MakeMyMove: at least 71 US cities and towns are now offering cash grants and other perks to attract remote tech workers, up from 24 in October 2021
Incentives are drawing high-paid tech workers, and challenging how we think about local economic development
Context & Ripple Effects
The incentive race has a clear lineage: Vermont's $10K relocation offer in 2018 was a one-off experiment, but once pandemic-era work-from-home policies made employees genuinely mobile — and pushed employers into debates over who pays taxes and whether salaries follow workers out of high-cost cities — small municipalities saw an opening. MakeMyMove's count of at least 71 participating cities and towns, up from 24 in October 2021, shows that opening being institutionalized.
The timing matters because the geography of tech employment was already loosening: Brookings found coastal hubs still dominate, but 36 other cities posted stronger tech job growth than before the pandemic. Town-level cash grants are the demand-side complement to that supply-side shift — instead of courting an employer to open an office, a town courts the worker directly.
First-order effects
- High-paid remote tech workers can now shop their relocation across dozens of competing grant programs, converting what was Vermont's novel perk into a buyer's market for movers.
- Participating towns are spending local budgets on per-worker acquisition costs, betting each grant recoups itself through the newcomer's out-of-state income spent locally.
Second-order effects
- Employers whose staff take these deals inherit the unresolved cost questions already surfacing in coverage — tax obligations across states and whether pay should be re-cut to the worker's new location — pushing those debates from edge cases toward policy.
- Coastal hubs lose leverage at the margin: if smaller cities can subsidize the move, the retention argument shifts from amenities to compensation, pressuring big-tech employers already weighing salary adjustments for relocated staff.
Third-order effects
- Local economic development is structurally flipping from recruiting companies to recruiting individuals — a model that scales only if remote work persists, which startup hiring patterns (81% of sub-5K-employee firms offering remote vs. 26% for 25K+) suggest it will at the small-company end where most net job creation happens.
- If the 24-to-71 trajectory holds, incentive programs risk converging into a commodity arms race among towns, rewarding whichever jurisdictions pair cash with durable quality-of-life advantages rather than one-time grants alone.
The trend: Place-based economic development is pivoting from employer recruitment to direct subsidies for individual remote workers, turning municipal talent acquisition into a competitive national market.