We checked every live listing on WFA Digital for where it can actually hire. Only 2.3% of 19,514 remote jobs are truly work from anywhere. 69.1% restrict to a single country, and 22% never say where they can hire.
Open anywhere in the world: 2.3%. Remote within one region: 6.6%. Remote within a single country: 69.1%. Does not say where it can hire: 22%.
Only 23% of the listings we track state pay.
Most remote work statistics you will find come from surveys: someone asks a few thousand workers whether they work from home, and how often they would like to. Those numbers describe how people work. They say nothing about what is actually being advertised, which is the only thing that matters when you are looking for a job.
This report counts postings instead of opinions. Every one of the 19,514 live listings on this board is read for a single question that job boards normally leave unanswered: where can this employer actually hire from? The answer comes from the wording of the posting itself, not from a label the employer picked from a dropdown.
That distinction is why the headline figure here disagrees with almost everything else published about remote work. A survey can tell you 75.7% of people work remotely in some arrangement. Only a count of postings can tell you that 3.3% of the jobs calling themselves remote will genuinely take a candidate from anywhere.
The word remote has quietly split into two meanings. To a candidate it suggests the job travels with them. To most employers advertising one, it means the office is optional but the country is not.
The split shows up cleanly in the numbers. 69.1% of remote listings can only hire inside one country. Another 6.6% are limited to a region or a timezone band. Just 636 postings, 3.3% of the board, carry no location condition at all.
The most expensive category for a job seeker is the third one. 22.0% of listings never state where they can hire from. Nothing in the posting is false, because nothing was claimed. The candidate finds out after writing the application, and often after the first interview. Silence is not neutral here: it moves the cost of the ambiguity onto the person with the least information.
77.0% of remote job listings do not publish a salary. Only 4,488 of 19,514 state a range up front.
Among the ones that do, the median advertised floor is $140,000 a year. That number needs two caveats before anyone quotes it. It counts only listings that give an annual range, so several hundred hourly and monthly roles, which pay less on average, are not in it. And it is the median of employers willing to name a figure at all, who tend to be the ones comfortable with what they pay. The true market median across every listing is therefore lower, probably materially so, than the median of the transparent minority.
Salary transparency law has moved fast in the United States and parts of the European Union, but this is what compliance looks like in practice on a global board: roughly a quarter of postings name a number, and the rest still ask candidates to spend an application to find out.
Employers on this board can hire from 44 countries, but the distribution is nothing like even. The United States alone accounts for 7,580 of the openings available to candidates in a given country, more than the next several markets combined.
This is the practical consequence of the 69.1% figure above. A job that is remote within the United States is invisible to a qualified candidate in Brazil or Poland, even though the listing and the search filter both say remote. Filtering by the word remote returns a list that is mostly unavailable to anyone outside a handful of countries.
Location freedom is not spread evenly across professions. Admin & VA leads at 45.3% of its remote roles open worldwide, while coaching sits at 0.0%.
The pattern behind the ranking is regulatory rather than technical. Work that touches licensing, patient records, student records or payroll tends to be bound to a jurisdiction no matter how digital the task is. Work that is delivered entirely as output, and that a contractor can do as easily as an employee, travels. Nothing about a nurse's or a teacher's job is less computer-based than an assistant's. The difference is which government has to approve it.
If you are planning a career move around location freedom, this table is more useful than the headline percentage. It shows which fields have a real path to borderless work and which ones will keep asking where you live no matter how the role is advertised.
Every figure on this page is recomputed from the live board, and each statistic has its own anchor so a citation can point at a single number rather than the whole page. The dated edition linked above is frozen: its figures will not move, which is what you want if you are quoting one in an article that will outlive this month.
The data is free to use with attribution under CC BY 4.0. If you need a cut we have not published, such as a specific country, category or seniority band, the underlying board is public and every listing carries its own eligibility label.
Figures come from 19,514 active remote listings on WFA Digital, as of September 2, 2026, each parsed for where it can hire from the text of the posting. Numbers update as the board updates, and each statistic has its own anchor so a citation can point at a single figure. Free to cite with attribution (CC BY 4.0): WFA Digital, The Remote Hiring Report, https://wfadigital.com/remote-hiring-report, retrieved September 2, 2026.
Every listing says which countries it can hire from before you apply. Browse by where you live or by field.