Nomadic life dates back to the pre-agriculture days of nomadic hunter-gatherers. Without farming humans were often forced to move around to find food.

Before digital nomadism even existed, it was widely predicted for decades.

1964

In 1964, Arthur C. Clarke, a futurist and writer of the film "2001: A Space Odyssey", predicted digital nomads working from Bali in 2014, an eerily accurate prediction up to the specific year:

1983

In 1983, Robert Noyce, the founder of processor-maker Intel, predicted the end of commuting, the rise of remote workers and people living "where it's conducive to live, not where it's conducive to work":

That same year, Steve Roberts, a technology hacker from Columbus, OH in the U.S., quit his job, put a solar panel on his bicycle, packed up one of the first laptops ever built, the Tandy 100 and started a 27,000 kilometer (or 17,000 mile) journey while using the predecessor of the internet, ARPANET, to stay connected. By any record he was the first digital nomad ever. He presented about it in 1989 at the legendary Xerox PARC:

1990

The nineties saw the term "telecommuting" on the rise and a failed push by networking companies like Bell Atlantic to get people to work from home:

1997

Then in 1997, Tsugio Makimoto, one of Japan's most famous semiconductor innovators, was the first to coin the term "Digital Nomad" in a book with the same name. He predicted the rise of portable internet connected devices which would allow people to travel and live wherever they want as their work could be done on their devices, wherever they are. In the years after, telecommuting as a term became popular and increasingly people started working from home.

In the same year, James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg wrote The Sovereign Individual, a very influential book making big predictions for the next decades, amongst them location independent individuals with online businesses using cyber currency (crypto?) while countries and cities compete for them by attracting them with benefits:

"The computer revolution, in the authors' dire scenario, will subvert and destroy the nation-state as globalized cybercommerce, lubricated by cybercurrency, drastically limits governments' powers to tax. They further predict that the next millennium will see an enormous decline in the influence of politicians, lobbyists, labor unions and regulated professions as new information technologies democratize talent and innovation and decentralize the workplace. In their forecast, citizenship will become obsolete; new forms of sovereignty reminiscent of medieval merchant republics will spring up; electronic plebiscites will decide legislative proposals; mafias, renegade covert agencies and criminal gangs will exercise much more behind-the-scenes power. Davidson and Rees-Mogg, who publish Strategic Investment, a financial newsletter, present an apocalyptic exercise that is unconvincing. Appendices offer advice to "Sovereign Individuals" (members of the information elite) on how to invest, find tax shelters, avoid criminals and list one's business on the World Wide Web." — Publishers Weekly

2007 - 2013 - The first wave: shady pioneers

In 2007, Tim Ferriss wrote the 4-Hour Work Week. It described people building online businesses and using economic arbitrage (e.g. living in cheaper places while making money in expensive places). With internet connectivity rising everywhere, the technology was now just about ready for people to actually nomad and his book started the first wave of people doing it.

In 2008, the Economist dedicated a special report to digital nomads called "nomads at last" describing "our nomadic future". It didn't get much attention back then but The Economist was maybe a decade ahead of its time reporting and predicting it so early and accurately, even its negative consequences:

"Will it be a better life? In some ways, yes. Digital nomadism will liberate ever more knowledge workers from the cubicle prisons of Dilbert cartoons. But the old tyranny of place could become a new tyranny of time, as nomads who are “always on” all too often end up—mentally—anywhere but here (wherever here may be). As for friends and family, permanent mobile connectivity could have the same effect as nomadism: it might bring you much closer to family and friends, but it may make it harder to bring in outsiders. It might isolate cliques. Sociologists fret about constant e-mailers and texters losing the everyday connections to casual acquaintances or strangers who may be sitting next to them in the café or on the bus." — The Economist

The first wave of digital nomadism received some criticism for incentivizing people "to escape the 9 to 5" as fast as possible by chasing short-term profits with low-value products, shady business models like multi-level marketing, get-rich-quick schemes, spamdexing, selling illegal drugs from abroad, and blackhat affiliate marketing, while living in cheap places like Thailand. Nonetheless, those first nomads where the pioneers of a movement.

The first wave of nomadism transformed it from a theoretical concept written about for decades by futurists, into a real life activity that people tried out. But it was still a niche fringe, far from the mainstream, and the scene was too dodgy for regular people to join.

2014 - 2020 - The second wave: tech workers

After 2007's first wave of nomadism, it had been stagnant for quite awhile from 2010 on. At the same time though, telecommuting had transformed into remote work and had started to be adopted by many startups. It made working from home normal for millions of tech workers around the world, but especially in Silicon Valley. This created the perfect environment for the second wave of nomadism starting with the launch of Nomad List in 2014.

"Digital nomadism became recognised as a mainstream phenomenon in 2014–15 when dedicated online communities emerged (e.g. Nomad List)"
— Daniel Schlagwein of the University of Sydney writes in "The History of Digital Nomadism"

Nomad List launched in July 2014 and went to the top of Product Hunt, Hacker News, hit Reddit's frontpage, and was continously covered by the New York Times, CNN, BBC, The Guardian, CNBC and most other major media outlets.

Nomad List was targeted at a different audience than the first wave of nomadism, it was for the people who could already work remotely: the web developers and designers working for companies with real customers, but who were still working from home.

Starting with a simple list of cities with their internet speed and cost of living, Nomad List was able to give people who could already work remotely the realization that they could now start working from anywhere in the world. Data on nomad hubs already existed before, but it was dispersed over thousands of blogs that varied in quality.

Nomad List steadily became the most popular website related to digital nomads and location independent remote workers in the world. Since its launch, Nomad List has received 148,998,242 visits, gets 2,939,616 visits per year and has become a multi-million dollar business.

The rise of nomad hubs and multi-city living

The top places on Nomad List became overnight nomad hubs. Chiang Mai was the original nomad hub from the first wave of nomadism, but from just tens of nomads there back in 2013, it grew to thousands of nomads by 2016.

New nomad hubs also sprung up after Chiang Mai: first Ubud in Bali in 2015, which before that was a hippie spot (e.g. Eat, Pray, Love) but with the founding of Hubud Coworking started attracting nomads.

Meanwhile another place in Bali few had heard of called Canggu, an hour's drive from Ubud, had just turned from a fishing village into a surfer's hotspot. "Canggu is still relatively underdeveloped" the owner of a popular surfer's bar said in 2014:

But as the internet speed in Canggu started improving, it started to rank as a really attractive place for nomads on Nomad List:

And within a few years it turned into one of the most most popular remote work hubs in the world and rapidly developed:

For Americans, Medellin sprung up as the first real nomad hub near them in 2015, but then Mexico City surpassed as the most popular nomad hotspot in the Americas in 2018. Meanwhile in Europe, Budapest became a popular hub in 2016, due to its low cost, especially for European standards.

More recently Ko Pha Ngan in Thailand, Lisbon in Portugal and many places in Mexico are seeing a surge of nomads.

What the next nomad spot will be is hard to predict. You can study the trends page, to get a rough idea. Nomads seek affordability, mild to warm climates, and above all fast internet, clicking that link might show you the next hotspot.

The rise of an ecosystem

2014's second wave of nomadism also sprung up many more businesses targeting location independent remote workers. Hacker Paradise was the first company organizing group travels for nomads. Soon after Remote Year started offering a similar product. Besides coworking spaces, now coliving spaces also started around the world. In 2015, companies like Selina started offering shared housing with other remote workers in hotspots around the world and Coworker.com started indexing coworking spaces everywhere for remote workers to find spaces to work within cities. In 2016, the first documentary about the rise of digital nomads came out called One Way Ticket. With regular travel and health insurance companies not wanting to insure nomads, in 2017, SafetyWing became the first company to start offering health insurance specifically for nomads.

As with any new market, most companies failed, but a few succesful ones remained and now an ecosystem of companies targeting location independent remote workers is flourishing.

The second wave of nomadism transformed it from a niche fringe enabled by early technology to a socio-cultural movement participated in by hundreds of thousands of people in hundreds of nomad hubs and made it well-known in the mainstream.

2021 - 2028: The third wave: the mainstream

In 2020, the sudden Coronavirus pandemic forced people and companies to adopt and embrace remote work, as the virus caused lockdowns of entire societies for billions of people around the world. This might start the next wave of nomadism as people working from home for the first time will realize they can work from anywhere, and many won't want to return back to the traditional work setup. The effects of this, we are starting to see in 2021 as traveling recovers and masses of people are starting to live nomadically.

Location independence is a direct consequence of the enabling of remote work, and as remote work becomes mainstream in the next decade, it will closely follow in adoption. The prediction is that it will push it into the mainstream permanently starting in high-income regions like US, Canada, Europe and Australia from 2021.

What we're seeing now is the greatest migration in human history. Companies like Airbnb are seeing it happen in their data now too:

5. Millions of people can now travel anytime, anywhere, for any length - and even live anywhere

— Brian Chesky (@bchesky) November 9, 2021

Nomadism as a term will become less relevant and instead we will see the migration to and movement between multiple cities as remote work hubs, which will be places with high quality of life, great affordability and active social ecosystems for remote workers. Different places will cater to different niches and subcultures of remote workers. Not everyone will want to live in the typical hubs like Bali. Think of people living in places where they can work remotely and at the same time actively pursue their sports or hobbies. Ski resorts, cabins in nature or maybe Burning Man-style off-grid villages.

In 2024, Nomad List celebrated its 10 years anniversary and renamed to Nomads.com. It represents the millions of nomads now living and working remotely from around the world, not tied to a single place but making the entire globe their home.

2028 - 2035 - The fourth wave

The prediction is that by 2035 there will be a billion people working remotely around the world away from their home countries at least part of the year.

Where until now it's been mostly people from high-income countries working remotely and going nomad, the most interesting part of the fourth wave might be how it can enable people from South and South East Asia, Africa and other currently low and middle-income countries to work remotely around the world and make it accessible for everyone.

Nomads.com's mission is to accelerate the freedom of global movement enabled by remote work.

Nomads.com finds you the best places in the world to live, work and travel as a remote worker. Every second, it collects millions of data points on thousands of cities around the world, from cost of living, temperature to safety. With that data, Nomads.com gives you an idea of where it's best for you to go.

Nomads.com has much more features than just that though: you can do things like find coworking spaces in each city, see how warm it is in a city in a specific month, search for places with specific climates, read reviews and see who of Nomads.com's members is in a city now or will be there soon.

Nomads.com originally started out for digital nomads but as remote work has become more prevalent, it's evolved into a platform for remote workers living anywhere in the world.

We have a 50,000+ people member base who log their trips to meet other people in the same place, and chat everyday on Telegram to ask questions, share information and make friends. Many of them also host and attend our regular meetups in real life. The goal of Nomads.com's community is to make it less isolating to be a remote worker and since it's a paid membership it offers a way to fund the main site's development of city rankings and data to help people find places to go.

The Nomad Score of cities is based on all the different data points, with highest weight given to cost (should be affordable), current temperatures (should be comfortable), internet speed (should be somewhat fast and usable) and safety (should have low crime). Other indicators are also important like low in racism, gay/LGBTQ+ friendliness, air quality, if it's fun to live and if there's good nightlife.

Throughout the day the site keeps updating its data (including temperatures, humidity, internet speeds, exchange rates etc.) which means that at any moment you'll see the best cities recommended to you. Scores are re-generated every 10 minutes.

The ranking shows considerable changes throughout the seasons. In the summer, places in the US and Europe start moving up while (like Berlin) in the winter Asia (like Thailand) and South America (like Medellin) do very well.

In the last year 1,000,000+ people have used Nomads.com to find 1,377 cities in 190+ countries to live and work. Since its launch in 2014, Nomads.com has received 148,000,000+ visits.

It started out as a crowdsourced spreadsheet:

That spreadsheet held about 25 cities. That was a great start, but crowdsourced data has by nature challenges with consistency. For example, some people have a more expensive taste than others and will tell you the rent in a city is higher than the actual average.

To mitigate this, we've since switched to public data sets by the UN, WHO, IMF, World Bank for things like demographic, crime, safety and healthcare information, as well as public APIs for things like weather, air quality and traffic density. All data is processed and normalized constantly. Practically that means there might be 42 different samples for air quality in Amsterdam, and 9 different internet speed measurements for Tokyo. Our robots will remove outliers, discount older values and calculate median values that have the highest probability of being accurate when you arrive in a place. The more data (and thus samples) is inserted into the site, the more accurate the overall data becomes.

How much it costs to live in a place varies by person. For cost data, our data is within the range of 90% of other cost of living sites. Ratings about cities can be especially subjective. Safety level is a particular datapoint that's highly discussed. Nomads.com uses the most recently available crime statistics as well as armed conflict and political stability data for each place. As with any website with lots of data about lots of cities and countries all around the world, there will always be data points that are not accurate. Even more, many people have a tendency to be overly positive and patriotic about their own city or country, which might not strike with the reality if compared to other places.

We highly suggest to always double check data you find here with other sites before you go travel, to be sure. The nature of data is that the more sources you check, the more broad and accurate idea you get of the reality. Even then, keep in mind that how a place feels to you when you're there can be completely different than what any site, person or app tells you.

There isn't a site with data about destinations to travel that will ever be fully accurate. Data like this is by nature dynamic and subjective.

US AQI is the United States measurement system for air quality as defined by the US EPA. Lower values are cleaner air. A range from 0-25 is great, 25-50 is good, above 100 becomes bad, and above 200 is very unhealthy.

We source 10,000+ air quality sensors from around the world and diplay the air quality measurement at noon local time in every place.

Air pollution kills an estimated 7 million people every year. That's why it should be an essential indicator when choosing where to live.

Internet speeds on Nomads.com are shown as averages of all internet devices like desktop PCs, laptops and smartphones. Yes, maybe you can get 250Mbps in your city. But that's not the average, that's the theoretical maximum as advertised. Remote workers don't care about theoretical maximums, we care about what the speed will realistically be in our hotel, Airbnb, cafe or coworking when we arrive in a city. Which is usually 10 to 50 times lower than telecom companies advertise with.

We use data from internet speed testing websites, internet service providers, public internet speed data sets, as well as measuring internet speed of users on Nomads.com itself. That means for most cities we have hundreds of thousands samples from hundreds of sources to analyze.

Nomads.com lets its vistors and members vote for the best photos for a city. We automatically download new photos from Unsplash and Wikipedia by searching for the city, state and country name. Because the robots don't know which photos are right or which one are the best, we let you vote on it.

In most cases this works but sometimes a photo is wrong. You can help fix this by voting for the right photo: click on a city and go to the Photos tab. Then click on the photo you like most and think is the most accurate depiction of a city.

Votes are counted daily and then new photos are downloaded. We cache them for 7 days to a month so it might take a week or more for photos to be replaced! Be patient.

Nomads.com does not add coworking spaces. We have partnerships with sites indexing coworking spaces such as Coworker.com. Add your space on there, and it'll be indexed by us and show up on Nomads.com. Be patient, because it might take a few weeks!

Nomads.com currently has indexed 100% of cities in the world with a population of over 500,000 people, and 99% of cities in the world with a population over 250,000 people. We are not planning on adding smaller places right now (with a few exceptions like Canggu or Koh Phi Phi which are low in population but popular nomad destinations). Usually the data for the biggest city near a small place is fairly close.

The reason for this is 1) data for small towns is very hard to find, it's usually not in datasets because there's no data collected there, 2) cities follow a power law, which means there is a long tail of tens of thousands of smaller places, we don't have the resources to collect data for all of them, 3) we want to avoid the site becoming saturated with smaller destinations.

It goes a long way back. To start in 2009, when I was studying in Amsterdam I had the opportunity to study abroad. I studied and lived in Korea with my two Dutch friends. Imagine never having been outside of Europe before and being dropped in the middle of nowhere in Seoul and having to figure things out. It was exciting and life changing. Back then I made a YouTube channel for electronic music, and YouTube paid me a few hundred dollars for the ads it ran on it. I knew I had to update my channel when I'd be in Korea, or it would die out. So I bought a small laptop that could barely render videos, and managed to keep my channel up to date and upload a new video every week. That was the first moment I was essentially working remotely away from home and saw it might work.

In 2012, I had almost graduated university with a Master's degree in Entrepreneurship. I just needed to write my master's thesis. Me and my friend Jim went to San Francisco and couchsurfed for months while we both finished off our thesis. I had rented out my room in Amsterdam, so I had to pack my stuff in boxes. When I came back from San Francisco, I hardly unpacked anything. And I realized I didn't need most of my material stuff and started reducing my possessions to what could fit in a backpack.

That same year, after graduating university, I went traveling again and I visited Saint Petersburg in Russia and was there for weeks, and on my laptop I worked on my YouTube channel and coding side projects. Those weeks I realized I didn't really need to be home in Amsterdam, but could pretty much go anywhere, as long as I had income.

In 2013, I did just that. I bought a MacBook and a backpack, packed my stuff, moved out and started traveling. I now had serious ad income from my YouTube channel, about $2,000 to $6,000/mo, so I could live from that. My first trip was almost a year long and I lived in Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Ko Samui, Ho Chi Minh City, Singapore and Hong Kong. It was a life changing year but mostly I discovered that it could potentially work, and probably for way more people than just me. Back then there were maybe 20 to 40 nomads in the hotspot of Chiang Mai. And outside of that, hardly anybody. Nomadism was an unknown micro niche with no real traction.

The first signal I was on to something, was that my super unknown travel blog, which I wrote mostly to keep my mom updated, started getting traction on Hacker News. At the end of 2013, I wrote a recap of my trip from the startup angle, and it went to the front page of Hacker News. That was new because before that digital nomadism wasn't popular so much under techies especially not on Hacker News.

After half a year in the Netherlands, I went on my second trip, I visited Ubud in Bali and there I wondered what more places would be suitable to live and work for people like me, and a site like that would probably make more people realize what I did, that you can probably work from anywhere.

I knew I needed fast internet, nice weather and low cost of living. So I made a spreadsheet, shared it on Twitter and people helped fill it in:

Help me build the definitive list of locations for digital nomads+remote workers, edit w/ me https://t.co/Nqb4eyEAmu pic.twitter.com/DMnVPaYi88

— ؜ (@levelsio) June 24, 2014

That became the basis for this site:

It went straight to the top of Hacker News, Product Hunt and hit Reddit's frontpage:

We did it! @NomadList hit @Reddit's frontpage, the nomad revolution is in effect 😍🚀 thx every1 (and sorry 4 my spam😁) pic.twitter.com/oX03vAmiwV

— levels.io (@levelsio) June 16, 2015

Since then it's been a crazy ride trying to keep up, both personally too and as a business. I used that early momentum to launch lots of things that I hoped would create something sustainable. I started organizing meetups, launched a jobs page for nomads called Nomad Jobs which later spun off Nomads.com as its own business called Remote OK, I created a Q&A forum and a Telegram chat group with thousands of people socializing on it, as well as a social network based on people's trips, and a dating app for remote workers.

The hard work has paid off and Nomads.com has since received 148,998,242 visits, and gets 244,968 monthly visits. It's become the dominant way for remote workers and nomads to find places to live and work and is the most popular site for digital nomads in the world.

Yes, we had it but closed it in 2016 after 6 clones of Nomads.com showed up using our data on Product Hunt, Hacker News and in the iOS App Store and Google Play Store. It caused more trouble than it did good, so it's permanently closed.

The other reason we can't have an API anymore is that a lot of the data we use on Nomads.com is licensed (and paid for) from other APIs (e.g. weather, climate data, traffic data) which we are not allowed to re-distribute.

No, it's not and you should consider it as a public space. Only your direct messages are private and nobody can read them, not even admins. But messages in all channels are public. Most recent messages are shown on Nomads.com Chat to non-members too.

The reason is that we don't want to create an illusion of privacy in the chat. There's thousands people on the Telegram. Any of those people may have created a script/robot that just logs and saves every message anyone posts anyway. There's no way for us to stop that. Anyone can pay the membership fee and join and within 5 minutes be in the chat and read your messages.

That's why you should consider it as a public space. If you'd like to talk in private, switch to DM or to external chat apps.

Nomads.com mostly makes money from membership fees to our website and companies advertising.

Remember all those cool startups you used that were free but then they were acquired, shut down and now don't exist anymore? It's because free apps don't make money, and therefore can't survive:

Someone builds a cool, free product, it gets popular, and that popularity attracts a buyer. The new owner shuts the product down and the founders issue a glowing press release about how excited they are about synergies going forward. They are never heard from again.

Whether or not this is done in good faith, in practice this kind of 'exit event' is a pump-and-dump scheme. The very popularity that attracts a buyer also makes the project financially unsustainable. The owners cash out, the acquirer gets some good engineers, and the users get screwed.

To avoid this problem, avoid mom-and-pop projects that don't take your money! You might call this the anti-free-software movement.

If every additional user is putting money in the developers' pockets, then you're less likely to see the site disappear overnight. If every new user is costing the developers money, and the site is really taking off, then get ready to read about those synergies.

To illustrate, we have prepared this handy chart:

	Free	Paid
Stagnant	losing money	making money
Growing	losing more money	making more money
Exploding	losing lots of money	making lots of money

What if a little site you love doesn't have a business model? Yell at the developers! Explain that you are tired of good projects folding and are willing to pay cash American dollar to prevent that from happening. It doesn't take prohibitive per-user revenue to put a project in the black. It just requires a number greater than zero.

I love free software and could not have built my site without it. But free web services are not like free software. If your free software project suddenly gets popular, you gain resources: testers, developers and people willing to pitch in. If your free website takes off, you lose resources. Your time is spent firefighting and your money all goes to the nice people at Linode.

So stop getting caught off guard when your favorite project sells out! “They were getting so popular, why did they have to shut it down?” Because it's hard to resist a big payday when you are rapidly heading into debt. And because it's culturally acceptable to leave your user base high and dry if you get a good offer, citing self-inflicted financial hardship.

Like a service? Make them charge you or show you ads. If they won't do it, clone them and do it yourself. Soon you'll be the only game in town!

— Maciej from Pinboard.

So if you want Nomads.com to survive, please support it and become a paid member.

Nomads.com is NOT a venture capital funded startup. It's bootstrapped! That means we don't have any external funding on purpose. The problem with so many venture-capital funded startups is that their investors force them to grow fast in user base without making any money in the first few years, to then sell out to BigCo (e.g. Google, Facebook) for tens of millions or billions of dollars, then write a blog post about their incredible journey, then either shut the site down, or fuck over their users by selling their user data.

That sucks, right? We don't get that. We don't like that. And we don't want to do that.

So we'd rather go for higher odds of success, try to make money on day one, and not make a billion dollars but just make good money to live off. Maybe we'd actually get acquired later too. But it'd have to be good for the users in the first place. And there shouldn't be the extreme high growth trajectory which will then F over our customers.

The challenge of going this way is that we can't offer everything for free, like Facebook or Google or any other funded startup does. We have to get money somehow because we need to pay for our costs. We could make money in sneaky ways like selling your user data, but that'd suck and honestly it wouldn't make that much money at this scale. So the fastest way is simply asking you, as a user of this site, for money. That means we can pay our server bills, hire developers and improve Nomads.com every day.

If you like what we do, please support this site and become a paid member.

A good full stack developer is paid $150,000+. A normal VC funded startup probably has 5 engineers. That's $750,000/y. Add some marketing people and you're close to $1,000,000/y in labor costs.

Hosting and bandwidth is relatively cheap but still gets to $12,000/year including backup storage and backup servers. To make the site fast we pay $48,000/year to Cloudflare. You need regular security people to check your server and avoid it getting hacked, which is another $24,000/year. We pay staff to moderate the chat at $36,000/year. Customer support staff is $24,000/year. Using Mapbox's APIs for geocoding and showing maps is not free and costs about $6,000/year for our usage. Using email APIs for sending emails is not free and costs about $12,000/year for our usage. We pay $50,000/year for APIs to collect data about places around the world. For example, the daily weather conditions, air quality and internet speeds in thousands of cities.

That means Nomads.com would not be able to exist if it was a regular startup. It'd lose money.

It's written in HTML, CSS, JS with jQuery for the frontend and PHP with SQLite as db for backend. It's hosted on a single VPS running Ubuntu with NGINX. Nomads.com doesn't use any frameworks except for jQuery. Every part of the site is manually built.

Sure! You can use any data on our site and make screenshots of Nomads.com as long as you reference us as "Nomads.com" (with space in between) and use our logo and link back on every data mention! Thanks :)

We can do custom partnerships, like sponsorships and integrations into the site if they match our brand. Think insurance for remote workers, or coliving platforms. These start at $20,000/month and reach 244,968 monthly impressions. Tweet @nomadlist if you're interested. If you're below this budget, please don't waste your own time and try later when you are.

Go here and click Host A Meetup! If enough people RSVP, we'll make it happen.

We're not taking interviews to instead focus on making Nomads.com better every day! We've tried to answer most questions on this page.

Digital nomads, or location independent remote workers, are people who live at least part of the year away from their home country while working remotely as an employee for their employer, as a contractor for companies or if they have their own business for themselves.

The classic stereotype of digital nomads is that they move fast from place to place every week or few weeks, while working on their laptop on a beach. Not much of that is true anymore in 2024: most people on Nomads.com move only every 4 to 6 months, to the same handful of places, work from coworking spaces or cafes and have close ties to the places they visit and regularly come back to to meet their friends from all over the world. And hardly anybody works from the beach: too much sand, and too much sun glare on your screen.

Just like the traditional nomadic tribes which "follow a fixed annual or seasonal pattern of movements and settlements", remote working travelers do the same. Many like to stay in climates around 23°C/74°F, and will move based on the seasons.

The term "digital nomad" has been used and abused over the last decades, including in shady online courses and get rich quick schemes, and for that reason many remote workers who travel are wary of using that term to describe themselves. Unfortunately the alternative terms haven't taken off yet. The faster that remote work becomes mainstream, the faster the term digital nomad will go out of fashion and we'll see it as normal that people work from different countries based on their personal preferences in living.

There are currently 1 million to 100 million digital nomads in the world in 2024. This is based on the below assumptions:

It's hard to estimate how many digital nomads exist, but let's try with some live data from this site (this paragraph is live updated based on Nomads.com data). To do this we have to make some assumptions though, so take this with a grain of salt.

In the last year, Nomads.com got 2,939,616 visits. About 20% of those visits are unique users, or 587,923 users. Not everyone who visits is already a nomad, probably most are wanna be nomads: but let's assume 25% are nomads or 146,981 people. If we assume Nomads.com captures 10% of the entire demographic of digital nomads in a year (it's uncommon for companies to capture double digit amounts of a market), that'd mean there's 1,469,808 digital nomads.

Nomads.com mostly has an English-speaking Western audience though, which is only 20% of the world. Then again, most of the world is probably not in a position to go work remotely and travel (yet) due to differences in income. If we assume 40% of the world is though (or double the English speaking population), that means we can count 2,939,616 digital nomads.

That's only self-described digital nomads though. If we make the definition broader to people who work remotely at least part of the year in a country different than their home country the number might double to 5,879,232 or triple to 8,818,848 digital nomads in the entire world.

There's actual research that has surveyed this too. MBO Partners concluded "4.8 million independent workers currently describe themselves as digital nomads [in the United States]". The U.S. has a population of ~330 million people. That means 1.5% self-describes as a digital nomad. If we use that percentage for the entire world, we get ~100 million digital nomads. But most of the world isn't as developed as the U.S. Even if we only add Europe: 741 million people * 1.5% = ~10 million digital nomads. Adding back U.S. to that gets us to close to ~15 million digital nomads. MBO's research is within the range of 10 million - 100 million above.

Let's try one more calculation: business travelers. The Business Travel Association reports that in the U.S. alone there are 405 million business trips taken per year with the average traveler taking 12-14 trips. That means there's about 30 million business travelers in the U.S. It is stated in Gallup’s State of the American Workplace Report that 43% of U.S. employees work remotely at least some of the time. If we take 30 million business travelers * 43% working remotely at least some of the time = 12.9 million remote working business travelers. If we add the same % to Europe, that's ~42 million people traveling while working remotely in the U.S. and EU. The estimate based on business traveler and remote work statistics is again within the range of 10 million - 100 million above.

If we check Facebook and search for "digital nomads", the biggest group is Digital Nomads Around the World which has ~200,000 members at time of writing. Let's say that group captures 10% of digital nomads and there's 2,000,000 nomads there. We then only have the predominantly English-speaking Western audience though, which again is only 20% of the world. If we add the rest of the world, that'd be a multiple of this, e.g. 10 million digital nomads. Which is on the lower end 10 million to 100 million but still in the millions.

If we do the same for Reddit, the main subreddit for digital nomads is /r/digitalnomad with over 2,000,000 subscribers. Probably most are wanna be nomads: but let's assume 25% are nomads, that's 500,000 people. If that group captures 10% of digital nomads (not everybody uses Reddit, nor does everybody who is a nomad subscribes to this subreddit), then there's 5 million nomads out there. Since Reddit too is mostly an English-speaking Western audience (e.g. 20% of the world) the real number is a multiple of 5 million. That's on the lower end of the 10 million to 100 million nomads range.

The 10 million to 100 million range with current growth is about in line with the prediction that there will be one billion digital nomads by 2035: