More Employees Are Declining a Job Relocation: Our Tool Can Help With That Decision
According to the 59th Annual Atlas Corporate Relocation Survey, 46% of companies said more employees turned down relocation offers in 2025 than the year before.
Nearly half of HR decision-makers are seeing more and more employees say “no thanks” to relocating for work, and this survey is of companies that actively relocate people.
Imagine it as an employee: You get a job offer or a promotion that requires a move. Your company has a relocation package ready. And you still say no.
Why?
The #1 reason employees decline relocation is family
The Atlas survey found the top three reasons employees turned down relocation in 2025 were:
- Family issues/ties: 34%
- Concerns about housing/mortgage at the new location: 28%
- Concerns about selling/leaving the home at origin: 21%
Moving isn’t just a logistics problem, it can be a life upheaval. It can mean uprooting a partner’s career, pulling kids from their schools, leaving aging parents, or giving up a support network built over years. The Atlas survey put it plainly: “The support systems employees have in their current communities are too valuable to give up.”
The hidden cost to companies
Here’s where it gets expensive. The same survey found that 52% of companies agreed they lost good employees due in part to a relocation policy.
Not because the package was stingy or because a relocation package negotiation fell through. Not because the job wasn’t good. Because the employee looked at everything a move would require and decided it wasn’t worth it.
An employee who declines a relocation and leaves the company represents a recruiting and retention failure. An employee who accepts but isn’t prepared represents a different kind of failure, one that tends to play out slower.
The decision is the hard part
Companies have gotten better at the logistics of moving. The Atlas survey shows widespread support for housing assistance, school searches, spousal job help, even mental health resources. But all of that help comes after the decision is made.
What about before?
Most employees are making one of the biggest decisions of their lives with no structured way to think it through. They’re weighing housing costs, family disruption, career opportunity, and personal wellbeing all at once, often under time pressure, without a clear framework.
That’s the problem we built our Should I Move For Work? tool to solve.
It walks people through the full picture of a relocation decision, including career factors, family considerations, finances, housing, and personal readiness. The tool delivers a confidence score at the end so they can see which areas they’ve thought through and which ones need more attention.
The goal isn’t to talk anyone into or out of moving. It’s to make sure that when someone says yes or no, they actually mean it.
Source
Atlas Corporate Relocation Survey, 59th Annual (2026)
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