You should think about it from the company's perspective: Why should they hire someone at twice the rate at which they can find very good people? As you say mos

You should think about it from the company's perspective: Why should they hire someone at twice the rate at which they can find very good people? As you say most remote companies pay either average or slightly above-average local market salaries as that's good enough for most developers to find these jobs attractive enough (since many prefer remote work) for the companies to fill up their hiring pipeline with lots of good candidates. That said I think $250k is definitely possible for non entry-level positions if you bring strategically important knowledge into a company. If you e.g. work for a startup/scaleup/enterprise in given space go talk to other companies in the same space that want to break into the competitors market or pull off a similar business model. Then you can e.g. say "I helped company X to scale their backend infrastructure to support 100 MM customers and I'm looking for a position where I can apply that knowledge and help you do the same, while having more responsibility / ownership / decision power". That will make you more valuable to a company than saying "I'm a really good Golang programmer". It's all about selling you as an individual with very specific market knowledge that a company wants.