Small US towns offer cash incentives to lure remote workers from expensive cities

Brianna Beyrouti was drowning. As a single parent in Portland, Oregon, every unexpected expense—shoes for her children, a car repair—felt like a crisis she couldn't absorb. She was living paycheck to paycheck, watching her salary disappear into rent and the basic costs of keeping a household afloat in a city of 2.5 million people. Last year, she made a decision that would reshape her life. She packed up her two children and moved 2,000 miles east to Muncie, Indiana, a city of 65,000 with a university, open space, and something Portland no longer offered her: affordability. The move came with a $5,000 cash incentive from the city, designed to attract remote workers like her. She kept her job at the bank, kept her $107,000 annual salary, and suddenly the math of her life changed.

In Portland, rent consumed $1,290 of her monthly income. In Muncie, she bought a home—her first—with a mortgage, insurance, and property taxes totaling $1,100. Indiana's lower state income tax, cheaper car insurance, and reduced energy bills added another layer of relief. By her calculation, she was $600 a month better off. That wasn't just a number on a spreadsheet. It meant saying yes when her children asked for something. It meant taking a family vacation for the first time in her youngest child's life. "I'm able to live my life more than I was before," she said.

Brianna is part of a larger migration reshaping American geography. For years, the nation's largest cities—New York, Los Angeles, Portland—have watched their populations decline as people chase cheaper housing. A 2025 report from the National Association of Realtors found that affordability was the primary reason people moved between states. The Covid-19 pandemic turbocharged this trend by making remote work permanent for millions. If your employer was in a coastal city but your job could be done from anywhere, the calculation became simple: why stay?

Small towns that had hemorrhaged population for decades are now seeing the tide reverse. Muncie's population hit 65,466 last year, a modest gain from 65,194 in 2020, though still far below its 1990 peak of 71,828. To compete for remote workers, cities have gotten creative. Muncie offers $5,000 in relocation cash through a platform called MakeMyMove, which aggregates similar programs across hundreds of small cities and towns. Other incentives include free cinema tickets, restaurant vouchers, and bottles of wine. Around 100 families have moved to Muncie through the program. MakeMyMove says it facilitated 1,000 relocations last year and is on track for 1,500 in 2026.

Elena Chrysostomou, a scientist, followed a similar path. In 2024, she left San Diego, where she was paying $3,000 a month to rent a one-bedroom apartment, and moved to Jacksonville, Illinois, a town of 17,700 in rural farm country. The Jacksonville Regional Economic Development Corporation gave her $5,000 in cash plus a "quality of life package" worth $4,000—gym memberships, golf passes, and other perks designed to sweeten the proposition. She now owns a three-bedroom home with a mortgage of $1,868. Her salary increased 22 percent after she changed jobs locally. Her commute shrank from 15 minutes to one minute. "I never thought that I'd be able to afford a house on my own," she said. "It's just more freeing. There's more security and independence."

Neither woman minimizes the trade-offs. Brianna misses walking to parks and shops; now she drives everywhere. Both left behind friends and family. Brianna struggled to settle her children into new schools. The restaurant scene is narrower, the cultural options fewer. Jacksonville and Muncie are not Portland or San Diego. But when weighed against financial stability, homeownership, and the ability to breathe, the calculation tilted decisively. Brianna now has the largest savings account of her life. Elena owns a home she once thought impossible. These are not small things.

As remote work becomes entrenched and housing costs in major metros continue to climb, these relocation schemes may reshape where Americans live and work. The programs are still modest in scale—1,000 people in a nation of 330 million—but they point toward a possible future: one where geography is no longer destiny, where a software engineer or a scientist or a bank employee can choose to live where life is livable, not just where the job happens to be. The small towns betting on this shift are banking on the idea that once people arrive, they stay. The early evidence suggests they might be right.