The rise of long-distance work has touched every sector of the economy. But while some employers and industries have embraced distance work, others haven’t — or can’t.

We studied a sizeable ADP sample of workers at large employers with identifiable worker-manager relationships, giving us a broad, though not complete, view of how long-distance work has spread across the labor market.

As distance work was widely adopted during and after the pandemic, it became a defining feature of several sectors. By February 2026, more than 45 percent of workers employed in professional and business services or information lived in a different metro than their manager, evidence of how deeply geographic flexibility had taken hold in sectors built around knowledge work.

Finance and insurance also saw a sharp rise in its share of distance workers, from a relatively low pre-pandemic baseline of 18.9 percent to 28.6 percent at the beginning of 2026. That steep growth likely reflects the sector’s historical concentration in a few major employment hubs.

Before the pandemic, even remote hiring, which doesn’t require workers to live near their managers, often yielded employees who still were local to their managers. As workers gained more freedom to live outside traditional finance centers, long-distance arrangements spread quickly.

At the other end of the spectrum, agriculture saw almost no change, a clear reminder that some work simply can’t be done from afar.¹

To track the change in distance work, we measured the share of workers living in a different metro area than their manager — our definition of a long-distance work arrangement — at three moments in time: February 2017, the eve of the pandemic in February 2020, and February 2026.

These snapshots reveal which sectors had already embraced long-distance arrangements before the pandemic and which experienced a sharp pandemic-driven uptake.

Remote-friendly sectors drove the shift

To understand why distance work expanded more in some sectors than others, it helps to consider how well their jobs lend themselves to remote execution—and how remote work, in turn, opens the door to long-distance work.

Remote work describes where individuals do their jobs—fully off-site or a mix of on- and off-site—while long-distance work describes the geographic spread of teams. The two are distinct; colleagues can work with each other from separate offices without either being “remote,” but the pandemic-era surge in remote work almost certainly enabled the parallel rise in long-distance arrangements as workers and employers discovered that daily co-location was no longer a prerequisite for effective collaboration.

Notably, long-distance work has proven more durable than remote work itself: Even as return-to-office mandates have pulled many workers back to shared workplaces, the geographic dispersal of teams has largely held.

We examine each sector’s share of distance workers from February 2020 to February 2026 against a remotability score, a measure of how feasible it is to perform that work away from a shared location.²

The pattern is straightforward: Sectors with jobs that are amenable to remote execution saw the largest gains in long-distance work, while those tied to physical presence changed little. In other words, the nature of the work--not just the preferences of workers or employers--shaped which sectors went the distance.

A few sectors fell outside any trend, most notably educational services and arts, entertainment, and recreation. This might reflect how remote potential is measured. Work in the arts might be more remote-compatible than conventional classifications suggest, while education’s apparent flexibility during the pandemic might have overstated its true capacity for remote delivery.

Still, the overall pattern is clear: The more remote-ready a sector is, the more likely it was to shift toward long-distance arrangements.

Methodology

The sample used consists of a monthly subset of employers in ADP data with at least 100 U.S. employees and for whom information is available on their internal reporting structure. Within those organizations, the sample was confined to members of credibly sized teams, implemented as having no more than 10 employees reporting to the same manager, and to workers whose employment and team membership (i.e. manager) were observed and consistent for at least two months before and two months after the observed period. If an employee and their direct manager lived in different metropolitan areas, we defined the employee as a long-distance worker.

Although the number varied over time, from January 2017 to February 2026, on average there were approximately 1.9 million employees that meet these criteria each month, employed by an average of almost 32,000 organizations each month. The sample was weighted using Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) employment totals in each state and sector pair to better represent the U.S. working population. The share of long-distance work is calculated as the ratio of long-distance workers to the total sample characterized above, which already omits any individuals for whom long-distance work status is unobserved, thanks to observing team membership.

Metropolitan areas used to determine long-distance work status refer to Consolidated 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 living on the opposite side of the line between the San Francisco and San Jose metro areas from then Jose metro areas from their manager as being a long-distance worker).