These numbers come from the corpus behind Actually Remote, a board that lists only remote roles with no country restriction. We have an interest in you finding them useful — which is also why every figure here is checkable against the live report, and why the ways it could be wrong are set out below.
A remote role restricted to a single country states a salary 5.5 times as often as one open worldwide.
That is not a small effect, and the first suspicion was that it measured something about the data collection rather than about the job market. It does not. Here is the table, as of 18 October 2026:
| How open the role is | Roles | State pay | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| One country only | 4,284 | 1,153 | 26.9% |
| A region, such as EMEA or North America | 851 | 64 | 7.5% |
| Worldwide — no country restriction stated | 1,460 | 72 | 4.9% |
A clean gradient. Narrow the role to one country and disclosure is common. Widen it to a region and it drops by more than half. Remove the restriction entirely and it nearly disappears.
The cause is a law, not a culture
Over the last few years a series of jurisdictions started requiring employers to publish a pay range in the advertisement itself. Colorado went first; California, Washington and New York followed; the EU's pay transparency directive points the same way.
Every one of those rules binds employers hiring into that place.
That detail decides the whole thing. A posting that says "remote, United States" is hiring into a jurisdiction, and inherits that jurisdiction's disclosure rule. A posting open to anyone anywhere is hiring into no particular jurisdiction at all, so no disclosure rule attaches to it. The employer is not refusing to tell you — nobody is making them tell you.
If that explanation is right, then country-restricted roles should themselves split by country, with the most heavily regulated market on top. They do:
| Country-restricted roles | Roles | State pay | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Restricted to the United States | 2,544 | 825 | 32.4% |
| Restricted to any other single country | 1,740 | 328 | 18.9% |
American postings disclose more often than postings tied to any other single country, and both disclose far more often than postings tied to nowhere in particular. The ordering follows regulatory pressure rather than anything about the work itself.
There is a second reason, and it is an honest one
Law explains most of the gap but not all of it, and the rest is not cynicism.
A genuinely worldwide role has a real problem to solve: one number cannot describe the same job in Zurich and in Manila. An employer hiring across the entire world either pays a single global rate — generous in one place, insulting in another — or pays a local rate, which cannot be printed as one range in an advertisement. Neither option fits in a salary field.
So some of the silence is evasion and some of it is arithmetic. The practical consequence for you is identical either way.
What to do about it
Do not read silence as a bad sign. On worldwide roles it is the norm. Most of the roles on the board state no pay, and most of them are ordinary jobs at ordinary companies. If you filter out everything that does not advertise a number, you will remove 95% of the roles that are actually open to you.
Ask in the first exchange. Where no law forces a range into the advertisement, nothing forces one into the process either. Candidates who wait are the ones who find out at the offer.
Ask what the number is anchored to. "Is this a single global rate, or adjusted to where I live?" is the question that actually determines what you get paid, and it is answerable in one sentence. Ask it before you have spent four interviews finding out.
Use the restricted roles as a reference. A comparable role restricted to the United States usually does state a range. That range is a reasonable upper anchor for the same work sold worldwide — not what you will be offered, but a number you can hold in your head while someone tells you the budget is tight.
How this was measured, and how it could be wrong
Every open remote posting in the corpus is classified two ways: by how open it really is, and by whether the employer published a pay range as structured data. Pay is counted only where the employer stated it as data. Nothing is inferred from the wording of a description, and no range is estimated from a job title or a seniority level.
Eligibility is read the same way — from what the posting states, never inferred. A posting whose location reads just "Remote" is filed as unspecified, not worldwide, because most of them turn out to be country-gated once you read the body. A stated timezone band counts as a geographic restriction even when the same posting uses the word "anywhere".
The obvious way for a finding like this to be an artefact: different channels carry pay data in different ways. If the worldwide roles and the country-locked roles arrived through different sources, the gap would be measuring the pipeline rather than the labour market. It is a real risk — in this corpus the mix genuinely differs by source. So the same comparison was run inside each channel separately before publishing. The direction holds independently in each one: the broader the eligibility, the rarer the disclosure.
What cannot be ruled out is the selection in the corpus itself. It covers the boards and company feeds the pipeline ingests, which skews toward software and toward companies that publish machine-readable postings at all. The mechanism should generalise, because the mechanism is statute, but a market the corpus does not cover has not been measured.
The live version of this report, which reads the current board rather than the snapshot above, is at actuallyremote.work/insights/pay-transparency. The roles themselves — the 1,460 with no country restriction stated — are on the board.
If you have negotiated a worldwide role, we would like to know which way the anchoring question went. That is the one part of this a corpus cannot supply and a comment can.
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