Tulsa Is Not (Just) Paying People to Move. It Is Building a City They Might Choose to Stay In
Why We Love Tulsa Remote SOOO Much
The relocation grant attracts the headlines, but Tulsa Remote has lasted since 2018 because the money is only the entrance ticket to a much broader civic, professional and economic ecosystem. While much of Europe remains mesmerised by cheap houses, tax discounts and one-off incentives, Tulsa has concentrated on the considerably harder question: what happens after people arrive?
Let us admit it: many of us knew Tulsa primarily, perhaps exclusively, through Tulsa King, the television series in which Sylvester Stallone plays a New York mafia capo exiled to Oklahoma and proceeds to build a new criminal enterprise with the sort of efficiency rarely encountered in conventional regional-development policy.
Hands up. Guilty as charged.
Tulsa, in the European imagination, is not usually filed alongside New York, San Francisco, Austin or even Nashville. It is somewhere in the middle of America, in the middle of Oklahoma, in the middle of that vast geographical space that international visitors tend to cross at 35,000 feet while watching a film about New York, San Francisco, Austin or Nashville.
That relative invisibility is partly what makes Tulsa Remote so interesting. Since 2018, the city has been deliberately recruiting remote workers from elsewhere in the United States, offering selected applicants a relocation grant, workspace, practical support, professional connections and access to a substantial community of people who have already made the same move. The programme welcomed its 4,000th member in January 2026, having started with a first cohort of just 70 people.
The predictable headline is that Tulsa gives people $10,000 to move there. It is a very good headline, which is presumably why almost everybody uses it. It is also an increasingly inadequate description of what the programme has become.
The grant may prompt an application, but it cannot explain why the initiative has survived for more than seven years, expanded from dozens of participants to thousands and reported an 80 per cent two-year retention rate among its 2025 survey respondents. Nor can it explain why 96 per cent of participants complete the initial year and why a large majority choose to remain after the contractual reason for staying has expired.
The more consequential story is not that Tulsa found a price at which some people would move to Oklahoma. Almost every place can attract temporary attention by attaching cash to a press release. The more consequential story is that Tulsa attempted to build the conditions under which newcomers might develop careers, friendships, businesses, routines and a sufficiently convincing life not to leave again.
This is not a scheme devised by a nearly deserted village offering a symbolic house, a municipal key and best wishes for the restoration of a roof last inspected in 1957. Tulsa had an estimated population of 416,209 in July 2025. It is a proper city, with universities, hospitals, aerospace, energy, finance, manufacturing, cultural institutions and a metropolitan economy large enough to offer more than picturesque isolation and a weekly bus.
That distinction matters because the programme is not trying to use remote workers as emergency demographic decoration. It is positioning them inside an existing city and, more ambitiously, inside an evolving economic ecosystem.
The grant is marketing. The ecosystem is the proposition
Tulsa Remote is backed by the George Kaiser Family Foundation, a large philanthropic organisation with the financial capacity and local commitment to operate less like a short-term sponsor and more like a patient civic investor. The programme selects people who already have portable employment outside Oklahoma and encourages them to relocate without requiring the city first to persuade their employers to move as well.
The logic is simple, but rather more sophisticated than it initially appears. Conventional economic development frequently involves offering tax concessions, land, infrastructure and public money to a company in exchange for a promise to create jobs. Sometimes this works very well. Sometimes the jobs arrive late, in smaller numbers than advertised or accompanied by public costs that remain discreetly outside the celebratory press release.
Tulsa Remote reverses the process. Instead of recruiting the employer and hoping the employees follow, it recruits workers who already have employers, salaries and professional networks elsewhere. The salary continues to be financed by an external company or client, while a meaningful share of the worker’s spending, tax contribution, housing demand and social activity is transferred to Tulsa.
In effect, the city imports payroll without first importing the corporate headquarters.
By the end of 2025, Tulsa Remote’s 3,972 participants had collectively generated an estimated $878 million in direct employment income since the programme began. This figure should be read carefully: it is not the programme’s profit, nor is it a calculation of money spent exclusively within Tulsa. It is the total employment income earned by participating remote workers. Nevertheless, it demonstrates the scale of the economic capacity that has been attracted into the city.
An independent 2025 study by economist Timothy J. Bartik of the W.E. Upjohn Institute concluded that the programme’s economic effects extend beyond the participants themselves. The research examined whether the incentive genuinely induced moves that would not otherwise have happened and found that Tulsa Remote members create additional local spending, fiscal benefits, business activity and employment. Crucially, Bartik argued that the programme’s support services, entrepreneurship incentives and surrounding housing and development policies are at least as important as the relocation payment and the participant-selection process.
That conclusion should be printed in very large letters above the desk of every policymaker who believes regional development consists of announcing an incentive and waiting for economic life to occur.
The cash is not irrelevant. It reduces the cost and perceived risk of relocation, creates publicity and supplies a clear reason to consider a city that might otherwise never enter a remote worker’s search. But its usefulness depends on what follows. Without professional opportunities, accessible housing, social connections, cultural life, services and a credible sense of momentum, a relocation payment merely subsidises a temporary change of address.
Tulsa Remote appears to understand this. New members receive individual support, access to a network of more than 4,000 remote workers, a dedicated online community, events and introductions to local organisations and residents. The official programme is explicit that its purpose is not simply to facilitate arrival but to build long-term attachment.
This is where the Tulsa model moves beyond the familiar incentive economy. A financial offer can acquire an applicant. It cannot, on its own, produce belonging.
A programme embedded in something larger
The most important feature of Tulsa Remote may be that it does not stand alone. It forms part of a broader attempt to develop Tulsa’s economic identity, talent base and innovation infrastructure through a combination of philanthropy, business, local institutions and public-private collaboration.
The George Kaiser Family Foundation has also supported Tulsa Innovation Labs, an organisation working across areas including energy technology, advanced mobility, cybersecurity and advanced manufacturing. The city has developed startup support, workforce programmes, incubation, coworking, professional communities and spaces designed to connect entrepreneurs, researchers, employers and investors.
Gradient, formerly known as 36 Degrees North, operates as a hub for entrepreneurs and growing companies, providing workspace, incubation, acceleration, mentorship and business support. Tulsa Remote participants do not therefore arrive in a city whose entire economic-development strategy consists of having successfully persuaded them to arrive. They enter a landscape in which several organisations are attempting to convert talent into longer-term business and professional activity.
Not every remote worker will establish a company, join a technology venture or become a civic leader. Nor should they. One of the more exhausting habits of contemporary economic policy is the insistence that every reasonably competent adult must eventually become a founder. A functioning city also requires managers, designers, consultants, writers, accountants, researchers, parents, volunteers, customers and people who occasionally wish to finish work without disrupting an industry.
What matters is that the programme increases the number of possible connections between newcomers and the wider city. A remote employee may initially arrive with a job based in California, New York or Texas, but may later hire locally, invest in a business, join a nonprofit board, purchase a home, start a family, establish a company or persuade somebody else to move. The immediate transaction is relocation; the intended return is accumulated participation.
This is also why duration matters more than the original offer. Tulsa Remote began in 2018, before the pandemic turned remote work from a growing employment practice into a global argument about offices, productivity, freedom, loneliness, city centres and the correct number of days per week on which adults should pretend to enjoy commuting.
Many programmes announced during the pandemic were temporary attempts to capture a suddenly mobile professional class. Tulsa Remote predates that moment and has continued well beyond it. Its endurance suggests that the initiative is not based solely on a passing remote-work frenzy or on the novelty of a cheque. The model has had time to develop alumni, networks, local partnerships, institutional knowledge and a community large enough to become part of the proposition itself.
The programme now benefits from a form of compounding. The first participants moved to join an experiment. Later participants can move into an existing network containing thousands of people, accumulated experience and a visible body of alumni who have chosen to remain. Every successful relocation potentially makes the next relocation less socially risky.
That is how an incentive begins to become infrastructure.
Community is not the decorative part
Economic-development plans are often divided into serious components and soft components. Serious components include capital, property, transport, tax, skills and employment. Community is placed near the end, generally beside a photograph of young people drinking coffee under decorative lighting.
For remote workers, however, community is not a lifestyle accessory. It is one of the principal determinants of whether relocation works.
A remote worker can bring employment to a new city without bringing colleagues, an office, a social network or any of the incidental human contact traditionally attached to work. Geographic freedom can therefore produce both opportunity and disconnection. A person may be able to work from anywhere and still discover that “anywhere” becomes lonely remarkably quickly.
Tulsa Remote treats social and professional integration as a core part of the economic proposition. Participants are connected with one another, but also with established residents, nonprofits, businesses and local institutions. The aim is not merely to create an enclave of recently arrived laptop owners, all congratulating one another on the price of their apartments. It is to create routes into the city beyond the programme itself.
The programme’s reported retention figures indicate that this approach has had some success. An 80 per cent two-year retention rate does not mean that everybody remains permanently, nor does it prove that every participant has found professional fulfilment somewhere between downtown Tulsa and the Arkansas River. It does, however, suggest that many participants continue living there after the payment has ceased to provide any reason to do so.
That is the test that cash-only programmes frequently avoid. They publish the number of applications, announce the successful recipients and circulate photographs of the first arrivals. Much less is said two, three or five years later, when the incentives have expired, the ribbon has been cut and the new residents have had sufficient time to discover whether the local ecosystem extends beyond a discounted property and an enthusiastic mayor.
Tulsa’s model is interesting precisely because it is designed around the period after the launch event.
Meanwhile, in Europe: here is your cheap house, and good luck
Europe has no shortage of territories attempting to attract new residents. Rural municipalities offer grants, discounted properties, tax relief, business incentives and houses advertised for symbolic prices. Some initiatives are serious, well-designed and connected to genuine local strategies. Others seem to assume that affordability is a complete answer to the question of why a person should reorganise an entire life.
The sales proposition often begins and ends with cheapness. The house is cheap. The land is cheap. The rent is cheap. The tax regime is advantageous. The municipality may contribute to renovation costs, provided the applicant satisfies 46 conditions, submits the correct historic cadastral document and has not used blue ink on page seven.
Then, once the new resident arrives: “auguri e figli maschi”.
The missing questions are usually the most important ones. What professional opportunities exist once the person is there? Who will introduce them to clients, employers, investors or collaborators? Is there a functioning community rather than a promotional idea of one? Can a partner find work? Are there schools, healthcare, transport, childcare and reliable digital infrastructure? Is housing merely inexpensive, or is it actually habitable? What happens after the grant is spent and the novelty of restoring a stone wall in a village with no pharmacy has worn off?
Cheapness may attract attention, particularly in a period of punishing housing costs across many European cities. But being inexpensive is not an economic strategy. Sometimes it is simply evidence that demand has already rendered its judgement.
Tulsa’s advantage is not that it has discovered a more generous incentive. Its advantage is that the incentive sits inside a proposition with several layers: a sizeable city, an existing labour market, a lower cost base than many major American metropolitan areas, professional networks, civic institutions, entrepreneurial support and a deliberately constructed community of newcomers.
The relevant comparison is therefore not between $10,000 in Tulsa and a €30,000 relocation grant somewhere in Europe. The relevant comparison is between what the recipient can plausibly build in either place over the following five or ten years.
One offer discounts the move. The other attempts to improve the trajectory.
The model is not beyond criticism
Tulsa Remote is selective by design. It attracts people who already possess qualifying remote employment and the economic security required to contemplate relocation. It is not a universal employment programme, an anti-poverty measure or a substitute for investment in residents who have lived in Tulsa all their lives.
The initiative also benefits from the involvement of a foundation with unusual financial resources and a long-term interest in the city. Many towns and regions cannot reproduce that institutional capacity merely by admiring the results and commissioning a logo.
There are also legitimate concerns about housing pressure, inequality and the distribution of economic benefits. Recruiting relatively well-paid workers can increase demand and reshape neighbourhoods in ways that do not benefit every existing resident. Aggregate growth is not the same as equitable growth, and the arrival of new professional talent does not automatically address longstanding racial, social or economic disparities.
This is particularly significant in Tulsa, a city whose economic history cannot be separated from the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and the destruction of Greenwood, one of the most prosperous Black communities in the United States. A contemporary innovation ecosystem does not erase that history, and the success of a relocation programme should also be judged by whether it expands opportunity for the people already living in the city.
The Upjohn research is encouraging because it considers benefits to existing residents rather than only the income of programme participants. It nevertheless remains essential to distinguish between an estimated net benefit for a local economy and an equal benefit for every household within it.
Tulsa has not solved urban inequality, remote work, regional development or capitalism. This may come as a disappointment to anybody expecting a relocation grant to do all four.
What it has done is construct a programme around a more credible understanding of how people choose places.
Places compete for people, whether they admit it or not
Cities have always competed for capital, companies, institutions, tourists and major events. They are now increasingly competing for people whose income is geographically portable and whose choice of residence is no longer determined entirely by the location of an employer.
This requires a change in the way places present themselves. A city is not merely selling property, weather, tax or cost of living. It is selling the possibility of a future: professional progress, social connection, personal identity, security, opportunity and the belief that moving there will expand rather than diminish one’s life.
Tulsa Remote translates that competition into a structured process. It creates awareness, invites applications, selects candidates, reduces relocation friction, supports arrival, facilitates integration and measures retention. In commercial language, it is a customer-acquisition and retention model applied to human capital. In civic language, it is a place attempting to take responsibility for what happens between attracting a resident and becoming their home.
There is a certain irony in the fact that a city many outsiders first encountered as the setting for a Sylvester Stallone crime drama may now offer one of the more serious case studies in contemporary talent attraction.
The cheque helped Tulsa become a headline. The infrastructure around it has allowed Tulsa Remote to become a programme. Its longevity, retention and connection to a broader economic strategy are what may eventually turn it into policy.
Other cities can copy the amount. They can copy the website, the application form, the photographs of smiling people in coworking spaces and perhaps even the slightly breathless vocabulary of community and opportunity.
The more difficult thing to copy is the substance that begins after the newcomer has unpacked.
Tulsa’s most compelling offer is not that it will help pay for the journey. It is that, more than seven years into the experiment, it is still working on giving people reasons not to make the journey back.