How to Build a Relocation Package for Equal Opportunities

In 2025, forward-thinking organizations are leveraging the power of employee mobility. These organizations benefit from increased employee engagement and retention, greater workforce diversity, and the ability to mobilize a global workforce, expand into cross-border markets, and build a skilled and culturally intelligent workforce.

However, not all employees have access to the same mobility opportunities—various barriers prevent underrepresented groups from benefiting from international assignments that could accelerate their careers.

This is why a relocation package can be helpful. An employee relocation package is a benefit that companies provide to assist new and current employees in moving from one location to another.

Deel Immigration is an end-to-end mobility solution that can help you streamline global employee relocations. Our solutions tackle the specific challenges that companies face—from streamlined visa processing to customized benefits packages that meet diverse employee needs while ensuring complete compliance.

This guide will discuss strategies for building relocation packages that promote equal opportunities for all employees. You’ll also discover expert insights into removing mobility barriers, implementing flexible benefits, and creating support systems that ensure success for every relocating employee.

By partnering with Deel Immigration, your organization can implement cutting-edge mobility programs that work for everyone.

Not all relocation opportunities are made equal

Factors that impact an employee’s mobility:

• Circumstantial constraints: Family responsibilities, homeownership, caregiving duties, and financial limitations can prevent some employees from relocating.
• Perceived or actual risk: Cultural, legal, or safety concerns in certain countries can pose barriers—especially for underrepresented groups.
• Unconscious bias and discrimination: Traditional mobility policies often overlook single parents, carers, employees with disabilities, and others with non-standard needs.
• Lack of experience and representation: Employees from minority backgrounds may lack international experience, role models, or confidence to pursue relocation.

Core components of an equitable relocation package

For mobility to be an equal opportunity for employees, your relocation package needs to offer multiple dimensions of support.

Financial assistance forms the foundation, but to make the opportunities truly equal, you also need to ensure employees receive incentives, education, and ongoing support. Here’s what an effective relocation package includes:

Standardized financial support

Building a relocation package for equal opportunities starts with consistent financial support that doesn’t favor those with stronger negotiation skills. This includes coverage for physical moving costs, like flights, shipping personal belongings, and temporary storage when needed. You’ll also need to consider any salary adjustments to match the local cost of living.

Companies should provide temporary housing assistance during the transition period (typically 30-90 days, depending on the housing market situation in the destination.

You should also provide a settling-in allowance to give the employee who is relocating the means to establish themselves in their new location. This should be enough to cover initial expenses like household essentials, travel expenses, and other immediate needs, and can be paid either in increments or as a lump sum.

Not sure how much is a reasonable amount? Deel Immigration’s mobility experts bring deep knowledge of international relocation costs. They can guide your relocation package design to ensure it offers appropriate and competitive financial support.

Skill workshops and cultural training

Workshops and training sessions can help marginalized communities develop the knowledge, skills, and networks to embrace mobility opportunities. Through these sessions, employees can learn about international travel, safe house hunting, typical relocation expenses, tax liability, finding health insurance coverage, and more.

Cultural training sessions can help employees assess a new city, state, or country based on their desired lifestyle, culture, language, cost of living, and quality of life. They can also help eliminate preconceptions, homesickness, and culture shock.

Visa and immigration support

Before a new hire or current employee can relocate, they must qualify for certain visas and work permits to comply with local laws. Visa application processes are often time-consuming and require extensive paperwork and research.

Incorporating visa and immigration support into your relocation package will take the stress out of the complex visa process for your employees and ensure they receive the support they need.

With Deel Immigration, we assess your employees’ eligibility and handle the entire visa application process in-house, taking the burden off your human resources team and providing an excellent relocation experience. For most companies without local entities, Deel can also employ the worker through our employer of record (EOR) solution and sponsor the worker visa on your behalf.

Deel’s global mobility specialists are on hand to ensure that employees from any passport background receive equivalent immigration support by managing complex processes end-to-end.

Deel Immigration can also support independent contractor relocations. We check worker classification criteria, localize contracts, and collect all the tax, permit, and compliance documents.

Flexible benefits

Flexible in-kind benefits and perks enable workers to choose what’s relevant to maintain their specific lifestyle, help them be mobile, and support their families.

With permanent relocations, localizing the employees’ benefit package is often a legal requirement. Deel can help with localization.

For temp relocations, employers should give the employee flexibility to continue receiving existing benefits or change their benefits if they're no longer relevant.

Deel provides flexible benefits and perks that employees and contractors can pick and choose from, depending on their changing circumstances.

For example, a US employee would receive a healthcare benefit in the US. But in the UK, healthcare is free on the NHS, so this benefit becomes obsolete. They may want to switch this benefit for something else.

You could introduce the following:

• A childcare allowance
• A stipend for older employees to care for their elderly parents
• A reimbursement scheme to cover moving costs and transportation costs such as airfares, house hunting trips, temporary living expenses, household goods, moving services, relocation assistance fees, packing and unpacking services, and any related expenses
• Property management or real estate solutions for homeowners and renters to help with the home sale and property leasing
• Relocation bonuses

Offering flexible travel and relocation benefits can be a massive undertaking for your HR department. Deel takes care of the whole process of offering, reimbursing, and tracking the use of global benefits and perks and ensures movers receive the correct mandatory benefits in line with local employment laws.

With Deel Benefits, you can build a customizable employee benefits plan that is quick and easy for both you and your employees or contractors to use.

Settling in period

To combat the disruption that often comes with relocating employees, the relocation package should include a settling-in period—providing the worker with a couple of weeks’ leave or a temporary reduction in responsibilities to address any life admin such as setting up bank accounts, enrolling children in schools, and getting familiar with their new home.

Any support or information you can provide to help employees and their families during this process will be beneficial.

Key considerations when building a relocation package that provides equal opportunities

Building an equitable relocation package requires careful planning and execution. By auditing current practices, establishing role-based tiers, recognizing personal circumstances, and enlisting support from the right places, you lay the groundwork for a fairer relocation process. Training your teams and continuously measuring outcomes also allows you to transform relocation from a privilege into a true opportunity for all employees. Let’s run through this step by step.

Audit your existing approach

Look at the locations of your existing employees to gather relocation data and spot any patterns of inequality.

• Track who gets relocation offers by demographics, origin countries, and role levels
• Identify decline patterns – if certain groups consistently say no, find out why
• Collect feedback from relocated employees about the real challenges they have faced
• Pay attention to concerns from underrepresented groups

Define policy tiers

Create simple, clear tiers based on role level, not negotiation skills.

• Establish what is offered within each tier (housing, moving, immigration)
• Set objective criteria like role level and assignment duration
• Create flexibility guidelines to address unique needs without opening the door to inequality
• Document everything so decisions aren’t made on the fly

Account for country-specific and personal circumstances

Employees who relocate don’t necessarily all face the same challenges. Build a system that recognizes and addresses real-world differences.

• Address the cost-of-living in different locations
• Factor in visa complexity – some countries have much higher barriers
• Support diverse family structures, not just traditional arrangements
• Offer flexible allowances that employees can direct to their specific needs

Partner with the right support

Don't try to manage complex global mobility alone. Deel Immigration makes handling visas and immigration simple with the following features:

• Visa eligibility checker
• Dedicated support
• In-app visa tracker
• Easy visa renewal

Educate your teams

Even the best policies will fail without proper implementation. Make sure your team understands the process fully, including all the whys and hows.

• Train hiring managers on unconscious bias in relocation decisions
• Create simple guidelines for discussing relocations with candidates
• Share your commitment to equality transparently with all employees

Continually monitor and improve your package

What gets measured gets managed. Track your outcomes and keep refining your approach.

• Gather feedback from relocated employees across all demographics
• Track retention rates to see if certain groups return home sooner after relocation
• Measure satisfaction by origin country, gender, and other factors
• Make data-driven adjustments based on real outcomes, not assumptions

See also: A Guide to Relocating Employees

Implement a fair relocation package with Deel

Relocation opportunities shouldn’t be an exclusive privilege; they should be available to everyone, regardless of their background.

By building an inclusive relocation package, companies remove barriers and support diverse talent. This can help your company build a fairer, more global workforce.

With Deel, companies can make mobility an option for all employees, no matter their background or personal circumstances. Our in-house mobility experts handle visa and immigration, compliance with local laws, global payroll and tax support, and customizable benefits and perks so you can offer a fair and equitable relocation package.

Want to find out more? Request a demo today.