HETE‐2 has provided new evidence that gamma‐ray bursts may evolve with redshift. We investigate the consequences of this possibility for the unified jet model of XRFs and GRBs. We find that burst evolution with redshift can be naturally explained within the unified jet model, and the resulting model provides excellent agreement with existing HETE‐2 andBeppoSAX data sets. In addition, this evolution model produces reasonable fits to the BATSE peak photon number flux distribution — something that cannot be easily done without redshift evolution. © 2004 American Institute of Physics