How many jobs are actually remote? Two per cent in India.
Short answer: Of 73,429 live roles open to India, 1,771 are marked remote. That is 2%. In the United States it is 6%, or 15,870 roles out of 252,693. Remote work is a real option and a small one.
The numbers
| Live roles | Marked remote | Share | |
|---|---|---|---|
| India | 73,429 | 1,771 | 2% |
| United States | 252,693 | 15,870 | 6% |
These are roles an employer has flagged as remote on its own board, or whose stated location says so. We are not inferring it from the job title or from a line in the advert about flexibility.
Why the number feels wrong
Ask anyone in software and they will tell you remote hiring is everywhere. The feeling is real, and it comes from a sampling problem rather than from the market.
Remote roles are shared. A remote posting gets forwarded, screenshotted, put in newsletters and posted to communities, because it is useful to someone two thousand kilometres away. A Bengaluru-only role is useful to a much smaller group and travels accordingly. By the time a job reaches you through a feed, it has been filtered for how shareable it was, not for how common it is.
Our index does not filter that way. It reads every posting on a board whether it is interesting or not, which is dull and which is the point.
Where the Indian remote roles are
There is a second reason the Indian figure is low. A large share of Indian hiring runs through services firms and captive centres whose work is tied to a delivery location, a client site, or a shift that overlaps a particular timezone. Those roles are not going remote because the contract underneath them is not.
The 2% that is remote skews heavily towards product companies and towards engineering rather than operations.
Read the figure as a floor, not a ceiling
We would rather undercount this than overcount it. Some employers run hybrid arrangements that never appear on the posting. Some write "remote" in the body of the advert and leave the structured location field pointing at a head office, and when the board gives us a city we believe the board. A role that is quietly remote but publicly listed in Pune counts here as Pune.
So the true share is somewhat higher than 2%. It is not 30%.
What to do with it
If you are searching for remote work in India, the honest advice is to stop filtering for it first. Filter for the role and the experience band, then look at which of the results happen to be remote. Leading with the remote filter in a 2% market leaves you looking at a few hundred roles and concluding that nobody is hiring.
In the United States, leading with remote is more defensible at 6%, which is still fewer roles than most people expect.
Method
A role counts as remote where the employer's board marks it so, or where the location it publishes says remote. We do not read the advert text for the word and promote the role on that basis, because adverts say "remote-friendly" about jobs that require four days in an office.
Counted on 5 October 2026. Each posting was last re-read from its board on or before 29 September 2026.
Common questions
What percentage of jobs in India are remote?
About 2%. Of 73,429 live roles open to India, 1,771 are marked remote by the employer. Treat it as a floor: quietly remote roles listed against an office address are counted as office roles.
Is remote hiring higher in the United States?
Yes, roughly three times higher as a share. 6% of live American roles are marked remote, against 2% of Indian ones.
Why do remote jobs seem more common than this?
Because remote postings are shared far more than local ones. What reaches you through a feed has been selected for shareability. An index that reads every posting on a board sees the unshared majority too.