Remote share is the most quoted statistic in job posting data and the most misread. It measures a specific, narrow thing: the proportion of advertised roles that describe themselves as remote.
Three things it is not
- Not the share of people working remotely. Existing staff are invisible to posting data. A company can be fully remote internally and advertise everything as hybrid.
- Not a measure of flexibility. "Hybrid" covers one day a week and four. The word is doing a lot of work.
- Not comparable across sources. Some providers infer remote from the description; others use a structured field. Inference finds more and is wrong more often.
What it is good for
Direction, within one source, over time. If the advertised remote share for a role falls from 40% to 25% over a year in the same index, employers have changed what they are willing to commit to in writing. That is a real finding even though the underlying working patterns may have moved less.
The pattern that holds everywhere
Remote share varies far more by role than by country. Roles whose output is a file — engineering, design, writing, analysis — are advertised remote at multiples of the rate for roles that touch people, inventory or equipment. National differences are mostly a composition effect: countries with more of the first kind show higher headline remote shares.
Which means a national remote-share comparison is usually an industry-mix comparison wearing a disguise. Compare within a role.
The salary question
Remote roles sometimes advertise lower ranges than on-site equivalents in the same city, and sometimes higher. Both happen, and the direction depends on whether the employer is anchoring to their own market or competing in a national one. Anyone quoting a single "remote pay penalty" figure has averaged over two opposite behaviours.