"Remote" on a job board usually means "remote, inside the US".
I wanted a number, so I wrote a script that reads 8 remote job boards (Himalayas, RemoteOK, We Work Remotely, Remotive, Jobicy, Arbeitnow, Working Nomads and the Hacker News "Who is hiring?" thread) and labels every posting for one question: can someone living in India apply to this?
What one run looked like (19 Sep 2026)
- about 900 postings read
- 71 matched "react / node / full stack" and were less than 14 days old
-
41 of those 71 were restricted to somewhere else: "USA Only", "Europe, LATAM", "must be authorized to work in the United States", "CET +/- 3 hours", German
(m/w/d)local hires - 16 were really open to me: 1 named India, 3 named APAC, 12 said worldwide
- 3 did not say either way
- the rest were the same job posted on two boards
So roughly 1 in 4 of the relevant "remote" jobs was one I could actually apply to.
How the check works
No AI, just reading the posting in a fixed order:
- The board's own location field ("Anywhere in the World", "USA Only", "Europe, LATAM, APAC").
- Phrases in the description ("EU residents only", "authorized to work in ...").
- Timezone rules ("within 3 hours of EST") compared with the candidate's UTC offset.
- Local-hire markers such as
(m/w/d).
A job that only says "Remote" is marked unclear, never "worldwide". Every verdict carries the quoted text it came from, so a wrong one is obvious.
Two mistakes I made first, in case you build something similar: the word "global" in a description ("a global company") is not a hiring statement, and two-letter country codes ("in", "it", "de") match ordinary English words.
Update, 24 Sep 2026
Ran it again, this time for the last 7 days only and roles asking for 5 years or less:
- 886 postings read across the same 8 boards
- 56 matched the stack, the date window and the experience limit
- 42 of those 56 were restricted to somewhere else
- 11 were really open from India: 1 named India, 2 named APAC, 8 said worldwide
- 3 did not say either way
So it's closer to 1 in 5 this week. A third mistake turned up along the way: "work authorization in the US, UK, or Canada" on a job listed as "Anywhere in the World" is still a restriction, even when there's more than one country in it.
Try it
It runs on Apify as the Worldwide Remote Jobs Scraper: set your country and keywords, get a JSON/CSV list with a verdict per job. It works for 110+ countries, and as an MCP tool for AI agents.
https://apify.com/yash_harkawat/remote-jobs-eligibility-aggregator
The code is open, including the full rule list in src/eligibility.js:
https://github.com/yashharkawat/remote-jobs-eligibility-aggregator
If a verdict looks wrong for your country, open an issue with the job URL and I will fix the rule.
