Something has shifted. If you’ve been laid off recently — or you’re watching friends get cut, or you’re quietly worried you’re next — you’ve probably caught yourself thinking a thought you didn’t used to think: maybe I don’t have to do this here.
You’re not alone, and it’s not just a feeling. For the first time in about 90 years — since the Great Depression — more people are now leaving the United States than moving into it. At least 180,000 Americans relocated abroad in a single recent year, according to the Wall Street Journal. And when Gallup asked, one in five Americans said they’d like to move abroad permanently — nearly double the rate from a decade ago.
So if leaving has crossed your mind, you’re part of something real. Here’s what’s driving it — and what I’ve felt myself.
The remote-work lottery
Landing a remote-only job right now feels like winning the lottery. I don’t mean that as a figure of speech — people talk about it exactly like that. When I was laid off, that’s how it felt: a fully remote role wasn’t a normal job you applied for, it was a jackpot you hoped to hit.
The math is brutal. There are more people in the market than there have been in years, and fewer of the jobs offer the one thing everyone wants. Most companies have pulled back — hybrid if you’re lucky, full return-to-office if you’re not. And when a genuine remote role does post, it’s not unusual for it to pull thousands of applicants — for one job. You’re not imagining the odds. They really are that bad.
Which leads to an obvious thought: if remote work is this scarce and this valuable, and you do land it — why stay somewhere expensive to do it? If your job isn’t tied to a location, your cost of living doesn’t have to be either. That’s the realization sending people down the rabbit hole of “wait… where could I live?”
The cost of living finally broke something
Everything is expensive, and people are past pretending it’s temporary. Rent, groceries, insurance — it’s worn people down. And when you’re already stretched, a layoff doesn’t feel like a setback you’ll bounce back from. It feels like the floor moving.
This isn’t just vibes. When researchers ask why Americans want to leave, cost of living ranks at the very top, across survey after survey. People are looking at what their same salary — or even a smaller one — would actually buy somewhere else. And those numbers are hard to unsee once you’ve seen them.
The healthcare thing people are done with
This is the one I hear about more and more, and the numbers this year are staggering.
Americans already pay more for healthcare than almost anyone else on earth — and it just got worse. In 2026, ACA marketplace premiums jumped an average of 26%, with plans on Healthcare.gov climbing around 30%. For people whose subsidies expired, out-of-pocket premium payments more than doubled — up 114% on average. And it’s not just marketplace plans: even employer-sponsored insurance, what most working people have, rose about 9% this year — more than three times inflation — pushing the cost of a family plan toward $30,000.
Now remember that most of that is tied to your job. Lose the job, and you can lose the coverage right when you can least afford to replace it. People are tired of the narrative that this is just how it has to be. They’ve noticed — through friends who left, people they follow, their own research — that plenty of other countries offer affordable, functional healthcare that doesn’t bankrupt you or vanish the day you’re laid off. For a lot of people, that alone is enough to make them willing to take the leap.
Why it’s happening now
None of these is new on its own. What’s changed is the timing — they’re all hitting at once. Job market, cost of living, healthcare. And a layoff is often what tips someone from thinking about it to actually researching it.
Spend any time on LinkedIn lately, and you’ll see it happening in real time. People who stopped fighting the ATS. People worn down by applications that led nowhere. People who quietly decided to stop waiting for a system that wasn’t working for them — did the research, made a plan, and then left. Many of them say they live better, for less, than they did before.
That’s why more laid-off professionals are looking abroad. Not because they’re reckless — because they know exactly what staying feels like, and leaving no longer feels like the crazy option.
If that’s where your head has been lately, you’re not losing it. You’re paying attention — and a lot of other people are paying attention right alongside you.
If you’ve started asking “where could I actually live?” — that’s the right question, and it’s worth answering with real numbers instead of guesses. Start with the free guides: The Permission Slip and the Cost Escape Starter Checklist — the honest first steps for people who’ve realized they’re ready to figure it out.