Every night Covesight reads more than 52,000 job postings straight from 685 company hiring systems and keeps the 13,409 that call themselves remote. It reads each one to the end and records what the posting requires (a country, a region, a time zone or a language) and whether it states a salary. This page sums up the results and updates every night. In short, about one remote listing in 46 says in writing that the company hires worldwide.
The three states of a remote listing
Each remote listing ends the nightly check in exactly one of three states. The split in the latest check, on 24 September 2026:
| State | Listings | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Locked to a place, time zone or language | 11,719 | 87.4% |
| No lock found, worldwide not confirmed | 1,399 | 10.4% |
| Confirmed open worldwide | 291 | 2.2% |
So 87.4% of listings that say remote carry at least one lock. Only the bottom row is a promise. A listing enters it when the posting says the company hires from anywhere. Most job boards count the middle row as open. Covesight keeps it separate, because a posting that says nothing about location has not told you anything yet. The open-worldwide board lists the bottom row and nothing else.
What kind of lock
A listing can be limited by place, language or time zone, and some are limited in more than one way, so the rows below overlap. Place is by far the most common. Shares are of all 13,409 remote listings:
| Kind of lock | Listings | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Country or region named | 11,616 | 86.6% |
| Language required | 661 | 4.9% |
| Time zone required | 158 | 1.2% |
| More than one kind | 705 | 5.3% |
Most listings limited to a place name a country rather than a region. Of those listings, 10,672 name a country and 944 name only a region such as EMEA or APAC, so region labels make up 8.1% of them. The glossary of remote location labels explains what each region label usually covers.
Where the locks point
These are the places named most often in the latest scan. A listing that names two places counts once for each, so the column does not add up to the locked total. Share is of all remote listings.
| Place named in the posting | Listings | Share of remote listings |
|---|---|---|
| USA | 7,137 | 53.2% |
| Canada | 698 | 5.2% |
| United Kingdom | 581 | 4.3% |
| EMEA | 363 | 2.7% |
| India | 298 | 2.2% |
| Americas | 293 | 2.2% |
| Germany | 277 | 2.1% |
| Europe | 244 | 1.8% |
| APAC | 233 | 1.7% |
| Spain | 206 | 1.5% |
7,137 listings, 53.2% of everything tagged remote, name the USA. For a reader outside the US, that means more than half of the results of a remote search are really US jobs, and the remote tag will not tell you which ones. Each place in the table links to its page, which lists the jobs open to someone living there, for example the EMEA page or the APAC page.
Language and time-zone locks
661 listings (4.9%) require a language other than English. The most requested in the latest scan:
- Spanish: 125 listings
- German: 90 listings
- French: 74 listings
- Mandarin: 58 listings
- Russian: 50 listings
- Japanese: 37 listings
A language requirement usually signals a customer-facing role for a specific market, so it often comes with a country requirement. 158 listings (1.2%) state an overlap window or a named time zone. There are few of them, but they are the requirement most likely to get past a location filter, because the location field often says only "Remote".
How often a salary is stated
1,252 of 13,409 remote listings (9.3%) state a salary figure or range. The rate differs by state:
| State | Listings stating salary | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Locked | 1,019 of 11,719 | 8.7% |
| No lock found | 225 of 1,399 | 16.1% |
| Confirmed open worldwide | 8 of 291 | 2.7% |
One possible reason is that a company hiring in one country can publish one pay band, and some places require it to. A company that hires anywhere often sets pay by location or by contract, and is less likely to put a single number in the posting. This is our reading. The data does not prove it.
By role
There is no job category field in the postings, so roles are grouped by keywords in the title (the same grouping the role pages use). A title can match more than one group, and 4,288 listings match none, so the rows overlap and do not sum to the total. Groups with fewer than ten listings are left out.
| Role group | Listings | Locked | Open worldwide | States salary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Engineering | 4,636 | 88.1% | 3.8% | 9.3% |
| Sales | 1,899 | 91.4% | 1.3% | 9.7% |
| Operations | 703 | 88.8% | 2.4% | 9.4% |
| Data | 615 | 88.1% | 1.5% | 10.6% |
| Product | 593 | 88.9% | 1% | 13.5% |
| Marketing | 580 | 89% | 1% | 12.8% |
| Customer Support | 432 | 91.2% | 1.6% | 10.6% |
| Design | 339 | 85.8% | 0.3% | 16.2% |
| Finance | 299 | 89.6% | 0.7% | 12.4% |
| Content & Writing | 56 | 73.2% | 7.1% | 14.3% |
In the latest scan the group with the highest open-worldwide share was Content & Writing at 7.1% of 56 listings, and the lowest was Design at 0.3% of 339. Small groups move a lot from night to night, so treat the smaller rows as a rough guide. In every role group, more than half of the listings are locked.
What this means for a remote job search
If you live outside the US, the numbers suggest three habits. First, read every posting to the end before you judge it. The requirement is usually in the text, not in the location field. Second, treat a region label as a question rather than an answer, and ask which countries it covers. Third, answer a listing in the middle state with a short email, not a full application. There are 1,399 of them. One line asking whether the company can hire in your country saves you an evening if the answer is no.
The faster route is to start from the listings that already answer the question. Every country with enough listings has its own page, such as remote jobs available from Germany, and the country guides for the Philippines, Germany and Brazil cover contracts and pay for three countries in detail.
Method
The full method is on the methodology page. In short:
- Source. Postings are read from company hiring systems (685 tracked in the latest scan) and a set of job board feeds. Anything that disappears from its source leaves the data the same night.
- Population. A listing is counted when the posting claims remote work. The latest scan read 52,442 postings and kept the 13,409 that claim remote work.
- Locks. The title, location field and full description are checked for a named country or region, a time-zone requirement and a required language. Any one of those makes the listing locked.
- Open worldwide. A listing is confirmed open only when it has no lock and the posting states worldwide or anywhere hiring. Silence is recorded as "no lock found", never as open.
- Salary. Stated means the posting gives a figure or range.
- Limits. Detection reads text, so a requirement that appears only in an application form, or is never written down, is invisible to it. Role groups are keyword matches on titles, which is conservative and misses unusual titles.
Cite this
Covesight, "How many remote jobs are really open worldwide?", nightly scan of 24 September 2026, https://covesight.com/blog/remote-jobs-open-worldwide-study/
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