America's new remote-work havens: 20 cities that pursue faraway jobs

Jess Lupo loves Orlando, and not just because of the warm, sunny climate. It’s her old college town, and that means lots of friends from her days at the University of Central Florida are nearby.?

The job scene, however, is a little trickier, especially for ambitious college graduates like her. Orlando’s biggest employer is Disney World. The rest of the local economy tilts heavily toward relatively low-paying jobs in leisure and hospitality.?

For Lupo and many other Floridians, the solution is clear. Stay in the Sunshine State, where housing costs “don’t break the bank,” she explains. But find an out-of-state job that’s exciting, pays well, and can be done anywhere, amid this “boom in remote work.”

Fresh data from LinkedIn’s Economic Graph team provides two important new insights about the way the rise of remote work -- initially dictated by 2020’s pandemic restrictions -- is reshaping the U.S. economy.?

For starters, remote work opportunities as of August were capturing 30.2% of all applications to paid U.S. job postings on LinkedIn. There’s been plenty of anecdotal evidence of remote work’s rise, but the LinkedIn data makes it possible to see just how substantial this rise has been.

August’s remote-application activity turns out to be more than triple the rate of 9.8% in August 2020. It’s up nearly 10-fold from remote work’s mere 2.8% share in January 2020, before COVID-19 hit.?

What’s less well-recognized, and every bit as intriguing, is the degree to which certain cities, chiefly but not exclusively in the Sunbelt, have become hotspots for people seeking remote work, as seen in the chart below.?

The chart above covers the 12-month period through August 2021. During that span, the overall national rate for remote-job applications on LinkedIn was 21.3%.

In this analysis, small cities are defined as ones with less than 100,000 residents (according to the Census Bureau)? along with a minimum of 25,000 remote-job applications. Larger metros are defined as having a population of at least 100,000 in the core city, along with at least 100,000 applications for remote jobs.

It’s important to note that remote job listings attract at least double the engagement found for classic on-site jobs, as reported in earlier LinkedIn analysis. So while residents in many cities are eager to find remote work, competition is tough. That means such job hunts may take a long time, and not all of them will be successful.

Bend, Ore., placed No. 1 on the small-cities list, with remote listings attracting 41.8% of its residents’ applications for jobs featured on LinkedIn.?

Even before the pandemic, Census Bureau data highlighted Bend as having an unusually high percentage of people working from home. The region’s geography is rugged and pristine enough to attract outdoors enthusiasts, while its position between San Francisco and Seattle makes it a favored home for tech-sector specialists who can still check in periodically with their corporate employers in the big cities.

In Bend -- and many other remote-work favorites -- coworking facilities have sprung up or expanded, catering to people who like the bucolic life but still need a quiet desk or an occasional conference room to get things done. While shared-office coworking sites can be formed (and dismantled) relatively quickly, their steady rise suggests that a more durable ecosystem for remote workers is taking shape, across the U.S.

Such amenities help people avoid “a ton of distractions” that they might face if they were working full-time at home, says Brian Lindensmith , community manager of BendTech Coworking . Patrons also enjoy “bouncing ideas off of each other,” he says.?

In Asheville, N.C., (38.7%) some remote-based job categories that are working out for residents include medical billing, recruiting, data analysis and online instruction. Many of those same roles show up for Wilmington, Del., (35.9%) along with legal work, content marketing and IT/technical support.

Of the 20 metro areas highlighted in these lists, six are in Florida. In addition to Orlando, (29.2%) these include Sarasota-North Port, Pensacola, Cape Coral, and the Tampa Bay region.

Portland, Maine, (33.9%) is the one Northeastern metro on the list, while Louisville, Ky., (26.9%) is the closest candidate to a representative of the central U.S. heartland. Las Vegas (26.4%) and Salt Lake City (26.3%) stand out as remote-work-minded cities in the intermountain west.?

What cities are conspicuously absent from this list? Among big metros, San Francisco and New York -- at 16.4% apiece -- rank last in terms of residents’ interest in remote work.?

The reasons aren’t hard to figure out. Both those coastal cities are known for their high salaries and high cost of living. As a result, combining New York City housing costs with the pay rates of a Florida job would be an odd and painful choice.

If huge numbers of people moved to today’s low-cost cities and opted for remote work, that could have a fascinating leveling effect on housing costs across the country. New York might get cheaper; the Sunbelt might become pricier. A joint analysis by LinkedIn and Realtor.com indicates that such swings might be happening in some cities, though it’s too early to declare a trend.?

For example, Realtor.com data shows that in remote-minded metros such as Tampa (+27.2%), Las Vegas (+19.7%) and Orlando (+16.2%), rental prices have risen faster than the national average of 9.8% in the 12 months ended in July. But in Louisville, another remote-focused metro, rental prices are up only 8.9%.

Methodology:

A “remote job” is defined as one where either the job poster explicitly labeled it as “remote” or the job contained keywords such as “work from home” in the listing. The proportion of applications to remote jobs relative to non-remote jobs was ranked by the profile location of the applicant. LinkedIn analyzed more than 49 million applications to paid remote job postings in the United States posted since September 2020.

LinkedIn data scientist Brian Xu contributed to this report.