I checked 900 "remote" job postings. Of the 71 that fit me, 16 were open to India.
"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…
In a recent study, reporter <source> checked 900 remote job postings across 8 different job boards </source 844543da-a8e>. Of the 71 postings that matched their qualifications, only 16 of those were open to applicants in India. This means that roughly 1 in every 4 relevant remote jobs could potentially be applied to by someone living in India.
The reporter used a script to analyze the job postings, checking factors such as the location field specified by the job board, phrases within the description, timezone rules, and local-hire markers. A job that simply stated it was remote was marked as unclear and not considered worldwide.
The reporter made a couple of mistakes in the process. Firstly, they found that the word "global" in a description does not necessarily mean the job is open to applicants worldwide. Secondly, two-letter country codes such as "in" or "it" can match ordinary English words and should be taken with caution.
The reporter has made the script available on Apify as the Worldwide Remote Jobs Scraper. Users can set their country and keywords, and the script will generate a JSON or CSV list with a verdict for each job. The scraper is flexible, working for over 110 countries and can also be used as an MCP tool for AI agents. The code, including the full rule list, is open-source and can be found on GitHub.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.