Are you accepting lower pay to work remotely? Did you feel like you had a choice in the matter?

NPR recently surfaced a study showing many companies offering their employees the ability to work remotely in lieu of a salary bump. “A majority of large companies (those with more than 250 employees) and companies in finance and insurance, real estate, information, and professional and business services say they're using remote-work policies as a tool to appease workers and tamp down demands for raises,” the article added.

If that’s true, it contradicts tech-industry data suggesting that remote work is helping to equalize tech salaries between geographies. For years, technologists in high-cost places such as Silicon Valley and New York City could expect correspondingly high salaries—often much higher than their colleagues with similar skills made in places like Kansas City or St. Louis. With the rise of remote work, however, we’ve been seeing technologist salaries rise in areas well outside of the traditional tech hubs.

 “For senior software engineers, the pay gap between the most expensive U.S. cities and the least expensive shrank by two-thirds between 2019 and 2021, according to data from the compensation data provider Pave,” Protocol recently stated as part of a broad study. “By the third quarter of last year, the gap between Tier 1 salaries and Tier 3 salaries had narrowed from 18.1 percent to just 5.9 percent.” Data from Payscale suggested a similar trend.

Given the current demand for tech talent (despite the broader economic uncertainty), companies simply can’t afford to pay skilled technologists less than they’d make elsewhere; they have to accommodate the desire to work remotely. As a result, job postings for remote tech positions have risen steadily over the past few years. But that doesn’t close out the possibility that a percentage of technologists are taking pay cuts in order to work from the comfort of their living-room couch.  

In light of all that, we’re asking you: Would you take a pay cut to work remotely? Please take our quiz below, and we’ll serve up the results in a future article!