When remote and long-distance work began to spread during the Covid-19 pandemic, it was easy to assume that the geography of employment was changing because people were moving. Migration certainly surged, and some U.S. metro areas saw unusually large numbers of people arriving and leaving.

But that assumption wasn’t quite right. Even at the height of the pandemic, the expansion of long-distance work — arrangements in which employees and their managers work in different metropolitan areas — owed far more to changing employer practices than to where incumbent employees chose to live. Cross-metro hiring and reassignments proliferated, creating far more long-distance work relationships than employee relocations did, ADP data shows.

Distance work had already been climbing before 2020, but it took a giant leap that year, when long-distance employees accounted for nearly 30 percent of the sample. By December 2025, that share had reached 32.3 percent.¹

It might seem counterintuitive that distance work continues to expand even as pandemic-era migration has ended and more employers are ordering people back to offices and work sites. Yet it does. We found some reasons why.

The rise — and persistence — of distance work

Remote work describes where individuals do their jobs, be it off-site or a hybrid of on an off-site work. Long-distance work describes the geographic spread of teams.

The concepts overlap but are distinct. Long-distance colleagues can work together from their desks at separate locations. Conversely, a fully remote worker whose manager lives down the street isn’t doing long-distance work.

The pandemic-era surge in remote work almost certainly enabled the parallel rise in long-distance arrangements. As people and employers discovered that daily co-location was no longer a prerequisite for effective collaboration, the geographic boundaries of team-building began to dissolve. Notably, long-distance work has proven more durable than remote work itself.

In the three years leading up to the pandemic, the share of workers living in a different metro than their manager edged up from 21.5 percent to 22.5 percent. The growth was gradual, suggesting a quiet but persistent loosening of physical workplace ties.

The pandemic disrupted that pattern. In late 2020, the share of long-distance workers began to surge, reaching nearly 30 percent by the end of 2022, well above anything the pre-pandemic trend would have predicted.²

Since then, the pace of growth has slowed. The share of long-distance workers has continued to expand by about one percentage point every 16.4 months. That’s slower growth than during the pandemic surge, when the same gain took just 4.5 months, but it’s nearly twice as fast as the pre-pandemic pace of one point every 33 months.³

In other words, the growth of distance work has settled into a new, faster trajectory. The geography of work didn’t just adjust temporarily during the pandemic. It reset completely.

What’s driving this change, and why does it continue even as offices refill?

Org charts and moving vans

The answer lies in how distance jobs are created.

The geography of work can change even when people stay put. When workers and employers no longer see distance as an obstacle, teams can be configured across far-flung offices and regions through staffing decisions alone, redrawing the map of collaboration without anyone changing their home address.

ADP data allows us to measure this activity directly. To track what gives rise to distance roles, we sorted the sources of change into four categories: new hires, manager reassignments, worker relocations, and manager relocations.

New hires accounted for the creation of roughly 7 in 10 distance roles. Manager reassignments explained most of the rest. Physical relocations by incumbent employees – people in those moving vans – barely registered.

Even when migration was surging at the height of the pandemic, the geography of reporting relationships changed mainly as people and employers connected across metro lines and organizations reassigned workers to distant teams or managers to meet operational needs.⁴

Hiring and reassignments

Let’s look at the two activities that gave rise to distance work: new hiring and internal reorganization.

The share of new hires placed directly into distance roles was growing before 2020, but that growth accelerated during the pandemic and has remained elevated since.

In mid-2025, the pace of distance hiring began to pick up again, suggesting that the practice is more than a pandemic artifact. Employers have come to view it as a viable, routine practice rather than a temporary adaptation.

But the rise in long-distance hiring was only the beginning. Long-distance work also became more commonplace among the ranks of incumbent employees.

Among people hired before the pandemic’s onset in 2020, the share of long-distance reports grew during the pandemic and continued to grow after it ended, a change that reflected internal reorganization.

In short, distance work grew through two reinforcing channels: new hires taking jobs at a distance from their managers, and incumbent employees finding themselves reporting to managers at a distance as their teams were reorganized.

The takeaway

The geography of work can shift even when the workforce stays put. New hires, reassignments, and separations across metros can reshape the spatial pattern of employment without anyone changing their home address. Our data points to four key takeaways.

Hiring, not moving, drove long-distance work. When people changed their work arrangements during the pandemic, they did it mostly by switching jobs, not by convincing their current employer to let them work from afar. 

Distance hiring is self-reinforcing. Once employers established processes, norms, and tools to make cross-metro teams operationally neutral, they kept using them. Each successful distance hire or assignment made the next one feel less risky. What started as an exception became a norm. Once embedded, distance work becomes difficult and increasingly unnecessary to reverse. 
 
Return-to-office mandates and distance work aren’t mutually exclusive. Requiring employees to show up in person doesn’t necessarily put managers and teammates back in the same room. Whether people work from home or on site, distance reporting lines remain intact. And once cross-metro links are in place, they’re likely difficult to roll back. They could anchor supervision, project flow, and team composition in ways that make co-location redundant or costly and disruptive to restore.

An important micro-macro link. As legions of job candidates and hiring managers collectively paired up across metro lines, they quietly stitched distant metro economies together through corporate reporting lines rather than commuting patterns. What began as a pandemic-era adaptation has become a new connective tissue of the U.S. economy, one capable of spreading opportunity and interdependence across space even as people stay put. 
 
The pandemic changed where many people worked. But changes in how people match to jobs and how teams come together have reshaped how work is organized, and that shift has proven more durable. Distance work structures are built through everyday actions such as job changes, hiring decisions, and managerial reorganizations. As such, they’ve outlasted the boom in remote work.

Coming July 16: Which industries went the distance?

Methodology 
 
Our analysis draws on an ADP sample of employers with at least 10 U.S.-based workers on payroll each month for which we had visibility into internal managerial structures. Within that group, the sample was confined to individuals on credibly sized teams, which we defined as having no more than 10 people reporting to a single manager.

Our results reflect this sample rather than the full U.S. workforce. While the sample does change gradually over time, in our assessment that drift is unlikely to be driving results.

A worker is classified as long-distance if they and their direct manager live in different metropolitan areas. Although the number varies over time, from January 2017 to December 2025, our total worker sample averaged approximately 1.9 million people at almost 32,000 employers each month.

Metropolitan areas refer to Census Bureau Combined Statistical Areas where applicable, and Core-Based Statistical Areas elsewhere. Using the broadest available definitions minimizes situations in which workers separated only by an administrative boundary within a larger metro are considered cross-metro. For example, we do not consider a worker and a manager living on opposite sides of the San Francisco-San Jose metro boundary to be participants in long-distance work. 
 
An individual is classified as a new hire in the month they receive their first paycheck from a given employer in their current employment spell. A worker exit occurs in the last month in which a paycheck from that employer is observed. Changes in long-distance status attributed to relocation correspond to moves across metropolitan areas. It’s possible that employer records fail to record an employee’s change of address, which would cause us to underestimate the role of relocation. However, moves across state lines are almost certain to be recorded in a timely manner, given administrative implications such as tax and regulatory requirements. Because the vast majority of cross-metropolitan relocations also cross state lines, any underestimate of the share of relocation-driven changes in long-distance status is likely to be small.