Global Mobility Statistics 2026: 127K Assignees
Global mobility in 2026 is shrinking in volume but rising in complexity. New intra-company transfers across OECD countries fell to 127,000 in 2024, a third straight annual decline, while BCG's tracking shows cross-border moves by highly skilled professionals down 8.5% year over year. At the same time, 95% of mobility functions in EY's 2026 survey say regulatory and compliance complexity is slowing them down, and traditional long-term assignments are giving way to short-term moves, remote work, and 18.5 million American digital nomads. This report compiles 11 sourced data points from the OECD, EY, KPMG, BCG, MBO Partners, and Aon for anyone moving across borders for work in 2026.
The way companies move people across borders is being rewritten. The classic model, a three-year long-term assignment with a full relocation package, is in long-term decline. In its place sit short-term assignments, business travel, remote work from a second country, and self-directed digital nomadism. Each of these creates the same compliance question the formal assignment used to handle centrally: how many days have you spent where, and what does that trigger?
This post covers the volume side (how many people move and in what direction the count is going), the structural side (what kinds of moves are growing or shrinking), and the friction side (compliance, cost, and the operational pressure on mobility teams). Every figure carries an inline link to its primary source, and each stat names the data year so older numbers are not read as current.
TL;DR: 5 headline global mobility stats for 2026
- New intra-company transfers to OECD countries fell to 127,000 in 2024, down 3% year over year and 14% below 2019, continuing a ten-year downward trend (OECD, 2025).
- Cross-border moves by highly skilled professionals dropped 8.5% year over year as of August 2025, roughly 220,000 fewer people from a tracked pool of 214 million (BCG via CGDev, 2025).
- 95% of mobility functions say regulatory and compliance complexity is slowing mobility, per EY's 2026 survey of 1,038 respondents (EY, 2026).
- Cost dropped from a top priority for 39% of mobility programs in 2024 to just 18% in 2025, with demonstrating ROI now the #1 challenge (KPMG, 2025).
- 18.5 million American workers were digital nomads in 2025, up 153% since 2019 and now about 12% of the US workforce (MBO Partners, 2025).
1. 127,000 new intra-company transfers were registered in OECD countries in 2024
New intra-company transfers (ICTs) to OECD countries fell to 127,000 in 2024, 3% fewer than in 2023.
The intra-company transfer is the purest form of a corporate international assignment: a multinational moving a key employee between its own offices in different countries. According to the OECD's International Migration Outlook 2025, this category has been in a sustained decline. The 2024 figure sits 14% below 2019 levels and 17% below 2015, marking a ten-year downward trend. The drop in 2024 was consistent across the main destination countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany.
ICT permits had briefly doubled in 2022 as pandemic backlogs cleared, but the rebound did not hold. The structural story is that companies are substituting cheaper, faster move types (short-term assignments, business travel, and remote work) for the expensive multi-year transfer. For workers, fewer formal transfers means more cross-border work happening outside a centrally managed package, where day-counting and tax exposure fall on the individual.
Source: OECD — International Migration Outlook 2025
2. Cross-border moves by skilled talent fell 8.5% year over year in 2025
The cross-border movement of highly skilled professionals declined 8.5% year over year as of 31 August 2025.
That percentage translates to roughly 220,000 fewer people on the move, drawn from a tracked pool of 214 million professionals, according to BCG's semi-annual global talent mobility analysis as summarized by the Center for Global Development. Even after the decline, about 2.4 million highly skilled individuals still changed countries in the period measured.
The slowdown is notable because worker appetite for mobility has not fallen with it. BCG's broader Decoding Global Talent research consistently finds a large share of workers willing to relocate for the right opportunity. The gap between stated willingness and actual movement points to external constraints: tighter immigration policy, economic uncertainty, and employers pulling back on relocation budgets. Mobility is being rationed by cost and policy, not killed by lack of demand.
Source: BCG via Center for Global Development — Global Talent Mobility in 2025
3. 95% of mobility teams say compliance complexity is slowing them down
95% of mobility functions report that regulatory and compliance complexity is slowing mobility.
EY's 2026 Mobility Reimagined Survey, which gathered insights from 1,038 respondents worldwide (528 HR and mobility professionals plus 510 employees with recent international experience), found near-universal agreement that compliance friction is the bottleneck. The same survey reported that 62% of mobility teams spend most of their time on reactive, ad-hoc requests rather than strategic work.
The compliance load is not abstract. Every cross-border move can touch immigration status, income tax, social security, payroll registration, and permanent-establishment exposure, each governed by different rules in each jurisdiction. As governments share airline passenger data and tax information more aggressively, the margin for error on day counts and reporting has narrowed. The practical lesson for individuals mirrors the one we cover in our guide to permanent establishment risk: assume authorities can reconstruct where you were and for how long.
Source: EY — 2026 Mobility Reimagined Survey
4. Cost fell from a top priority for 39% of programs in 2024 to 18% in 2025
The share of mobility programs naming cost as a top priority dropped from 39% in 2024 to 18% in 2025.
The 2025 KPMG Global Mobility Benchmarking Report, based on insights from 456 multinational enterprises across 29 jurisdictions and 12 industries, found that cost management is no longer the dominant concern. The new number-one challenge among mobility leaders is justifying the program's return on investment. Cost still matters, but the focus has shifted from cutting spend to proving value and performance.
This reframing reflects a function trying to move from back office to strategic partner. KPMG found mobility leaders expect to raise the perceived strategic value of their programs from 6.0 to 7.1 out of 10 over the following 12 to 18 months. The shift away from pure cost-cutting does not mean budgets are loose; it means leaders are being asked to connect every assignment to a business outcome, which raises the bar on tracking and reporting.
Source: KPMG — 2025 Global Mobility Benchmarking Report
5. 70% of organizations now lean on short-term assignments
70% of organizations are leveraging short-term assignments, often as a lower-cost alternative to traditional long-term moves.
The 2025 KPMG benchmarking data frames this as a shift toward agile, project-oriented deployment and faster speed to value. Rather than relocating a family for three years, companies increasingly send an employee for weeks or a few months to deliver a specific outcome, then bring them home or move them to the next project.
The trade-off is administrative. Short-term and frequent moves multiply the number of cross-border events a company and an individual must track, even as each event is smaller. A single long-term assignment has one tax setup; a year of short-term assignments and business travel across five countries has five. This is exactly the pattern that pushes day-counting from a once-a-year exercise into a continuous one, and it is why so many mobility teams still run on spreadsheets they cannot scale.
Source: KPMG — 2025 Global Mobility Benchmarking Report
6. 72% of mobility teams still run reporting on spreadsheets
72% of organizations say their reporting and analytics are still largely spreadsheet-driven.
According to KPMG's 2025 benchmarking report, only 16% rely on dedicated analytics engines such as Microsoft Power BI or Salesforce Tableau. The remaining majority manage cross-border populations, day counts, and compliance triggers in manual spreadsheets, which KPMG flags as a barrier to analytics enablement and scalability.
The mismatch is stark. As move types fragment into short-term assignments, business travel, and remote work, the volume of trackable events climbs, yet the tooling underneath most programs has not kept pace. Spreadsheets do not send alerts before a day limit is breached, do not reconcile across jurisdictions automatically, and break down once a person crosses several borders in a year. For the individual mobile employee, the takeaway is that the employer's tracking may be thinner than assumed, leaving personal compliance partly self-managed.
Source: KPMG — 2025 Global Mobility Benchmarking Report
7. 80% of assignees say a stint abroad made them more likely to stay
80% of employees say their most recent international assignment made them more likely to stay with their employer.
EY's 2026 Mobility Reimagined Survey recorded this figure as a 32-point jump from 2025, one of the largest year-over-year swings in the study. For employers worried about retention, the data reframes mobility as a talent tool rather than a cost center: the experience of working abroad strengthens the bond between employee and company.
The same survey found 88% of respondents say flexibility in mobility policies matters to them, up sharply from 70% the prior year. Together the numbers explain why KPMG separately reports that 82% of mobility functions are now anchored in talent management and acquisition. Mobility is being repositioned from a logistics function into a retention and development lever, which raises expectations that the experience (including the compliance side) feels smooth rather than stressful for the employee.
Source: EY — 2026 Mobility Reimagined Survey
8. Gen Z workers are 36% more likely to value travel as a work benefit
Gen Z workers, aged 18 to 27, are 36% more likely than other generations to value travel opportunities as a work benefit.
Aon's International People Mobility Report 2025, which heard from over 360 HR leaders across 49 countries and 16 industry sectors, identifies this generational appetite as a force reshaping mobility demand. As Gen Z enters the workforce in larger numbers, expectations for international experience and location flexibility are rising rather than fading.
Aon also found that business travel and international assignments have been returning toward, and in some cases surpassing, pre-pandemic levels, even as the formal long-term assignment declines. Inflation and talent shortages were the most significant factors affecting mobility programs. The combined picture is a younger workforce that wants to move, employers that need their skills, and a cost environment that pushes both toward shorter, more flexible arrangements rather than classic expat packages.
Source: Aon — International People Mobility Report 2025
9. 18.5 million Americans worked as digital nomads in 2025
18.5 million American workers identified as digital nomads in 2025, up 2.2% year over year.
MBO Partners' 2025 State of Independence research puts that figure at a 153% increase since 2019, meaning the nomad population is now roughly 12% of the US workforce. The most important compositional detail: growth came from traditional employees, not freelancers. The number of digital nomads holding conventional jobs rose 10% to 11.2 million, up from 10.2 million the prior year.
This is the self-directed end of global mobility. Instead of a company assigning someone abroad, employees are taking employer-granted flexibility and working from other countries on their own terms. It happened despite widespread return-to-office mandates, driven by nomad-friendly corporate policies and Gen Z entering the labor market. The compliance burden here sits squarely on the individual, since a self-arranged work-from-abroad stint rarely comes with the tax and immigration support a formal assignment would. We break this segment down further in our digital nomad statistics for 2026.
Source: MBO Partners — 2025 Digital Nomads Trends Report
10. Permanent migration to OECD countries hit 6.2 million in 2024
Permanent migration to OECD countries reached 6.2 million people in 2024, 4% lower than 2023 but still 15% above 2019 levels.
The OECD's International Migration Outlook 2025 frames 2024 as a year when flows came off record highs but stayed historically elevated. Labour migration was a meaningful part of the mix: both permanent and temporary labour migration sat 32% and 26% above pre-pandemic levels respectively, even after a slight 2024 dip.
This wider migration backdrop matters for mobility because it sets the policy environment. Record post-pandemic inflows have pushed many destination countries to tighten immigration pathways, which feeds directly into the compliance complexity that mobility teams report. When governments restrict legal migration channels and add scrutiny, every corporate move (permanent transfer, short-term assignment, or remote-work arrangement) faces more friction at the visa and tax layer.
Source: OECD — International Migration Outlook 2025
11. 2.3 million work permits were granted in OECD countries in 2024
Approximately 2.3 million work permits and authorisations were granted across OECD countries (excluding Poland) in 2024.
According to the OECD, this temporary labour migration figure was unchanged from 2023 but represents a 26% increase over 2019 and a 51% increase over 2015. In other words, while the formal intra-company transfer is shrinking, the broader channel of foreign workers entering OECD economies on temporary permits remains far above pre-pandemic norms.
The contrast between these two numbers, stable mass labour migration alongside declining corporate transfers, captures the structural shift in how skills cross borders. Companies are relying less on relocating their own staff and more on hiring locally available foreign talent, sending people short-term, or letting work happen remotely. Each route has a different compliance profile, and the individual worker increasingly needs to understand which days, in which country, count toward which threshold.
Source: OECD — International Migration Outlook 2025
What these numbers tell us
Three signals run through the 2026 data. First, the classic corporate assignment is in structural decline: intra-company transfers fell to 127,000 in 2024 and skilled cross-border moves dropped 8.5% year over year, even as worker appetite for international experience stays high. Second, the moves that remain are smaller, faster, and more numerous: 70% of organizations now use short-term assignments, and 18.5 million Americans work as self-directed nomads. Third, the compliance load is rising sharply, with 95% of mobility teams citing regulatory complexity and 72% still managing it on spreadsheets.
For the individual, the practical implication is a shift of responsibility. When mobility happened through a centrally managed three-year package, the employer's mobility team handled day counts, tax setup, and immigration. As that model gives way to short-term moves, business travel, and remote work, more of the tracking falls on the person doing the moving. Miscounting days against a 183-day tax residency threshold or a visa limit is no longer something a relocation provider quietly catches for you.
The trajectory is clear. Formal assignments keep declining, flexible and self-directed mobility keeps growing, and governments keep tightening enforcement and data sharing. The total amount of cross-border work is not falling; it is fragmenting into more events that each need tracking.
Global mobility in 2026 is moving from a handful of managed assignments toward a high volume of smaller cross-border moves, and the burden of counting days and staying compliant is shifting from corporate mobility teams onto individual travelers.
How Staywise helps you navigate this landscape
The structural shift these numbers describe (fewer managed assignments, more short-term moves and remote work) means more people are tracking their own cross-border days without a corporate mobility team behind them. A short-term assignment in one country, a few weeks of remote work in another, and a stretch in the Schengen area can each trigger a different limit, and 72% of mobility programs are still running this on spreadsheets that do not send alerts.
Staywise (the visa compliance app for digital nomads) tracks your days automatically across every country you visit, warns you 7, 3, and 1 day before any visa, tax-residency, or stay limit, and keeps a clean record you can export for HR or a tax filing. The same engine that handles Schengen 90/180 day-counting covers the 183-day rule, the US substantial presence test, and employer work-from-anywhere caps, so you are not reconstructing your year from boarding passes when it matters.
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Frequently asked questions
How many intra-company transfers happen each year?
OECD countries registered 127,000 new intra-company transfers in 2024, according to the OECD's International Migration Outlook 2025. That figure was 3% lower than 2023 and 14% below 2019, part of a ten-year downward trend across the main destination countries including the UK, Canada, and Germany. The intra-company transfer is the most formal type of corporate international assignment, and its steady decline reflects companies substituting short-term moves, business travel, and remote work for expensive multi-year transfers.
Is global mobility growing or shrinking in 2026?
It is doing both, depending on how you define it. Formal mobility is shrinking: intra-company transfers fell to 127,000 in 2024, and BCG data shows skilled cross-border moves down 8.5% year over year as of August 2025. But flexible and self-directed mobility is growing: 70% of organizations now use short-term assignments per KPMG, and MBO Partners counts 18.5 million American digital nomads, up 153% since 2019. The total volume of cross-border work is rising even as the classic long-term assignment declines.
What is the biggest challenge facing global mobility teams?
EY's 2026 Mobility Reimagined Survey found that 95% of mobility functions say regulatory and compliance complexity is slowing them down, making it the dominant operational challenge. Separately, KPMG reports that demonstrating program return on investment is now the number-one strategic challenge, displacing cost management, which fell from a top priority for 39% of programs in 2024 to just 18% in 2025. A further 62% of teams say they spend most of their time on reactive tasks rather than strategic work.
How many digital nomads are there in 2026?
MBO Partners' 2025 State of Independence research counted 18.5 million American digital nomads in 2025, a 2.2% year-over-year increase and a 153% rise since 2019, putting nomads at roughly 12% of the US workforce. Growth came mainly from traditional employees, with 11.2 million digital nomads now holding conventional jobs. This figure covers US workers only; there is no single reliable global count, but the US trend illustrates how self-directed cross-border work is expanding faster than formal corporate assignments.
Where do these global mobility statistics come from?
The primary sources for this post are the OECD's International Migration Outlook 2025 (intra-company transfers, permanent migration, and work permits), EY's 2026 Mobility Reimagined Survey (1,038 respondents on compliance and retention), KPMG's 2025 Global Mobility Benchmarking Report (456 multinationals across 29 jurisdictions), BCG's global talent mobility analysis as summarized by the Center for Global Development, MBO Partners' 2025 State of Independence (US digital nomad data), and Aon's International People Mobility Report 2025 (360+ HR leaders across 49 countries).
Related guides
- Cross-Border Remote Worker Statistics 2026
- Digital Nomad Statistics 2026
- The 183-Day Rule Explained
- Permanent Establishment Risk 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.
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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.