When we talk about remote work and digital nomadism, there’s an assumption that white collar professionals have finally escaped geography. The laptop lifestyle promises freedom: work from a beach in Bali, a café in Lisbon, or your parents’ house in the suburbs. But this vision collides hard with reality for a massive segment of highly educated, well-compensated professionals who remain stubbornly tethered to specific locations.
The issue isn’t technology or company policy. It’s licensing.
Lawyers can’t practice law across state lines without getting admitted to each state’s bar. An attorney licensed in New York can’t simply hop over to California and start representing clients there, even if every conversation happens on Zoom. The same physician who could theoretically diagnose a patient via telemedicine in Tennessee cannot legally do so if that patient sits in Oregon, unless they hold an Oregon medical license. Accountants preparing tax returns need to understand state-specific regulations that vary wildly. Architects must be licensed in the jurisdiction where their buildings will be constructed. Engineers stamping structural drawings face similar constraints.
These aren’t arbitrary bureaucratic hurdles. Professional licensing exists to protect the public by ensuring practitioners understand local laws, regulations, and standards. A real estate attorney needs to know their state’s property laws. A civil engineer needs to understand local building codes and seismic requirements. A CPA must navigate state tax codes that can differ dramatically from one jurisdiction to another.
But the effect is a kind of invisible fence around these professionals. While a software engineer or marketing consultant can genuinely work from anywhere, a dental hygienist, a clinical psychologist, a pharmacist, or a veterinarian remains bound to the state where they hold credentials. Moving means reapplying, taking additional exams, paying new fees, and sometimes completing additional education requirements. For many, it’s simply not worth the hassle.
The pandemic exposed this tension acutely. Telehealth expanded rapidly out of necessity, but many states had to issue emergency waivers allowing out-of-state doctors to treat their residents. Those waivers have largely expired. A therapist in Michigan who started seeing a patient remotely during lockdown might have lost that patient when they moved to Arizona, not because the therapeutic relationship ended, but because the license didn’t travel.
Some professions have attempted solutions. The nursing profession has established a Nurse Licensure Compact allowing registered nurses to practice in multiple member states under one license. Attorneys have reciprocity agreements that ease admission to additional state bars after practicing for a certain number of years. But these are patchwork fixes, not comprehensive solutions, and they don’t exist for many licensed professions.The financial implications run deep. A professional who might command a higher salary in a different market effectively faces moving costs that include thousands of dollars in licensing fees and months of waiting for approval, during which they may not be able to work in their field. Families making decisions about relocation must factor in whether both spouses can transfer their licenses. The spouse who can’t easily relocate their professional credentials often becomes the anchor, determining where the family can live.
This creates strange distortions in labor markets. High-demand areas for certain professionals can’t always attract talent from elsewhere, even when salaries rise, because the friction of relicensing is too high. Meanwhile, professionals in oversaturated markets can’t easily move to where they’re needed. A surplus of lawyers in Manhattan and a shortage in Montana don’t naturally equilibrate when moving between them requires taking another bar exam.
The location dependence of licensed professionals also shapes urban geography in ways we rarely acknowledge. Doctors, lawyers, and accountants cluster in state capitals and major metropolitan areas not just because that’s where clients are, but because that’s where their licenses are valid and where professional networks make state-specific expertise valuable. A tax attorney who has spent twenty years mastering California tax law has built a career asset that doesn’t transfer to Texas.
There’s something ironic about this situation. We’ve built digital infrastructure that theoretically allows expertise to flow freely across borders. A junior developer in Romania can contribute code to a San Francisco startup. A graphic designer in Buenos Aires can create assets for a London agency. But a psychiatrist can’t ethically continue treating a patient who moved one state over, even though the conversation would happen on the exact same video platform.
The tension between technological possibility and regulatory reality creates a class divide in the knowledge economy. The truly location-independent workers tend to be those whose skills aren’t formally credentialed or whose credentials are nationally or internationally recognized rather than locally bounded. Meanwhile, professionals who invested years in education and passed rigorous examinations find themselves less mobile than workers with fewer formal qualifications.
Some argue this protects local communities from fly-by-night practitioners who don’t understand regional nuances. Others see it as protectionism that artificially restricts labor supply and keeps prices high for professional services. Both perspectives have merit, but the result is the same: millions of highly skilled professionals whose supposed knowledge work keeps them firmly planted in specific geographic territories, unable to take advantage of the location flexibility that defines modern remote work.
The next time you hear someone describe white collar work as increasingly placeless, it’s worth remembering that for lawyers, doctors, nurses, therapists, accountants, architects, engineers, and countless other licensed professionals, place still matters enormously. Their credentials are jurisdictional, and so are their careers.