Small towns in 2015: quiet, aging, and largely bypassed
Back in 2015, remote work was still a fringe arrangement reserved for freelancers, a handful of tech companies, and workers who had negotiated a special deal with an understanding boss. Before the pandemic, only 10% or fewer of workers in the United States worked remotely full-time. Small towns, meanwhile, were largely defined by what they lacked rather than what they offered.
Population loss had become a familiar storyline in much of rural America. For the three years before the pandemic, between 2017 and 2020, rural counties collectively lost 100,000 people via domestic net out-migration. Jobs tended to require physical presence, broadband was patchy at best, and anyone with an ambitious career path was expected to eventually move toward a metro area.
The telework baseline that never went away
The pandemic forced an experiment that no employer would have voluntarily run at that scale, and the results turned out to be stickier than almost anyone predicted. According to research from Stanford economist Nick Bloom, 25% of all paid U.S. workdays are now performed from home, a figure that has stabilized since 2023 and shows no signs of returning to pre-pandemic levels. That is roughly two and a half times the pre-pandemic norm, and it has held remarkably steady through years of headlines about return-to-office pushes.
The numbers on individual workers tell a similar story. As of March 2025, approximately 22.8% of U.S. employees worked remotely at least part of the time, equating to about 36 million individuals, and this percentage has remained stable between 21% and 23% since early 2024. That stability matters for small towns specifically, because it means the population of location-flexible workers is not a temporary blip that will vanish the moment a CEO issues a memo.
Return-to-office mandates barely moved the needle
Corporate America spent much of 2023 through 2025 loudly demanding that employees come back to the office, yet the data on actual behavior tells a more complicated story. Despite 83% of CEOs anticipating full RTO by 2027, remote work rates have increased from 17.9% in October 2022 to 23.7% in early 2025, with badge-swipe and cell phone data showing employees aren’t complying at the rates employers expect. Amazon, JPMorgan Chase, and Dell made headlines with strict mandates, but the workforce as a whole simply did not follow.
The one place mandates clearly worked was government. The federal government’s 2025 mandate to end remote work for most employees provides a natural experiment: the percentage of federal workers in hybrid arrangements dropped from 61% to 28% after the mandate took effect, but in the private sector, hybrid and remote arrangements remained stable during the same period. For small towns that had absorbed federal teleworkers, that split created a noticeable, if narrow, reversal, while private-sector newcomers mostly stayed put.
The rise of “Zoom towns,” from novelty to normal
A new vocabulary emerged to describe what was happening: mountain towns, lake communities, and college towns saw sudden waves of new residents who had never lived there before but now could, thanks to a laptop and a decent internet connection. Zoom towns emerged as remote workers flocked to places for the promise of a cheaper cost of living, proximity to wildlife, or an overall higher quality of life. Places like Bozeman, Montana, and Sandpoint, Idaho, became shorthand for the phenomenon.
The scale of relocation search interest confirms this was not a niche trend. A record 32.6% of Redfin users in 2025 searched for homes in a metro area different from where they currently lived, up from approximately 26% before the pandemic. Many of those searches pointed toward exactly the kind of smaller, lower-density places that had spent decades losing residents rather than gaining them.
Housing markets in small towns that never fully reset
The most visible and often most painful change in these communities has been housing. New demand from remote arrivals ran straight into housing stock that was never built for a population surge. Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia found that remote work disproportionately enables migration among high-income, highly educated workers, and among movers, 53% chose suburban areas, with remote households spending 7% or more on housing than comparable non-remote households, trading commute costs for space.
In some of the most scenic zoom towns, the price pressure has been extreme rather than modest. In Aspen, Colorado, home prices in mountain resort counties more than doubled over the 13 years leading to 2025, with single-family median sold prices reaching 18.1 million dollars in the first half of 2025, severely limiting access for year-round working residents. Aspen is an outlier, but it illustrates a dynamic playing out at smaller scale across dozens of once-affordable small towns.
Main streets found an unexpected second act
Not every consequence of this shift has been about strained housing supply. Remote workers bring big-city paychecks into small-town economies, and that spending has to go somewhere. Remote work has been reshaping local economies by injecting fresh talent relocation and financial resources into communities that once struggled with declining populations, with remote workers earning big-city salaries while living in smaller towns helping local businesses thrive.
Places that leaned into the trend rather than resisting it have often seen the clearest payoff. Bentonville, Arkansas, home to Walmart’s headquarters, actively adopted the remote work trend by investing in infrastructure and cultural projects to attract new residents. Coworking spaces, once unheard of outside major cities, have become a fixture in towns that would have seemed an odd fit for the concept a decade ago.
Talent incentive programs turned relocation into a pitch
Some towns did not wait passively for remote workers to discover them. They built formal campaigns, complete with cash incentives, to actively recruit newcomers. Tulsa Remote provides up to 10,000 dollars to new residents and exclusive perks like free coworking membership and access to events and meetups. Northwest Arkansas ran a similar program, sweetening the deal with a free bicycle on top of the cash.
These programs were not entirely new inventions of the pandemic era, but they multiplied fast once remote work went mainstream. Even though talent attraction programs are not new, with the first ever documented launched in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 2012, they became quite popular during the coronavirus pandemic. By 2026, a quick search for relocation incentive programs turns up dozens of towns still competing for the same pool of location-flexible professionals.
The broadband gap is finally closing, years behind schedule
None of this migration would be sustainable without decent internet, and that has long been the weak link for many small towns. The federal response has been the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program, a massive but slow-moving effort. BEAD, funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, is a 42.45 billion dollar federal grant program that aims to connect every American to high-speed internet by funding partnerships to build infrastructure.
Progress has been real but grinding, with most benefits still ahead rather than behind. Most BEAD-funded project awards and construction activity are expected to occur between 2025 and 2030, with early results becoming visible by 2027 or 2028 as new networks begin serving homes and businesses in rural and underserved areas. For towns still relying on satellite internet or spotty fixed wireless, that timeline means the full remote-work dividend is still a few years off.
Who actually made the move, and who got left behind
The demographic reality of this migration is less egalitarian than the “escape the city” narrative suggests. Remote work access, and by extension the freedom to relocate, has tracked closely with education and income. Nearly 42.8% of employees with advanced degrees work remotely, while those with a bachelor’s degree telework at 37.6%, and those with a high school diploma sit at 9.1%.
This has produced a two-speed version of rural revival, where scenic and well-connected places thrive while others are left out entirely. The nonmetro counties with positive net migration between 2020 and 2024 were concentrated in counties adjacent to metro areas, recreation-economy counties such as mountain towns, lake districts, and coastal communities, and retirement destination counties, while the remote rural, agricultural interior, and manufacturing small towns of the Midwest and Appalachia mostly continued to lose people. The overall reversal is still striking at the national level, since between 2021 and 2024, rural counties flipped from years of losses to a net gain of 670,000 people via domestic migration, a swing of 770,000 people driven primarily by pandemic-era remote work, early retirements, and urban housing costs.
Growing pains that small towns were not built to absorb
Every silver lining in this story comes with a corresponding strain, and small towns have felt it in ways that big cities, with their deeper infrastructure, rarely do. New residents put pressure on schools, clinics, water systems, and roads that were sized for a much smaller and more stable population. This influx of residents stimulates local economies through increased demand for goods, services, and housing, but it also puts pressure on infrastructure, schools, and the local health-care system, and areas with a limited housing supply may see a sharper increase in prices, potentially exacerbating affordability challenges for long-term residents.
There is also a quieter demographic pressure working against these gains. The 65% of U.S. counties experiencing natural population decrease, meaning more deaths than births, is a reminder that migration is now the sole lifeline for population stability in much of the country, and without it, the demographic math in rural America simply does not work. Remote work has bought many small towns time, but it has not solved the deeper demographic trends working against them.
The bigger picture heading into 2027
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