The job market for remote workers might be shrinking in some cities, but it’s flourishing in others.
A new paper from the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) identifies the cities where remote jobs are growing the fastest, focusing on five English-speaking countries: the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
The researchers behind the paper — called “Remote Work across Jobs, Companies and Space”— looked at more than 250 million job vacancies offering remote or hybrid work posted between January 2014 and January 2023.
They found that the U.K. is outpacing the U.S., Australia, Canada and New Zealand when it comes to remote, flexible jobs, which is “unsurprising,” the researchers note, “as the U.K. is on the whole more skewed towards white-collar jobs with a higher propensity to be worked from home.”
London, Sydney and Toronto — the most populous cities in the U.K., Australia and Canada, respectively — have seen some of the biggest increases in remote work, the report found.
Here are the 10 cities where the share of remote jobs has increased the most:
- Washington, D.C. (U.S.)
- San Francisco (U.S.)
- London (U.K.)
- Glasgow (U.K.)
- Chicago (U.S.)
- Atlanta (U.S.)
- Phoenix (U.S.)
- New York (U.S.)
- Sydney (Australia)
- Toronto (Canada)
Working from home is significantly more common in big cities than it is in suburbs and rural towns because dense cities tend to have higher numbers of “knowledge workers” whose jobs enable them to work from anywhere with an internet connection, past research has shown.
In 2022, for example, “one in four new job postings in Washington, D.C. advertised remote work arrangements, compared to one in fourteen in Perth, Australia,” the report notes.
While the share of new remote job vacancies saw a sharp rise across all five countries at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, the countries with the most severe initial Covid-19 outbreaks had the biggest uptick: the U.S., the U.K. and Canada.
In all countries, however, remote work’s popularity has continued “long after the forcing event of the pandemic subsided,” the authors write. Beyond pandemic severity, infrastructure (internet access, public transportation) and the prevalence of remote-capable jobs and industries in each city are all important determinants of remote work adoption, the report found.
The number of available remote jobs also fluctuates across regions: In the U.S., for example, remote jobs have become less common in southern cities like Savannah and Miami Beach, compared to northeast and western cities like San Francisco, Boston and Colorado.
Cities in southern states tend to be the least remote-friendly because they have a higher proportion of employers requiring on-site work including warehousing and distribution jobs, the Los Angeles Times reports, and fewer white-collar jobs available.
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