MakeMyMove: at least 71 US cities and towns now offer cash grants and other perks to attract remote workers, mostly in tech, up from at least 24 in October 2021
Christopher Mims / Wall Street Journal :
Context & Ripple Effects
Municipal relocation incentives have gone from experiment to industry: Vermont's $10K program in 2018 was the outlier paying remote workers to move, and by October 2021 at least 24 US cities and towns had followed. The count has since nearly tripled to 71, with MakeMyMove tracking the programs.
The demand side was set years earlier, when tech giants' work-from-home guidelines pushed employees to consider leaving Silicon Valley and companies weighed salary adjustments for leavers. Brookings' finding that 36 non-coastal cities posted stronger tech job growth than before the pandemic shows the dispersal is real, not just talk.
First-order effects
- Remote-capable tech workers now hold a bidding position most never had: 71 towns are effectively paying signing bonuses to relocate, converting a personal lifestyle choice into a subsidized one.
- Small-city governments shift budget toward talent acquisition — cash grants, perks, and intermediary platforms like MakeMyMove — treating inbound remote workers as an economic development line item.
Second-order effects
- Coastal hubs face erosion of their captive-talent advantage just as startups lean harder on remote hiring to compete for staff, weakening the geographic premium that justified Bay Area salary scales.
- Employers with distributed staff inherit the tax-and-compliance questions flagged in earlier coverage — who pays which state's taxes, whether salaries track location — pushing companies toward location-based pay policies or formal remote-work entities.
Third-order effects
- If the 24-to-71 trajectory holds, inter-municipal competition for remote workers becomes a standing feature of local economic policy, with incentive packages standardizing much like corporate relocation benefits did.
- Tech employment geography could structurally rebalance away from the coastal concentration Brookings documented, though the durability depends on whether post-pandemic remote norms survive any return-to-office push — the open question this data cannot answer.
The trend: US municipalities are turning remote-work mobility into a competitive market for tech talent, scaling cash relocation incentives from niche experiment to mainstream economic development tool.