Employee Relocation Statistics 2026
Employee relocation in 2026 sits at the intersection of rising willingness and rising cost. Almost half of workers worldwide (49%) now say they would consider relocating internationally for a job, per a 19-country Ipsos study, while the average international move runs roughly $77,000 per employee. Companies are leaning into mobility as a growth lever, but they are also rewriting the rules: 52% of multinationals now permit short "workations" and 23% allow permanent remote arrangements, according to KPMG. This report compiles 11 sourced data points from Ipsos, KPMG, ECA International, Atlas Van Lines, and IBISWorld covering who moves, what it costs, why people decline, and how remote work is reshaping the whole category.
Employee relocation used to mean one thing: pack up the household, move the family, report to a new office. That model is fracturing. The same forces that created the digital nomad also reshaped corporate mobility, blurring the line between a permanent transfer, a short-term assignment, and a remote worker who simply chose a different country to live in.
This post covers four sides of the picture. The demand side (how many workers will relocate and where they are most willing to go), the cost side (what a move actually runs and why budgets keep climbing), the friction side (why employees say no and how often assignments fail), and the transformation side (how workations and remote policies are redrawing the map). Every figure carries an inline link to its primary source.
TL;DR: 5 headline employee relocation stats for 2026
- 49% of employees worldwide would consider relocating internationally for work in 2025, up from 46% in 2017, per an Ipsos survey of 10,574 working adults across 19 countries (Ipsos, 2025).
- The average international relocation costs roughly $77,000 per employee, with household goods alone running $25,000 (NRI Relocation, 2025).
- 52% of multinationals now allow workations under 30 days and 23% permit permanent remote work, per the 2025 KPMG Global Mobility Benchmarking Report (KPMG, 2025).
- 46% of companies reported additional employees declining relocation in 2025, with family ties the top reason at 34% (Atlas Van Lines, 2026).
- The US employee relocation services industry is worth $12.2 billion in 2026, spread across 14,831 businesses (IBISWorld, 2026).
1. 49% of employees would relocate internationally for work in 2025
Almost half of working adults worldwide (49%) say they would consider relocating to another country for a job, according to a 2025 Ipsos study. That is up from 46% in 2017, a modest but consistent rise in cross-border openness.
The figure comes from a survey of 10,574 working adults across 19 nations, fielded between February and March 2025, with a global margin of error of roughly 1.1 percentage points. Ipsos is one of the largest independent market research firms in the world, which makes this a rare apples-to-apples comparison over an eight-year window.
The number matters because it reframes the talent conversation. Employers often assume relocation reluctance is universal, but the data shows close to half the global workforce is open to a move under the right conditions. The constraint is rarely willingness in the abstract. It is the package, the family situation, and the destination.
For employers, this means international roles are more fillable than headlines suggest, provided the offer addresses the practical barriers.
Source: Ipsos - Global Study on Willingness to Relocate (2025)
2. The average international relocation costs roughly $77,000 per employee
An international employee relocation costs approximately $77,000 on average, according to 2025 figures from NRI Relocation, a corporate mobility services firm with four decades in the industry.
The breakdown explains where the money goes: household goods shipment averages $25,000, temporary housing around $15,000 (roughly 60 days of furnished accommodation), employee and family travel $7,500, visa and immigration $5,000, tax services $5,000, and a miscellaneous allowance of $5,000. These are starting figures. Longer assignments with executives or large families routinely climb past $300,000 once schooling, housing allowances, and multi-year tax equalization stack up.
The cost structure reveals why companies are rethinking the traditional full-relocation model. A single move can equal an entire annual salary, and much of that spend goes toward physical logistics rather than the talent itself.
For mobility teams, the lesson is that the cheapest path to global talent increasingly avoids the household-goods line item altogether.
Source: NRI Relocation - International Relocation Costs (2025)
3. 52% of multinationals now allow workations under 30 days
Remote and flexible work has crossed into formal corporate mobility policy. The 2025 KPMG Global Mobility Benchmarking Report found that 52% of multinational enterprises now permit short "workations" of fewer than 30 days per year, while 29% allow arrangements under 90 days and 23% have embraced permanent remote work.
KPMG built the report from 456 multinational enterprises across 29 jurisdictions and 12 industries, making it one of the broadest mobility benchmarks published. The shift signals that the category formerly called "relocation" now includes employees who never set foot in a new office, working instead from wherever they choose for weeks or months at a time.
This is the data point most relevant to anyone tracking days across borders. A 60-day workation in Portugal or a 90-day stint in Thailand triggers the same visa-limit and tax-residency questions a perpetual traveler faces. The 90/180-day Schengen rule does not distinguish between a tourist and a workationer.
For employers, formalizing these policies without day-tracking infrastructure invites compliance exposure.
Source: KPMG - 2025 Global Mobility Benchmarking Report
4. 46% of companies reported more employees declining relocation in 2025
Nearly half of companies (46%) said additional employees declined a relocation offer in 2025, according to the 59th annual Atlas Van Lines Corporate Relocation Survey.
The top reasons were consistent and personal: family issues and ties at 34%, housing and mortgage concerns at the new location at 28%, and worry over selling or leaving the current home at 21%. Housing concerns at either origin or destination factored into 49% of declines. A new category, children's schooling, immediately ranked among the top five reasons in 2025.
Atlas surveyed 549 relocation decision-makers for this edition, the latest in a survey series running since the 1960s. The persistence of family as the leading barrier, across decades of data, tells employers that financial sweeteners alone rarely close the gap.
For mobility teams, the takeaway is that relocation refusal is driven by life logistics, not compensation. Flexible and remote options sidestep many of these objections entirely.
Source: Atlas Van Lines - 59th Corporate Relocation Survey (2026)
5. The US employee relocation services market is worth $12.2 billion in 2026
The employee relocation services industry in the United States is valued at $12.2 billion in 2026, according to IBISWorld's industry analysis.
That spend is distributed across 14,831 businesses, with the number of firms growing at a 5.2% compound annual rate between 2020 and 2025 and industry revenue rising at a 4.3% CAGR over the same period. IBISWorld is a long-established industry research provider whose figures are widely cited in financial and corporate planning.
The market size confirms relocation is not a shrinking legacy function. Even as remote work absorbs some demand, the dollars flowing through relocation management companies, household-goods movers, and immigration providers continue to grow.
For context, that single-country figure rivals the entire global market for some adjacent mobility services. It reflects how much physical relocation still happens despite the remote-work narrative, and how much infrastructure exists to support it.
Source: IBISWorld - Employee Relocation Services in the US (2026)
6. Demonstrating ROI is now the #1 challenge for 31% of mobility leaders
For the first time, demonstrating return on investment has overtaken cost management as the top concern in corporate mobility. The 2025 KPMG report found 31% of global mobility leaders now cite proving ROI as their number-one challenge.
The flip is striking. Cost management, long the dominant priority, fell from 39% in 2024 to just 18% in 2025. Mobility teams are being asked not whether a move is cheap, but whether it delivers measurable business value: skills transfer, leadership development, market entry, retention.
The shift reflects a maturing function. After years of cost-cutting pressure, organizations are treating mobility as a strategic investment rather than an overhead line. That reframing changes which moves get approved and how success is measured.
For employers, the implication is that relocations increasingly need a defensible business case tied to growth outcomes, not just a filled seat. The administrative burden of proving that value is itself becoming a bottleneck.
Source: KPMG - 2025 Global Mobility Benchmarking Report
7. 95% of firms now outsource at least one mobility function
Nearly every company managing global mobility has handed off part of the work. ECA International's 2025 Managing Mobility Survey found that 95% of firms outsource at least one mobility function to cope with skills shortages and support growth.
ECA gathered responses from 262 organizations across 30 countries. The survey also surfaced a striking technology gap: only 3% of companies report being fully satisfied with their mobility technology, and 60% find balancing transactional and strategic responsibilities challenging or very challenging.
The outsourcing rate signals that mobility has grown too complex to run in-house from end to end. Immigration, tax, payroll, and destination services each demand specialized expertise that few internal teams hold across all jurisdictions.
For employers, the 3% technology-satisfaction figure is the more telling number. It explains why mobility programs lean so heavily on external vendors, and why the search for better tracking and compliance tooling is a permanent feature of the function.
Source: ECA International - 2025 Managing Mobility Survey, via Relocate magazine
8. 43% of mobility teams use AI for admin, but 72% still run on spreadsheets
Mobility functions are adopting AI faster than they are modernizing their core systems. The 2025 KPMG report found 43% of teams now use AI for administrative tasks, and 62% plan technology investments in the coming year.
Yet 72% of organizations report that reporting and analytics remain largely spreadsheet-driven. The contrast captures a function in transition: experimenting with AI at the edges while the foundational day-tracking, cost-tracking, and compliance data still lives in manual files.
That gap is where compliance risk concentrates. Spreadsheet-based tracking of an employee's days in each country is error-prone, and errors in day-counting are exactly what trigger visa overstays and unexpected tax-residency liabilities.
For employers managing distributed and remote-mobile workforces, the data suggests the tooling has not caught up to the policies. Companies are granting workation flexibility while still tracking the resulting day-counts by hand.
Source: KPMG - 2025 Global Mobility Benchmarking Report
9. In-person work doubled to 68% as a relocation driver in 2025
The push to bring workers back on-site reshaped why companies relocate people. The 58th annual Atlas Van Lines survey found in-person work cited as a relocation factor by 68% of firms, double the 34% recorded the prior year.
Remote work moved in the opposite direction, falling from 44% to 17% as a stated driver of relocation decisions. The survey drew on 558 firms across more than 20 industries, fielded between late 2024 and early 2025.
The reversal reflects the return-to-office wave that defined 2024 and 2025. Some employers used relocation specifically to consolidate distributed teams back into physical hubs, treating a move as the mechanism for ending remote arrangements.
The data point sits in tension with the KPMG workation findings, and that tension is the real story of 2026 mobility: employers are simultaneously pulling some workers back to offices while granting others unprecedented location freedom. The workforce is splitting into two mobility tracks.
Source: Atlas Van Lines - 58th Corporate Relocation Survey (2025)
10. Willingness to relocate ranges from 75% in South Africa to 22% in Japan
Openness to international relocation varies enormously by country. The 2025 Ipsos study found 75% of workers in South Africa would consider relocating abroad, the highest of the 19 nations surveyed, followed by Mexico at 71% and Turkey at 65%.
At the other end, just 22% of workers in Japan and 31% in the Netherlands said the same. The spread of more than 50 percentage points reveals how much local economic conditions, language, and culture shape mobility appetite.
The pattern is broadly intuitive: workers in economies with fewer local opportunities show the most willingness to move, while those in stable, high-wage markets show the least. Ipsos surveyed 10,574 working adults for the study.
For employers sourcing internationally, the geographic variation is a planning input. Talent pipelines from high-willingness markets are easier to build, while attracting candidates from low-willingness countries demands a substantially stronger value proposition.
Source: Ipsos - Global Study on Willingness to Relocate (2025)
11. 67% of workers cite temporary housing and language support as top relocation incentives
The incentives that move the needle are practical, not just monetary. The 2025 Ipsos study found 69% of workers globally rank paid home visits as a key relocation incentive, with temporary housing and language training tied at 67% each, and a guaranteed return to their current role at 66%.
The findings align with the reasons employees give for declining moves. Housing and family logistics dominate both the objections and the incentives, which suggests employers can directly counter refusal drivers with targeted support.
Notably, around 69% of workers believe an international relocation would benefit their long-term career, with Mexico highest at 89%. The career-upside belief gives employers a recruiting narrative that compensation alone cannot.
For mobility teams, the data is actionable: the package elements that most increase acceptance are the ones that reduce the practical and family friction of a move, not just the size of the relocation bonus.
Source: Ipsos - Global Study on Willingness to Relocate (2025)
What these numbers tell us
Taken together, the data describes a category splitting in two. Traditional relocation remains a $12.2 billion business in the US alone, with willingness rising to 49% globally and budgets climbing past $77,000 per international move. At the same time, 52% of multinationals now permit workations and 23% allow permanent remote work, creating a parallel track where employees relocate themselves without a formal transfer.
The friction is consistent across both tracks. Family ties and housing drive 34% and 28% of relocation refusals respectively, while the incentives that overcome them (temporary housing, home visits, language support) are practical rather than financial. Meanwhile 72% of mobility teams still track the data on spreadsheets, and only 3% are satisfied with their technology. The policies have outrun the tooling.
The trajectory points toward more location flexibility and more compliance complexity at once. As workations and remote arrangements grow, the day-counting problem that defines the digital nomad lifestyle becomes a mainstream corporate concern. Every employee working 60 days in another country faces the same visa-limit and tax-residency math a perpetual traveler does.
The future of employee relocation is less about moving households and more about tracking where people are, for how long, and what compliance obligations follow them across borders.
How Staywise fits this picture
The fastest-growing segment of employee relocation is the one without a moving truck. Workations, sub-90-day arrangements, and permanent remote setups all create the same problem: someone has to track how many days an employee spends in each country, because those days determine visa compliance and tax residency.
Staywise (the visa compliance app for digital nomads) was built for exactly this day-counting challenge. It automatically tracks your days across every country, runs the Schengen 90/180 calculation, monitors 183-day tax-residency thresholds in multiple countries at once, and sends overstay alerts 7, 3, and 1 day before any limit. For a remote worker on a 60-day workation or an employee weighing a cross-border move, that is the difference between staying compliant and accidentally triggering an overstay or a tax-residency surprise.
With 72% of mobility programs still tracking days on spreadsheets, the manual approach is exactly the failure point these statistics expose.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many employees are willing to relocate internationally in 2026?
About 49% of working adults worldwide said they would consider relocating internationally for work in 2025, according to an Ipsos survey of 10,574 people across 19 countries. That is up from 46% in 2017. Willingness varies sharply by country, from 75% in South Africa and 71% in Mexico down to 22% in Japan. The data shows close to half the global workforce is open to an international move under the right conditions.
How much does it cost to relocate an employee?
An international employee relocation costs roughly $77,000 on average, according to 2025 figures from NRI Relocation. The biggest components are household goods shipment ($25,000), temporary housing ($15,000), and employee travel ($7,500). Longer assignments for executives or large families can exceed $300,000 once schooling, housing allowances, and multi-year tax equalization are included. The high cost is driving employers toward remote and workation arrangements that avoid physical relocation entirely.
Why do employees decline relocation offers?
Family ties are the leading reason, cited in 34% of declines, according to the 2026 Atlas Van Lines Corporate Relocation Survey. Housing and mortgage concerns at the new location followed at 28%, and worry over leaving the current home at 21%. Housing concerns at either end factored into 49% of refusals, and children's schooling emerged as a new top-five reason in 2025. The pattern shows relocation refusal is driven by life logistics, not compensation.
How is remote work changing employee relocation?
Remote work is splitting relocation into two tracks. The 2025 KPMG Global Mobility Benchmarking Report found 52% of multinationals now allow workations under 30 days, 29% allow arrangements under 90 days, and 23% permit permanent remote work. At the same time, in-person work doubled to 68% as a relocation driver in the Atlas survey. Employers are simultaneously pulling some workers back to offices while granting others unprecedented location freedom.
Where do these employee relocation statistics come from?
These statistics draw on five primary sources. Ipsos provided the 19-country willingness-to-relocate study of 10,574 workers. KPMG's 2025 Global Mobility Benchmarking Report surveyed 456 multinationals across 29 jurisdictions. ECA International's Managing Mobility Survey covered 262 organizations in 30 countries. Atlas Van Lines ran its 58th and 59th annual Corporate Relocation Surveys, and IBISWorld supplied US market-size data. Each figure links to its original source.
Related guides
- Cross-Border Remote Worker Statistics 2026
- Remote Work Statistics 2026
- Is It Legal to Work Remotely While Traveling?
- Schengen 90/180 Rule Explained
About Staywise
Staywise is the visa compliance app for digital nomads. Built by nomads for nomads, it tracks your days across every country automatically, alerts you before overstays, and keeps passport details on your device for privacy. The in-app AI assistant answers visa questions in plain English. Available on iOS.
Important: This content is informational and does not constitute legal, tax, or immigration advice. Visa rules, tax regulations, and entry requirements change frequently and vary by individual circumstances. Always verify current requirements with official government sources or a qualified professional before making travel decisions. Staywise tracks your days and surfaces compliance information, but final responsibility for compliance rests with the traveler.