Machaela Casey

Ask most people what a “global mobility manager” does and you’ll get a vague answer about “handling relocations.” The reality is far more substantial — and understanding it is increasingly important for the many companies that move employees but have never formalized the function. A global mobility manager sits at the intersection of HR, finance, […]

On paper, the do-it-yourself relocation looks like a bargain. Hand the employee a lump sum, let them book their own movers and manage their own move, and the company’s relocation line item shrinks to a single predictable number. It is an appealing simplification, and it is why lump-sum-only and self-managed relocation has spread, especially among […]

The moment an employee relocates across state lines, a quiet but consequential set of payroll and tax obligations shifts with them — and the companies that miss the shift create real liability for themselves and their employees. Relocating an employee is not just a logistics and benefits exercise; it is a multi-state payroll event. The […]

A relocation offer can be the start of a great new chapter for an employee and a strategic win for the company — or it can blow up a valued relationship in a single clumsy conversation. The difference often has less to do with the package itself than with how the offer is communicated. An […]

Technology companies face a relocation problem unlike almost any other industry: the talent they most need to move is also the most expensive to move, the most courted by competitors, and the most likely to be weighing an offer against equity they would leave on the table. When a tech company relocates a senior engineer […]

For most of the history of corporate relocation, budget management worked like this: a program owner estimated the cost of a move, approved it, waited for invoices and expense reports to trickle in over the following months, and discovered whether the move came in over or under budget long after the employee had already settled […]

When a company relocates a single employee, it manages a move. When it relocates an employee with a family, it manages a life transition — for a partner, for children, sometimes for pets and aging parents, all at once. And the difference matters enormously to the outcome, because family relocations succeed or fail not on […]

When a company relocates an employee, it does more than fund a move — it assumes responsibility for that employee’s safety and well-being throughout the transition, and often for their family’s too. That responsibility has a name: duty of care. It is the legal and ethical obligation employers carry to protect the health, safety, and […]

When an employee turns down a relocation, the reason that surfaces most often is not salary, and it is not the cost of housing alone. It is the family — and inside the family, increasingly, it is a partner’s career. With dual-income households now making up the majority of American families, a relocation offer is […]

When a company relocates an employee, there is a tax surprise waiting that catches both transferees and unprepared HR teams off guard: nearly every dollar of an employee relocation benefit is taxable income. Since the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act took effect in 2018, the moving-expense deduction and the income exclusion for employer-paid moves disappeared, […]

Few city comparisons produce a gap as wide as New York City versus Austin. By one widely cited 2026 estimate, it takes roughly $11,500 a month in New York to sustain the same standard of living that $6,900 buys in Austin — a difference so large it reshapes not just a budget but a life. […]

For a Chicago household weighing a move south, Charlotte presents an unusually clean comparison: a real city, with a genuine corporate economy and four mild seasons, at a fraction of Chicago’s cost — and, most strikingly, a fraction of its property-tax burden. A Chicago homeowner paying the metro’s effective property-tax rate near 1.98% on a […]

The most powerful number in the Chicago-to-Nashville move is one that never appears on a real-estate listing: zero. That is Tennessee’s state income-tax rate. For a household leaving Illinois, where the state takes a flat 4.95% of every dollar earned, the move delivers an immediate raise the moment residency changes — roughly $5,000 a year […]

Most relocation guides open with a promise that the destination is cheaper. This one will not, because Denver is the rare popular move where the headline housing number often runs the wrong way: the median home along the Front Range sits well above what the same family would pay in Chicago. And yet the Chicago-to-Denver […]

Every year, a steady stream of Chicago households make the same calculation, and it almost always starts with the property-tax bill. Illinois carries one of the highest effective property-tax rates in the country — averaging around 2.27% of a home’s value — which means the owner of a modestly priced $325,000 home can write a […]

For most of the last century, the talent map of American technology had one center of gravity, and it sat on the California coast. That map is being redrawn along a 40-mile stretch of Interstate 15 in northern Utah. The corridor that runs from Salt Lake City south through Lehi and Provo — what locals […]

Talent doesn’t stay where it used to. Over the past several years, the map of where companies relocate employees has been quietly redrawn — away from a handful of legacy high-cost hubs and toward a wider set of growth markets that offer lower costs of living, favorable tax environments, and an expanding base of corporate […]

Most of what goes wrong in an employee relocation is visible — a missed delivery date, a damaged item, an unhappy transferee. Compliance failures are different. They’re invisible until they aren’t, and by the time they surface — a payroll-tax notice, an immigration violation, a data-protection complaint, a duty-of-care gap exposed by an incident — […]

For decades, relocation lived on the wrong page of the budget. It was filed under logistics — a cost to be minimized, a line item finance squeezed, an operational chore handed to whoever had capacity. That framing is now actively out of step with how the most effective organizations think. In the Atlas Van Lines […]

The lump sum is the most seductive idea in corporate relocation: hand the relocating employee a fixed sum of money, let them manage their own move, and reduce the whole complicated business of moving a person to a single, predictable line item. For an overstretched HR or mobility team, the appeal is obvious — one […]