Vermont will pay up to $10K over 2 years to those who move there to work remotely for an out-of-state employer, to cover relocation and work-related expenses
here's how to do it Tweets: Christopher Mims / @mims : Every depopulated state or city should do this. We subsidize corporate relocations all the time. It's insane we don't do the same for remote workers and solopreneurs.http://work.qz.com/ ... Ryan Hurst / @rmhrisk : It would seem Vermont also has unreliable and slow internet to go with their poor cellular coverage. Fixing that would be the first thing I would do if I wanted to encourage remote work from out of state employers. http://twitter.com/... Adam Khan / @khanoisseur : Vermont is also one of the healthiest states in the US; California doesn't rank in the top 10; in fact, 8 out of 10 most polluted cities in the country are in California; San Francisco is No.6 on that list http://amp.usatoday.com/... http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Vermont's $10,000 relocation grant was an early bet that states could recruit individual remote workers rather than court whole companies — a reversal of the corporate-subsidy playbook commentators like Christopher Mims argued had it backwards. The idea looked niche in 2018, but the related coverage shows it scaling fast: by mid-2022, at least 71 US cities and towns were offering cash grants to attract remote workers, up from 24 just nine months earlier.
Employer behavior moved in parallel. Facebook said it would adjust pay by employee location as staff dispersed from Silicon Valley (Zuckerberg's location-based compensation policy), and Stripe offered $20,000 one-time payments to leave San Francisco, NYC, or Seattle while cutting base salaries up to 10% (Stripe's relocation payment plan) — meaning the money chasing mobile remote workers now flows from both towns and employers.
First-order effects
- Remote employees who move to Vermont can claim up to $10,000 across two years for relocation and work-related expenses, directly lowering their cost of relocating to a low-density state.
- Vermont gains a recruiting tool aimed at out-of-state employers' payroll, without offering those employers any tax break or subsidy.
Second-order effects
- Other depopulated cities and towns copied the model — the count of places offering cash grants tripled between October 2021 and July 2022 per MakeMyMove data, turning relocation bonuses into a competitive bidding market among small municipalities.
- Location-based pay policies at Facebook and Stripe mean part of any state grant is effectively offset by salary cuts for movers, pushing workers to weigh the town's bonus against the employer's geographic discount.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, economic development shifts from subsidizing corporate relocations to bidding for individual taxpayers, with small towns competing on grants, broadband quality, and cost of living — Ryan Hurst's critique of Vermont's connectivity points to infrastructure becoming the real differentiator once cash offers converge.
- A split-incentive structure emerges: towns pay to attract workers whose employers simultaneously pay them to move or discount their pay for doing so, raising questions about who ultimately captures the value of geographic arbitrage.
The trend: State and local governments are shifting from courting corporate relocations to directly bidding for individual remote workers with cash grants, a market that grew from Vermont-style pilots to dozens of competing programs.