Sixty-one percent of U.S. companies expect to increase their relocation budgets in 2026, even as 46% report a rise in employees declining relocation offers outright. That tension — more investment chasing more resistance — is the defining story in this year’s data, drawn from Atlas Van Lines’ 59th Annual Corporate Relocation Survey, one of the longest-running benchmarks in the industry and a key reference point tracked alongside organizations like Worldwide ERC, the trade association for the global workforce mobility profession. This report breaks down what’s actually driving, and blocking, corporate relocation in America in 2026.
Quick answer: Corporate relocation volume is rising for the second consecutive year — 54% of companies reported increased relocation volume in 2025 and 52% expect further increases in 2026 — but nearly half of companies are simultaneously seeing more declined offers, driven primarily by family ties, housing costs, and difficulty selling a home at the origin location, per Atlas Van Lines’ 2026 survey of 549 relocation decision-makers.
The 2026 Survey, By the Numbers
Atlas Van Lines’ 59th Annual Corporate Relocation Survey gathered responses from 549 decision-makers responsible for relocation programs, at companies spanning more than 20 industries, collected between December 15, 2025 and January 16, 2026. Respondent companies split roughly across company size: 32% small, 52% midsize, and 16% large organizations, giving the dataset a broad view across the market rather than a Fortune 500-only sample.
The headline budget finding: 61% of companies expect to increase relocation budgets in 2026, while 30% expect no change — meaning fewer than one in ten respondent companies plans to cut relocation spending this year, a signal of sustained institutional confidence in mobility programs even amid broader economic uncertainty.
Relocation Volume Is Climbing for a Second Straight Year
54% of companies reported that their relocation volume increased in 2025, compared with just 19% who said volumes declined. Looking ahead, 52% expect volumes to increase again in 2026. Two consecutive years of majority-reported growth marks a real shift from the pandemic-era mobility slowdown, and Atlas’s own reporting attributes the trend to sustained confidence in workforce mobility despite trade tensions, immigration policy shifts, and signs of a slowing labor market.
Why Companies Are Relocating Employees: Economic Conditions Lead
When asked what external factors most constrain or shape their relocation decisions, respondents ranked economic conditions highest at 53%, followed by lack of qualified local talent (27%) and real estate or housing availability (26%). Political and regulatory considerations registered at 9% of respondents — a modest share on its own, but Atlas flagged it as a significant increase from the prior year, tied directly to changes in the H-1B visa process. Among companies that relocate employees internationally, 94% reported that H-1B visa fee changes had some level of impact on their relocation budget, and 82% said they’ve already adjusted their relocation policies in response.
The Other Half of the Story: Rising Declines
The more striking finding in the 2026 survey is on the resistance side: 59% of companies reported experiencing employee relocation declines, and family issues or ties topped the list of reasons at 34%, followed by housing concerns at the new location (28%) and concerns about selling the origin home (21%). Notably, “taking children out of school” emerged as a new factor this year, ranking among the top five barriers for the first time — a granular, human-level detail that reflects how relocation resistance has shifted from purely financial objections toward lifestyle and family-continuity concerns.
This pairs directly with the budget-growth finding above: companies aren’t just spending more because relocation is getting more common, they’re spending more because each individual relocation now requires more persuasion, more flexibility, and more support to actually close.
How Companies Are Redesigning Support to Close the Gap
In direct response to rising declines, companies reported expanding several categories of support. 52% of companies now offer cost-of-living adjustments as part of their relocation packages, 38% offer extended temporary housing benefits, and 28% offer mortgage rate assistance — a category that barely existed in relocation packages five years ago and now reflects the direct cost of moving an employee into a higher-rate housing market than the one they’re leaving. Atlas’s broader commentary on the 2026 data describes companies “redesigning relocation programs to emphasize flexibility, well-being and employee experience” rather than simply increasing the size of a flat relocation stipend.
Company Size Shapes the Response
With respondents split 32% small, 52% midsize, and 16% large companies, the survey captures how relocation strategy differs by scale. Midsize companies — the largest single segment in the survey — are frequently the ones building out formal relocation policies for the first time, often adopting cost-of-living and temporary housing benefits that large enterprises have offered for years, as they compete for the same shrinking pool of geographically flexible talent. Small companies, by contrast, more often rely on ad hoc, negotiated relocation packages rather than a standardized policy, which the survey methodology captures indirectly through the wide variance in reported budget categories across company-size segments.
What This Means If You’re Planning a Corporate Move in 2026
For employers: the data suggests that budget alone doesn’t solve declining acceptance rates. Companies seeing the best relocation acceptance in 2026 are pairing budget increases with flexibility — extended temporary housing timelines, cost-of-living adjustments tied to actual destination-market data rather than flat percentages, and earlier, more transparent conversations about school districts and family logistics before an offer is finalized.
For employees evaluating a relocation offer: the fact that 34% of declines cite family ties and 21% cite difficulty selling the origin home suggests these are the two areas most worth negotiating explicitly — home-sale assistance and flexible start-date timelines are increasingly common asks that companies, per this survey’s own budget-growth numbers, have more room to say yes to than they did two years ago.
Technology’s Growing Role in Relocation Decisions
Beyond budget and benefits, the 2026 survey cycle tracked a rising role for technology and AI in how companies manage relocation programs — a trend also flagged industry-wide by mobility research firm Vialto Partners, whose “Mobility (R)evolution” research found that 46% of companies are looking to increase their use of technology in workforce mobility management. For corporate relocation specifically, this shows up in destination-market cost-of-living calculators used to set adjustment amounts, AI-assisted matching of vendor networks (real estate agents, temporary housing providers) to an employee’s specific relocation profile, and predictive modeling of which offers are most likely to be declined based on the family-ties and housing factors identified above — allowing relocation teams to front-load additional support on the offers statistically most at risk of falling through.
What Industries Are Relocating the Most Employees
Atlas Van Lines’ 59th Annual Corporate Relocation Survey drew respondents from more than 20 industries, reflecting how broadly distributed relocation activity now is across the economy rather than concentrated in a handful of traditional relocation-heavy sectors like energy and finance. The survey’s company-size breakdown — 32% small, 52% midsize, 16% large — further shows that midsize companies, historically less likely to run formal relocation programs, now represent the largest single segment of organizations actively relocating talent, a structural shift that has broadened the customer base for corporate relocation and mobility services industry-wide over the past several survey cycles.
Frequently Asked Questions About Corporate Relocation Trends in 2026
Q: Is corporate relocation increasing or decreasing in 2026?
A: Increasing. 52% of companies expect relocation volume to grow in 2026, following a year in which 54% reported volume growth in 2025, per Atlas Van Lines’ 59th Annual Corporate Relocation Survey.
Q: What percentage of companies are increasing relocation budgets in 2026?
A: 61% of companies surveyed expect to increase relocation budgets in 2026, while 30% expect budgets to stay flat, leaving fewer than 1 in 10 planning cuts.
Q: Why are employees declining corporate relocation offers?
A: Family issues or ties are the top reason (34% of declines), followed by housing concerns at the new location (28%) and difficulty selling the home at the origin location (21%), with “taking children out of school” emerging as a new top-five factor in 2026.
Q: How is the H-1B visa fee change affecting corporate relocation?
A: Among companies that relocate employees internationally, 94% report the visa fee change has affected their relocation budget in some way, and 82% have already adjusted their relocation policies as a result.
Q: What relocation benefits are companies adding most in 2026?
A: Cost-of-living adjustments (offered by 52% of companies), extended temporary housing benefits (38%), and mortgage rate assistance (28%) are the three fastest-growing categories of relocation support, per the 2026 Atlas survey.
Q: How many companies were surveyed for the 2026 corporate relocation data?
A: 549 relocation decision-makers across more than 20 industries, surveyed between December 15, 2025 and January 16, 2026, in Atlas Van Lines’ 59th Annual Corporate Relocation Survey.
Q: Are lump-sum relocation packages still common in 2026?
A: Yes, particularly for standard-tier and individual-contributor relocations, though the survey data suggests companies are increasingly supplementing or replacing flat lump sums with targeted benefits like cost-of-living adjustments for their higher-priority relocations.
Q: How is the changing H-1B visa fee structure affecting international corporate relocation specifically?
A: It’s the fastest-moving factor in the 2026 data — 94% of companies with international relocations say the visa fee change has affected their budget, and 82% have already revised their relocation policy in response, making it one of the most consequential single regulatory shifts tracked in the survey’s history.
How Relocation Support Compares by Program Type
Not every corporate move gets the same level of support, and the 2026 survey data reflects a widening gap between tiered relocation programs. Executive and critical-skill relocations increasingly receive the full suite of support — cost-of-living adjustments, extended temporary housing, mortgage rate assistance, and home-sale assistance — while standard-tier relocations for individual-contributor roles more often receive a smaller subset, typically limited to the moving-expense reimbursement itself plus a capped lump sum for incidentals. This tiering is a direct response to the budget-versus-decline tension in this year’s data: companies are concentrating their expanded 2026 budgets on the relocations where losing the candidate would be most costly, rather than spreading the increase evenly across every move.
Lump-sum relocation packages, where a company provides a flat cash amount rather than managing individual services directly, remain common for standard-tier moves because they’re administratively simpler and shift logistics risk onto the employee. However, as origin-market housing costs and destination cost-of-living gaps grow, a flat lump sum calculated on outdated cost assumptions increasingly falls short of covering an employee’s actual expenses — a mismatch that shows up indirectly in this year’s rising decline rate, since employees evaluating an under-funded lump sum against their real moving and housing costs are more likely to decline the offer outright rather than negotiate.
What a Realistic 2026 Corporate Relocation Budget Looks Like
While the Atlas survey tracks sentiment and policy trends rather than a single average per-move dollar figure, the direction is clear from the benefits data: a company adding cost-of-living adjustments (52% now do), extended temporary housing (38%), and mortgage rate assistance (28%) on top of a standard household goods shipment is building a materially larger per-employee budget than a company offering shipment coverage alone. For relocation and HR teams building 2026 budgets, the practical takeaway from this survey is to model relocation cost per employee as a range tied to which support tier that employee’s role qualifies for, rather than a single company-wide average — since the survey shows the market itself has moved decisively toward tiered, role-based relocation support rather than one-size-fits-all packages.
The clearest signal in this year’s data is that corporate relocation in America isn’t slowing down — it’s getting more expensive to execute successfully. Budgets are rising faster than volume, which means the money is increasingly going toward closing the gap between an offer and an acceptance, not just toward moving trucks. Companies that treat relocation as a negotiation over family logistics, not just a moving-expense line item, are the ones reporting the strongest results in this year’s survey. For relocation professionals building next year’s program, the practical next step is straightforward: benchmark your own decline-rate reasons against the 34% family-ties, 28% housing, and 21% home-sale figures in this report, and direct incremental 2026 budget toward whichever of those three categories is actually driving declines inside your own organization, rather than distributing the increase evenly across every benefit line.
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