Berlin and Munich are the same country. So are Toronto and Montréal, Milan and Naples, New York and Houston. Domestic transferees hit the same friction as international assignees — with none of the allowances and none of the support.
The Unsupported Majority
Domestic moves dwarf international assignments in volume, and they are treated as a logistics problem: book the truck, pay the allowance, done. But an engineer moving from Calgary to Montreal, or from Frankfurt to Munich, is walking into a different working culture with none of the permission that comes from being visibly foreign. Nobody makes allowances for them, because on paper nothing has changed.
No Grace Period
When an assignee arrives from abroad, colleagues extend patience automatically — the accent does the explaining. A domestic transferee gets no such cover. They speak the language, hold the same passport, and are therefore expected to already know how things are done here. When they get it wrong, it does not read as unfamiliarity. It reads as attitude.
That asymmetry is why domestic relocations quietly underperform: the friction is just as real, the support is zero, and the failure gets attributed to the person rather than the move.
Why Programmes Add It
Domestic transferees usually sit outside the mobility programme entirely, which means nobody measures their attrition and nobody attributes it to the move. Adding them to the same platform gives you the first real comparison you have ever had between your international and domestic populations.
Book a 30-minute demo and we will look at your domestic lanes alongside your international ones.
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