Remote Jobs Can Be Done Anywhere. Why Are They In Expensive Cities?

As companies transition employees to remote work, we’ve been working hard to help companies better understand the impacts of these changes on their workforce.

By analyzing hundreds of millions of job postings, we’ve created a suitability to remote work score for every position (see our previous post) and have discovered a fascinating trend: jobs that are most suitable to remote work are located in the most expensive cities. Check out the results below:

Our thoughts:

• IT-centric cities are heavily populated with knowledge workers, which are often most suitable for remote work.
• While many jobs can be done remotely, there is still a productivity boost from being surrounded by a network of skilled workers.
• Knowledge workers, who have the benefit of working remotely, may place a higher premium on high-cost city life (entertainment, culture, density of people) than their counterparts who don’t have that same flexibility.

If you have any ideas of other metrics to track or would like to hear more, please feel free to reach out to us.