handful of EU countries and will take you in any of them.
(This is our reading of the pattern, not something the posts state. Very few explain their restriction at all.)
Who actually hires from anywhere
138 companies have at least one role labelled as open from anywhere. It is concentrated: ten companies hold 170 of the 378, and one of them holds 66.
These are the ones whose postings we read by hand and found genuinely open worldwide:
Canonical posts most roles as "Home based - Worldwide". It has the most anywhere roles of any company we track. Even here, one engineering manager role we checked was limited to EMEA or American time zones, so read each post.
Supabase writes "Remote, Global".
Railway writes "Remote (anywhere)".
Crossover hires everywhere except countries under sanctions.
If you are outside the US and want a remote tech job, those four are a good place to start. Everyone else is a per-role check.
The part where our own label was wrong
Until last week our board said about 1,900 postings were remote from anywhere. We picked 120 at random and checked them against the employer's own posting. Of the 105 we could verify, 93 were limited to a country or region. About nine in ten.
The cause was boring. Most applicant tracking systems put the restriction in a structured location field ("Remote - Ireland") rather than in the text, and our extraction mostly read the text. So a post that said "work remotely!" in its body and "Remote - Ireland" in its location got filed as anywhere. We changed it so a remote role whose location names a place is marked as restricted, and re-ran the affected roles.
It is better, not fixed. On October 6 we sampled 40 of the remaining anywhere postings and could check 19 of them against the source (the rest had closed or would not load). Twelve were genuinely open worldwide. Seven were not: a Canada-only role, a US-only role, one limited to North America, one to Paris and Barcelona, two limited by time zone, and one labelled "Global" that actually listed twelve countries. That is where the "4% to 8%" above comes from. Nineteen is a small sample, so treat the range as a range.
If you are job hunting from outside the US
Read the location field before the description. "Remote" in the body tells you nothing. "Remote - Germany" in the location tells you everything.
Look for a list. A company that names six or twelve countries is telling you exactly where it can employ people, and it is worth checking whether its other roles carry the same list.
Start with the companies that hire worldwide on purpose, then widen. On remoet.dev/jobs every role is marked remote, remote (restricted), hybrid or onsite, so you can tell the two kinds apart before you click, and an agent can search the board without an account.
If you live in the US, most of this works in your favour: about half of all remote restrictions mention the US. Not all of it, though. That list of eighteen states still leaves out the other 32.
What we are not sure about
The restriction on each role comes from a model reading the posting and its location field, so it inherits the mistakes above. The 950 is lowercased strings, which means "US only" and "US Only" count once, but "US only" and "USA" count twice. The groupings (mentions the US, mentions Europe) are keyword matches, so a string like "Americas" is in neither. And all of it is one day, October 6, 2026.
If you are hiring from anywhere and we have you filed as restricted, or the other way round, tell us in Discord. We would much rather fix the label than keep counting it wrong.
