"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.
Update, 4 Oct 2026
Ran it again this morning. 855 postings across the 8 boards. After dropping stale ones and anything that isn't a dev role, 110 were left, more than last week because the October HN thread is now in. 78 of those were locked to a country, a region or a work permit I don't have. 16 were actually open from India (2 name India, 1 says APAC, 13 say worldwide or anywhere). 16 were too vague to call.
So about 1 in 7 dev roles tagged remote this week was really open to me, a bit worse than the 1 in 5 on 24 Sep. The HN posts are the vaguest of the lot, most just say REMOTE and leave it there.
Update, 7 Oct 2026
Ran it again today. 891 postings across the 8 boards. After dropping stale ones and anything that isn't a dev role, 133 were left. 95 of those were locked to a country, a region or a work permit I don't have. 24 were open from India: 5 name India, 2 say APAC, 17 say worldwide or anywhere. 14 were too vague to call.
That's 24 of 133, close to 1 in 6, and better than the 1 in 7 on 4 Oct. One fix this week: a job whose location was only "Cairo Governorate" used to come back as unclear. It's a local hire in Egypt, so it now counts as locked.
Update, 11 Oct 2026
Ran it again today. 927 postings across the 8 boards. After dropping stale ones and anything that isn't a dev role, 117 were left. 88 of those were locked to a country, a region or a work permit I don't have. 22 were open from India: 5 name India, 3 say APAC, 14 say worldwide or anywhere. 7 were too vague to call.
That's 22 of 117, a bit under 1 in 5, and about the same as 7 Oct. Three checks in a row have landed between 1 in 7 and 1 in 5, so that looks like the real range and not a bad week.
Update, 14 Oct 2026
Ran it again today. 979 postings across the 8 boards. After dropping stale ones, senior lead titles, roles asking for more than 5 years, and anything that isn't a dev role, 130 were left. 89 of those were locked to a country, a region or a work permit I don't have. 21 were open from India: 7 name India, 2 name a region that includes it, 12 say worldwide or anywhere. 20 were too vague to call.
So 21 of 130, about 1 in 6. That's inside the same range as the last three checks. The vague pile is bigger this week, mostly Arbeitnow posts that just say "remote" with no country at all.
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.
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