Data
Two in three "remote" tech jobs in Europe actually require you to work from one country
We read 2,249 EU tech postings tagged remote, in full. Two in three only take people living in one country; just 15% let you work from anywhere. Here's how to check before you apply.
Published 2026-10-03
A job board's "Remote" tag tells you the role has no office desk. It doesn't tell you where you're allowed to be. That line usually sits in the posting body, often in bold, halfway down.
So we counted. We took 2249 open EU-market postings tagged remote and read each one in full.
- 66% are remote from one country only: "remote, but you must live in this one country."
- 16% limit you to a region: a list of countries, or a zone like "EMEA".
- 15% are open to candidates anywhere.
Altogether, 84% say where you must live, or require you to show up somewhere.
In the US, 79% of 5748 remote-tagged postings restrict location, and 66% are single-country. There, that almost always means US-only: no barrier if you live in the US, a wall if you don't.
What "restricted" means here
A posting counts as restricted when its body limits where you can live or work from. We split that in two:
- Single-country: exactly one country ("UK residents only").
- Region-wide: several countries, or a broad zone such as "EMEA" or "EU".
We also count the few postings that are tagged remote but require regular presence at an office.
The region-wide share is the soft part of the number. An "EU only" limit costs a Berlin resident nothing, but it rules out someone in Belgrade or London. The single-country share is the hard part: unless you already live in that one country, the role isn't yours to take.
By function
Percentages are rounded down, and only functions with at least 30 postings are shown.
| Function | EU postings | EU restricted | of which single-country | US postings | US restricted |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Product | 653 | 86% | 75% | 519 | 82% |
| Engineering | 389 | 85% | 67% | 116 | 86% |
| Sales | 386 | 89% | 63% | 2288 | 81% |
| Customer success | 146 | 82% | 52% | 1348 | 73% |
| Design | 109 | 80% | 67% | 133 | 81% |
| Marketing | 170 | 74% | 62% | 39 | 76% |
| People | 102 | 90% | 69% | 56 | 83% |
| Operations | 92 | 77% | 53% | 826 | 82% |
No function escapes the pattern. Even the "most open" EU function, marketing, restricts location in 74% of its remote postings.
The exception: postings that name no market
1501 remote postings in our set name no market in the listing itself. Those mostly mean it: 69% are genuinely open worldwide. The ones to read carefully are the remote postings that do name a place in the listing. The place is usually a hint about the rule.
What to do with this
If where you live is fixed, the remote tag is the start of the check, not the end. Search the posting body for "located in", "based in", "residents of", "eligible to work in" and "time zone" before you spend an evening on the application.
How we measured
- The set. Open postings tagged remote whose full body our pipeline has read and labelled: 2249 EU, 5748 US and 1501 with no stated market. This is a few thousand postings, not our whole index. Postings get read in full when they reach our users' shortlists, so the set leans toward the senior, tech-company roles our users look for.
- The labels. A language model reads each body and records any residency, region or presence requirement. Labels can be wrong in both directions. At this sample size, a few points either way don't change the picture.
- Rounding and cutoffs. Measured 2026-10-03. Percentages are rounded down. Functions with fewer than 30 postings are left out.