by Rat Race Rebellion June 27, 2026
Subscribe to our daily newsletter to get the latest vetted remote job leads delivered straight to your inbox.You’ve spent an hour on the application. Cover letter customized. Resume tailored. Then you scroll to the bottom of the posting and find the small text: “This position is not available to residents of California, New York, Massachusetts, Colorado, Hawaii, or Alaska.”
Most “remote” jobs come with state exclusions of some kind. Tax registration costs, state-specific labor laws, and payroll compliance overhead make it expensive for traditional employers to hire in every state — so they don’t.
A small category of companies sidesteps this problem entirely. They were built distributed from day one – not as a pandemic-era retrofit – which means they solved the multi-state hiring problem before it became a problem. For these companies, where you live in the U.S. genuinely doesn’t matter.
What “Distributed-First” Actually Means
The term matters because it draws a real line.
A remote-friendly company is a traditional employer with a remote work program, usually added during or after the pandemic. They have an office somewhere, a headquarters city, and a payroll system originally built for in-person workers. When they hire remotely, they typically restrict to states where they’re already registered as an employer, because adding a new state means new tax filings, new compliance work, and new costs. The exclusion list grows from operational friction, not malice.
A distributed-first company is one whose entire operating model was built remote. There’s no headquarters in any meaningful operational sense. The payroll, the compliance, the management structure – all of it was designed to handle employees in any U.S. state from the start. State exclusions don’t appear on their postings because the structural reasons that produce exclusions don’t exist for them.
The companies listed here are all in the second category. Most have been distributed-first for a decade or more.
The 7 Companies
Doist: All-remote since 2012, with around 100 employees distributed across 35+ countries. Doist hires across all U.S. states with no documented restrictions, and the application explicitly states “we work from anywhere in the world.” Engineering, design, marketing, support, and operations roles all run on the same distributed model.
Twilio: Remote-first by formal policy, and notable because Twilio has actually closed offices rather than reopened them in the post-pandemic adjustment — the opposite of the RTO pattern dominating large tech. Roughly 95 active U.S. remote listings at any given time, spanning engineering, customer success, sales operations, and corporate roles. The cloud communications platform has had layoffs in the broader industry cycle but its hiring model remains genuinely distributed.
DuckDuckGo: 335+ employees across 27 countries, with one of the strongest location-independent pay structures of any company on this list – “everyone at the same professional level earns the same pay regardless of race, gender, age, and location.” That single policy tells you a lot about how the company thinks about state restrictions. The privacy-focused search engine hires engineering, product, design, and marketing roles.
Customer.io: Fully remote, async-first, distributed across 40+ countries. Of the seven companies on this list, Customer.io has the most generous documented benefits package – 100% covered health insurance for employees and family, unlimited PTO with a 20-day recommended minimum, 16 weeks of parental leave, and a $250 monthly remote work stipend. They have around 126 active U.S. remote listings at any time. The marketing automation platform hires engineering, sales, marketing, and customer success.
Buffer: Fully remote since 2013, with 22 countries, 51 cities, and 11 timezones represented across roughly 80 employees. Buffer also runs a four-day work week for most roles — a real structural differentiator that’s worth knowing about, especially for candidates evaluating against companies that mention “flexibility” without changing the actual workweek. The social media management platform hires for engineering, marketing, customer advocacy, and product roles.
Mattermost: Remote-first with about 42 active U.S. listings. Of the seven companies on this list, Mattermost is the most technically focused — the open-source secure messaging platform is used widely in government, defense, and financial services, which means most of the open roles are engineering, security, product, and customer success in technical fields. Less applicable than the broader companies for non-technical job seekers, but if you have the background, the hiring is genuinely distributed and uncomplicated.
Help Scout: Fully remote since founding in 2011, one of the longer-running distributed-first models in this group. 130+ team members across 115+ cities globally. All roles are fully remote, with one minor caveat worth knowing: some customer support roles prefer Eastern or Central time zone coverage to support their global customer base. That’s a time-zone preference, not a state exclusion — you can still apply from any state, but support roles in Pacific time may not align with team coverage windows. The customer support software company hires engineering, customer support, marketing, and product.
Did you find this interesting? Browse similar posts right here.Which States Get Excluded Most Often – And Why
The companies above are the rare exceptions. Most remote employers have at least one or two state exclusions, and the patterns are remarkably consistent. Knowing which states get excluded most often – and why – gives you a framework for evaluating any remote posting you encounter going forward.
California. The most commonly excluded state, by a significant margin. California’s labor laws are genuinely more complex than other states’, predictive scheduling requirements, robust break-time enforcement, and high penalties for misclassification all make employer registration costlier. Employers who skip CA aren’t always doing it for tax reasons – many are doing it because compliance overhead exceeds the benefit of hiring a single Californian.
New York. Same dynamic as California with different specifics – New York’s wage transparency requirements, paid leave laws, and tax structure make multi-state employer registration genuinely expensive.
Massachusetts. Similar logic. The state’s pay transparency law and paid family leave program add compliance burden.
Colorado. Increasingly common on exclusion lists since the “Equal Pay for Equal Work” Act and subsequent transparency requirements. Some employers exclude Colorado because they don’t want to publish pay ranges; others exclude it because the multi-step compliance is operationally heavy.
Illinois. Cook County’s separate regulations sometimes create double-compliance situations.
Hawaii and Alaska. Operational reasons more than legal – payroll registration costs, distance from the employer’s primary operations, and limited candidate volume in those states often combine to make them not worth the setup cost.
U.S. territories. Almost universally excluded — Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, and American Samoa each have their own employment regulations that most U.S.-mainland employers haven’t built infrastructure to handle.
If your state is one of these, you’ve likely been hitting more “not available in your state” notices than you should have to. The seven companies above are where to spend your time.
A Few Honest Notes
“Distributed-first” doesn’t mean global pay. Several of these companies (Doist, DuckDuckGo) have location-independent pay structures. Others adjust for cost of living. Confirm during the offer process which model the specific company uses, it can mean meaningful salary differences for the same role.
Corporate “at-home” or “anywhere agent” programs are usually hub-tied. If you see a remote program from an airline, hotel chain, retailer, or major financial services company, check the fine print. The “anywhere” naming is often marketing. Real-world examples we encountered while verifying this article: JetBlue’s at-home program is primarily Utah-based, Marriott’s “Anywhere Agent” has Utah-residency requirements on several positions, Wyndham’s reservation specialist roles are concentrated in Orlando. These can be legitimate jobs for residents of those specific states, but they’re not all-50-states employers.
State exclusions can change quietly. Companies update their state registrations without announcing it. A listicle that’s accurate today can be partially wrong six months from now. We verified the seven companies above as of June 2026; verify directly before applying if you’re searching in late 2026 or beyond.
Verify the posting itself before applying. Even at distributed-first companies, individual roles can have specific requirements. Help Scout’s time-zone preferences for some support roles is a real example. The footer text of the actual posting is where the truth lives.
Final Take: Two Questions Before You Apply
Before spending an hour on an application, two questions get you most of the way to knowing whether the role is real for you:
“Is this position available to residents of my state?”
“Is this a distributed-first company, or a traditional employer with a remote program?”
The first question is the practical filter. The second is the diagnostic.
If the company is distributed-first, your state almost certainly isn’t excluded. If it’s a traditional employer with a remote program, the exclusion list is real and worth checking.
Most candidates never ask either. The ones who do save themselves hours of customized applications that go nowhere — and find their way faster to the small category of companies where their state genuinely doesn’t matter.
Didn’t find what you were looking for? Check out these related roles and resources- 10 US-Based Companies Hiring Remote Workers Outside the U.S.
- Hiring Company Roundups
- Part-time Remote Opportunities
- How to Apply to 10 Remote Jobs a Week Without Losing Your Mind
- Side Gigs 2026
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* This article was originally published here
