# Remote, but not from here

> The job market is brutal, but have you noticed how few remote jobs you can actually apply for? Most of them have a catch: you must live in a certain country. Why is that?

_Published October 1, 2026 · https://marcioflorindo.com/remote-but-not-from-here.html_

What can I say about the job market that hasn't been said before? Not sure, really. I can only describe my experience.

It's brutal out there. I've been looking for five months. Most companies don't reply, and the ones that do send a version of "we decided to go with someone else" that says nothing about why. I've [written about those emails before](too-efficient-to-keep.html), and about [not letting the numbers decide what I'm worth](measuring-my-search-not-defining-myself-by-it.html). This post is about something else, the thing I run into before I even get to apply.

You find a role that fits. It says *Remote* right at the top. You read the description, you start planning the cover letter in your head, and then near the bottom there it is: *must be located in the United States*. Or Germany, or the UK. Remote, but not from here.

I live in Portugal. I don't necessarily want a fully remote job, to be clear. I aimed at remote roles because I thought they'd improve my odds: the Portuguese market is small, and there's very little in my field.

After enough of those ads I started to wonder whether I was imagining a pattern, and whether it was the companies' choice or something bigger. So I decided to check.

## Remote has a postcode

I sampled 600 companies' public job boards on Ashby, a recruiting platform a lot of tech startups use. Three hundred of them had at least one fully remote role open. Only 46 had a single remote role I could apply for from Portugal, meaning it was open to Europe, to EMEA, to anywhere, or it named Portugal outright. Counting every company equally, about two thirds of their remote roles were tied to one country. Another fifth just said "Remote", usually next to an American address.

Himalayas, a job board built entirely around remote work, looks no different. Of its 3,000 most recent listings on the morning I checked, 95% were limited to one country, and more than half to the United States alone. Seventy were open to someone living in Portugal.

Even "Anywhere in the World" doesn't always mean that. On We Work Remotely, 83 of the 89 ads in the feed that morning carried the label. At least seven of them said, further down, that you had to live in the US or be authorised to work there.

None of this is official. I couldn't find a statistics agency that measures how many "remote" jobs are tied to a single country, in Europe or anywhere else. The impression comes from five months of reading ads; the numbers come from public job boards on a single morning, and nearly two thirds of the Ashby companies I sampled hire mainly in the US. But the one other count I found agrees: Jobgether, a remote-jobs platform, [reported](https://jobgether.com/blog/remote-job-market-2025) that about 85% of remote roles in 2025 were restricted to a specific country, and fewer than 4% were open from anywhere. It doesn't explain how it counted, though.

The few roles that are truly open get flooded. In February 2022, remote jobs were [19.4% of paid LinkedIn job posts in the US but drew 50.1% of the applications](https://www.linkedin.com/business/talent/blog/talent-acquisition/remote-jobs-attract-majority-applications-first-time). By December 2023, according to LinkedIn data [reported by Fortune](https://fortune.com/2024/01/29/remote-jobs-scarce-many-applications-labor-market-linkedin-report/), they were 10% of open roles and got 46% of the applications. Those are American figures. I couldn't find European ones, but I'd be surprised if it were gentler here.

## It's legal, just expensive

I assumed this was mostly preference. Companies like hiring people they can meet for lunch. Then I used my AI assistant to help me dig through the regulations, and the preference started to look like common sense.

Nothing stops a company in Germany from hiring me in Portugal. That's the whole point of the single market. But under EU rules, where I physically work decides [which country's social security covers me](https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/work/unemployment-and-benefits/country-coverage/index_en.htm). So a German company that hires me has to [register as an employer in Portugal](https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/hiring-managing-staff/social-security-health/registering-employer/index_en.htm), follow Portuguese labour law, and [pay into Portuguese social security](https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/hiring-managing-staff/social-security-health/paying-contributions/index_en.htm) "even if your business is not based there", as the EU's own guide for employers puts it. For one person.

None of that is forbidden. But it is paperwork and risk, and most of it lands with the first hire in a new country, not the fiftieth.

There is a workaround. An employer of record hires you on the company's behalf and handles the local side. List prices are $599 per employee per month at [Deel](https://www.deel.com/pricing) and $699 at [Remote](https://remote.com/pricing) and [Oyster](https://www.oysterhr.com/pricing). That's more than seven thousand dollars a year before the company has paid me a cent of salary.

I've seen where that cost ends up. A recruiter recently wrote to me that "the salary range budgeted for this position is up to [a figure I'll keep to myself] gross per year, depending on experience **and the associated employment costs in your country of residence**" (emphasis mine). So the number in the email wasn't really my salary. It was their budget for me, and part of it would go on what it cost them to employ someone in Portugal.

Even companies built on remote work draw the line here. GitLab is one of the best-known all-remote companies, and its own handbook says it "[hires in countries where we have an entity that does not carry any hiring restrictions](https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/employment-solutions/)", to "reduce operational complexity". Where it has neither its own entity nor a local employment partner, it isn't hiring. If GitLab won't take on that paperwork country by country, I can't really blame a fifty-person startup for posting "Remote (US)".

What I can rule out is time zones. Portugal is one hour behind most of the EU. That's not why a company in Amsterdam won't hire me.

## The single market stops at payroll

I can hear how this sounds: a job seeker (me) blaming Brussels. Maybe it is a bit of that. Because it is frustrating. Selling across the EU isn't frictionless either, but for tax at least there's a shortcut: a business selling to consumers in other member states can "[register once, file one VAT return, and make one payment](https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/finance-and-tax/vat/one-stop-shop/index_en.htm)" in the country of its choice. There's nothing like that for hiring. Employ one person in another country and you're joining that country's system.

Brussels knows. The Commission's [Single Market Strategy](https://single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu/document/download/d92c78d0-7d47-4a16-b53f-1cead54bcb49_en?filename=Communication+-+Single+Market+Strategy.pdf) of May 2025 calls the procedures for proving your social security cover when you work in another country "time consuming and administratively burdensome", and promises to "explore EU legislation to address barriers to the mobility of workers". *Explore*. Even its proposal for a single EU-wide company form, [EU Inc](https://ec.europa.eu/transparency/documents-register/api/files/COM(2026)321_0/090166e52ad48519?rendition=false), says in black and white that it "does not affect Union or national employment law".

So almost nobody works for an employer across a border this way. One estimate, [cited by Indeed's economists](https://hiringlab.indeed.com/uk/blog/2025/11/06/how-europe-freedom-of-movement-fuels-cross-border-work/), puts the share of the Single Market workforce teleworking in another country in 2020 at 0.37%.

I'm not a lawyer, and I won't pretend to know what the fix looks like. But if the EU wants a single market for talent, hiring one person in another member state could at least get what selling to them already has: one registration at home, instead of one in every country. Right now there's nothing like it.

## It's not me. Some days I believe that

After five months, you start questioning yourself and your abilities. Am I aiming at the wrong roles? Is my CV wrong? Should I rephrase it or shuffle my achievements in a different way, depending on the job ad? Am I just not good enough?

The research didn't answer those questions, but it changed how I read them. The pool of remote jobs I can actually apply for from Portugal is a small fraction of the remote jobs I see. Those few roles attract a crowd from every country where they're open. And the reason the pool is small has more to do with payroll and social security than with anything on my CV.

It's a numbers game, and so far I haven't won. Maybe it's close, maybe it's not. I just can't let it make me feel like less. That's what I keep telling myself, some days more successfully than others.