As of Oct 6, 2026, our inventory holds 3,754 open federal postings that are either fully remote or telework eligible, and 0.9% of them are fully remote. The rest are telework eligible, which means they come with a duty station. Telework eligible today: 3,719. Those figures are a count, not an estimate: every day we pull the current federal listings from the USAJOBS API, keep the ones that allow remote work or telework, and tag each one with the tier the announcement states. The two words get used loosely in everyday conversation, but in federal hiring they mean specifically different things, and confusing them is the most common way job seekers waste applications on positions that do not fit where they live. This guide explains the difference, shows what the data looks like for each tier today, and helps you decide which one to target.
Remote: no duty station
A fully remote position has no assigned physical office. You are not expected to commute anywhere as a condition of the job, and the overview’s “Remote job” line says Yes. Your pay is generally set by the locality table for wherever you live and work, not for the agency’s headquarters, which the GS pay scale guide explains. Fully remote is the smallest tier of federal work by a wide margin. The inventory shrank sharply after the January 2025 return-to-office directive, and it remains thin; the explainer on why remote federal jobs became rare covers that history.
Telework eligible: tied to an office, with flexibility
A telework-eligible position has a real duty station, a specific federal building somewhere, but the agency permits the employee to work from home for part of the time. That could mean one day a week, several days a week, or more under a particular agency’s policy, but the position is still anchored to that office. You may be required to report there on short notice, for specific meetings, or under a schedule that changes with policy. The announcement states only that the position is telework eligible “as determined by agency policy,” and the actual number of days is set by your supervisor and the agency’s current telework agreement, not by the announcement.
What the data shows for each tier
Here is today’s split across every federal posting we hold:
And here is the same split for the federal contractors we track, which looks very different, because our contractor feeds collect only the postings each company tags remote:
The contractor bar is the reason the fully remote list on this site is not purely federal. Contractors were never subject to the federal return-to-office directive, so the remote market has two halves: a small federal one and a contractor one that runs alongside it, often for similar mission work.
The pace of each federal tier is worth watching separately. Posted in the last 30 days: 25 fully remote federal postings and 3,244 telework-eligible ones. Set those beside each tier’s total and you can see how much of each pool arrived within the past month. Federal announcements often close after a short open period, and a closed posting drops out of our inventory at the next daily refresh, so a tier that looks small is also a tier where waiting costs you.
Which agencies post each tier
The agencies with the most fully remote federal postings in our inventory right now are:
- Veterans Health Administration 19 listings
- Veterans Benefits Administration 3 listings
- Agriculture, Rural Development 2 listings
- Citizenship and Immigration Services 2 listings
- Judicial Branch Headquarters 2 listings
The agencies with the most telework-eligible federal postings are:
- Veterans Health Administration 628 listings
- Federal Aviation Administration 209 listings
- U.S. Army Corps of Engineers 170 listings
- Army National Guard Units 75 listings
- Headquarters, Air Force Reserve Command 69 listings
Each name links to that agency’s hub, where you can see every listing we hold for it and judge whether its remote or telework postings are a steady stream or a single hiring round. The two lists are usually led by large agencies with big civilian workforces, and the fully remote list in particular can be dominated by one agency’s hiring round for a short while, so treat it as a snapshot rather than a ranking that will hold next month. The agencies page lists every agency we track with its current counts.
What each tier pays
Advertised pay on fully remote federal postings we hold currently runs from $36,409 to $400,000 a year, with a typical figure of $113,939. Telework-eligible federal postings run from $22,592 to $400,000, with a typical figure of $122,404.
A word on “typical,” because it is doing real work here. A federal announcement advertises a range, not a single salary, and the range can be wide when a job is open at several grades. For each posting we take the midpoint of its advertised range; the typical figure is the median of those midpoints across every posting in the tier. The low and high ends are the lowest and highest bounds advertised on any posting in the tier, so they describe the edges of the market, not what most applicants are offered. Postings that publish no usable pay figure are left out of all three numbers, and contractor postings are left out entirely, because contractor feeds do not publish pay. The two typical figures should not be read as a remote premium or penalty: they reflect which occupations and grades happen to be open in each tier today, and with the fully remote tier so small, one agency’s hiring round can move its typical figure noticeably.
Why the distinction matters
If you are not willing or able to relocate near a specific city, a telework-eligible listing may not work for you even if the day-to-day experience sounds remote. You are still expected to live within commuting distance of the duty station, and telework arrangements can be reduced or reversed by policy with far less notice than a private employer would give. The 2025 directive showed how quickly that can happen.
Conversely, if you are flexible on location, or already live near a federal hub, telework-eligible roles represent a dramatically larger pool. The tier bar above shows the proportion today, and it is the proportion to set your expectations by: for every fully remote federal posting we hold, there are many times as many telework-eligible ones, across many more agencies and occupations.
How to tell which one you are looking at
Every listing on USAJOBS, and on this site, states its location policy explicitly. We tag every job as either fully remote or telework eligible and never blur the two into a single “remote-friendly” label, because the practical difference for your life, whether you need to live near a specific city or not, is too significant to soften. On a USAJOBS announcement, look at the “Remote job” and “Telework eligible” lines in the overview. If Remote job says Yes, it is fully remote. If a named duty station is listed and Telework eligible says Yes, it is telework eligible. “Location negotiable after selection” means the duty station is settled after you are chosen, not that the job is remote, so check the Remote job line. Do not rely on the title or a general impression from the summary.
Which should you target?
If location flexibility is non-negotiable, filter for fully remote only, understand the pool is small, and be patient: check back every few days, since new fully remote postings appear infrequently and close quickly. Keep your federal resume ready, because a short open period leaves no time to write one; the federal resume guide covers the format. If you have some flexibility about where you live, or you are already near a major federal hub, telework-eligible roles open up a far larger set of real opportunities, often with meaningful work-from-home flexibility in practice even if the job is not formally remote. Either way, read the position’s location and telework terms directly in the announcement before you apply.
How to search for these
The fully remote list is the complete set of fully remote postings in our inventory, federal and contractor alike, refreshed daily and sorted newest first. The telework list holds every telework-eligible federal posting with its duty station, so you can filter by the cities you could commute to. The agency hubs linked in the lists above show each agency’s full inventory in both tiers, and the entry-level page collects federal postings whose lowest grade is GS-7 or below, in either tier, for people starting a federal career. Every listing on the site links to the original USAJOBS announcement, which is where you apply.