The democratization of long-distance work

What once was mostly a big-company edge is now a broader market norm.

Well before the onset of the pandemic, large, well-resourced employers were tapping the national and global talent pool through long-distance hiring. Since 2020, however, mid- and small-sized employers have gotten in on the act, hiring long-distance workers at a rapid pace.

It’s a shift that marks the beginning of a broader democratization: The practice of long-distance work, once available to mostly just the largest companies, has become an important strategy for employers of all sizes, unlocking opportunities that cannot be ignored.

We define long-distance work as an arrangement in which an employee lives in a different metropolitan area than their manager. It’s closely related to remote work but also distinct, and it has implications for the geography of work and worker compensation.

At the local and regional levels, remote and hybrid jobs within the same metro area have allowed people to live farther from job centers and have given employers access to moderately larger talent pools. These shifts can be transformative for work-life balance, access to housing, and daily logistics.

Still, the effects of telecommuting and flexible work within a region are limited. Workers might halve their housing costs and employers might double their hiring radius, but the scale of change remains bounded to what is available in the metro area.

Long-distance work completely alters the scale. It unlocks exponentially greater possibilities on a national or even a global scale. For workers, it provides access to jobs across the country and beyond; for employers, access to talent unconstrained by distance. It accommodates individual priorities that local work flexibility often can’t, such as the desire to live near family or remain rooted in one’s existing community, but not one’s local job market.

Long-distance work doesn’t just expand opportunity, however, it also intensifies competition. Job-seekers must contend with applicants in distant states and countries, and organizations risk losing candidates to employers in higher-paying metros.

In this landscape, employer size becomes especially relevant. Small, mid-sized, and large companies offer distinct cultures, organizational structures, and experiences.

For someone who wants to be part of a tightly knit team, local or not, smaller employers newly hiring across geographies can be a game changer. And for employers, long-distance work makes it even more important to understand the new competition for talent.

Big employers, bigger shares of long-distance work

Before the pandemic, the large companies represented in anonymized, aggregated ADP payroll data had a head start in long-distance work. By early 2020, companies with 1,000 or more employees had nearly a quarter of their workforce living in a different metro than their manager. In contrast, companies with 10 to 100 employees were closer to a 15 percent share.

This pattern persisted after 2020, when companies of all sizes saw rapid growth in their share of long-distance personnel. The largest employers continued to lead in absolute share, and by 2024 about a third of their employees were in long-distance arrangements, compared with about 1 in 5 at the smallest organizations.

The structural advantages of large employers—their robust human resource operations, multi-metro footprints, and concentrations of knowledge work—position them to support organizational models that span metro boundaries. But that’s not the whole story.

Mid-sized companies go the distance

From the onset of the pandemic in February 2020 until January 2025, employers with 251 to 500 employees saw the fastest growth in long-distance work. The share of their workers in long-distance arrangements increased by nearly 45 percent over that period. Those with 501 to 1,000 employees followed closely, with the share rising by more than 39 percent. Even companies with just 10 to 100 and 101 to 250 employees saw long-distance work grow by 34 percent and 38 percent, respectively.

The share of long-distance workers at the largest employers also increased, but not as fast as for mid-sized employers, to about 38 percent greater than their pre-pandemic level.

In short, the biggest movers weren’t the biggest companies. The normalization of remote work, especially the long-distance kind, gave mid-sized employers the tools and permission to rethink their geographic reach in ways that previously had been impractical.

Even during the co-working boom, hiring in a new metro typically required a critical mass of personnel to justify opening a satellite office. The pandemic upended that calculus. Mid-sized employers not only accommodated pandemic-driven employee moves, they also began hiring across metro lines more deliberately to access new talent pools, expand their footprint, and compete more effectively with larger competitors. In short, they adopted strategies once reserved for the biggest players.

The surge subsides

This acceleration in long-distance hiring began to slow starting in 2023. By the end of 2024, most companies of all sizes had either reached a plateau or settled into a much slower pace of growth in their share of long-distance workers.

This shift likely reflects a natural settling after a period of extraordinary upheaval.

But it would be a mistake to call this phase a reversal. The long-distance share of employment continues to hold and, in some cases, inch higher. Although the pace of growth now resembles the long-run pre-pandemic trend, the baseline is permanently higher.

The pandemic surge of long-distance work has given way to continued but slower incremental growth. This progression is being driven by new tools, shifting expectations, and a broader acceptance of geographic separation between employees and their managers. If the earlier surge reflected disruption, today’s slower pace reflects consolidation.

The takeaway

The power to tap a national or global talent pool is no longer an exclusive privilege of large, well-resourced companies. Mid-sized companies, and to some extent smaller ones, have adopted long-distance hiring into their employment model. What began as an edge case has become more broadly accessible, structurally embedded, and strategically important across the labor market. The change has implications for both workers and employers.

For workers: Where access to distant employers once meant pursuing a small number of jobs at the satellite offices of the biggest companies, it now includes a fuller set of options at mid-sized and smaller employers, often in fully remote arrangements.

For employers: The need to tap a broad national or global talent pool is no longer the preserve of the biggest firms. Mid-sized and smaller employers now face the dual challenge of recruiting beyond their local markets and defending against increased competition for local talent, and not just from large and familiar names.

Long-distance hiring has become a standard and even necessary option across much of the labor market, and is no longer confined to large, well-resourced companies. While the pandemic accelerated the shift, its persistence reflects a structural change in the capacity and even the imperative for companies of all sizes to hire across geographic boundaries

Methodology

This article draws on an analysis that will be developed more fully in a forthcoming academic publication.

We used an ADP sample consisting of employers with at least 10 U.S.-based workers on payroll each month and with visibility into their internal managerial structure. Of that group, the sample was confined to individuals on credibly sized teams, which we defined as having no more than 10 employees reporting to the same manager.

If an employee and their direct manager lived in different metropolitan areas, we defined the employee as a long-distance worker. Although the number varies over time, from January 2017 to December 2024 there were on average approximately 3.2 million employees at almost 15,000 employers that met these criteria each month. The sample was weighted to represent the national population by state using two-digit industry weights derived from contemporaneous employment levels reported in the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and available at the time of analysis.

Metropolitan areas refer to combined statistical areas where applicable and Core-Based Statistical Areas elsewhere. By using the broadest available definitions of metropolitan areas, we minimize situations in which workers separated by arbitrary lines within broader metros are considered cross-metro. For example, we do not consider a worker and a manager living on opposite sides of San Francisco-San Jose metro line to be participants in long-distance work.