> European countries are outliers due to EU regulations. Any EU "citizen" can work anywhere in the EU, so pragmatically speaking, why would you only want to hire Spanish people instead of opening the door to French, Italian or German candidates? It comes at literally zero cost to the company.

The employer needs to pay social contributions in the employee's residence country. And more often than not, the employee cannot just become a freelancer or incorporate a single-person company and bill only one customer, as this is considered disguised employment. So no, it's not necessarily trivial for an EU company to hire a remote worker somewhere else in the EU, unless they have a local presence already.

It’s the same in the US to hire someone in a different state.

Every state has their own tax scheme. Every new employee in a new state is a big set up cost and ongoing maintenance.

To add to this, in over 17 states there are also city or county level income taxes[1] that you have to be set up to handle.

Then there's the potential for each employee's address to be considered a nexus, since each of their homes becomes a de-facto company presence. Potentially subject to local registration, licensing and taxation by local municipal authorities, in addition to just the state level requirements. If you have a presence in the state, and your employee's official work location is that location, then you only have to deal with that local registration once wherever the presence is located. But if you don't have a location the state, or you have employees who are officially designated as work from home (rather than unofficially working from home while being designated as assigned to an office), then this quickly scale into a giant mess of regulation to navigate[2].

[1] https://taxfoundation.org/local-income-taxes-city-and-county...

[2] https://smallbiztrends.com/2018/04/remote-employee-complianc...

Why so? I though all payroll/tax details are outsourced to the accounting firms and very straightforward in fact.

The payroll taxes can likely be taken care of easily by your payroll provider/accountancy firm, but there's potentially local business licensing requirements[1] you become subject to as well. If you have an office, you generally do all of that based on the location of the office, and the employee's home address doesn't come into play. But if the employee is officially a work from home employee, some states/municipalities treat that as a presence subject to business licensing or permitting requirements with the local authorities, as well as potentially triggering sales tax collection requirements that have to be accounted for within your sales/invoicing processes.

[1] https://smallbiztrends.com/2018/04/remote-employee-complianc...

My understanding from people who have done it is that:

-- Yes, you can outsource most of the payroll-related headaches to someone like ADP but

-- There are still a lot of other state by state details that can't just be handed off to a third party and told "Make it so." It's not a particularly big deal for a larger company, but it can be a fair bit of overhead for a small employer adding a new remote employee in a state with lots of paperwork.

Disguised employment laws end at the national border. Yes, for the EU/EEA member states too.

If you disregard international companies with English as the company language, most of the companies usually have a local language requirement. So still, you want to hire Spanish/French/German/Italian speakers in the EU market.