Politics are making it more complicated. Many countries are taking a less friendly stance on foreigners occupying valuable real estate and pushing prices higher without assimilating the culture. Like anything, the real answer is, “it depends”.
I live in Portugal, and there is a robust debate around this topic. It's far from ridiculous, and nationality laws are in the process of changing as a component of this discussion.
Also, many countries are "tightening down" their golden visa programs or removing them entirely. I have a friend who works for a golden visa consultancy, and they're already in the process of pivoting because of so many changes.
> I live in Portugal, and there is a robust debate around this topic.
Assumed it was somewhere in that region because my European friends usually talk about it. Personally find it bizarre because the few thousand digital nomads are barely moving the needle compared to tourism or normal migration. It comes across as people getting very upset about a minor issue because they have rigid ideological views that prevent them from touching the main one. A convenient scapegoat but nothing will change in the slightest if the Portugese DN visa is scrapped.
You've created the easiest pathway to a EU passport and then wonder why the planet flocks there.
The simple solution here is to build enough housing to meet demand.
I agree with you. It's purely political. The country has shifted to the right because of rhetoric around immigrants being the reason for everyone's problems. I do not agree with it, but I'm seeing it every day, and it does suggest that DN may be less viable as time goes on.
I don't think it's ridiculous, you might even argue we're at "peak" digital nomad. There's definitely pushback building, here's an example from recently:
‘There’s an arrogance to the way they move around the city’: is it time for digital nomads like me to leave Lisbon?
I know the guardian can be very hand wringy, but digital nomads are going to get swept up in the general anti-migration narrative that most populaces are now feeling. Anti-mass-migration in most populations, anti-tourist in Venice, anti-nomad in Portugal.
Locals are feeling betrayed by their politicians and foreigners are an easy target to point at and say "why is this happening". The Lisbon example is especially egregious, with the digital nomads being taxed less than locals. Locals are subsidizing their lifestyles.
Same feelings towards non-nomadic Expats in The Netherlands - because of the "30% tax free for Expats".
Meanwhile the truth is that some 15-20 years ago - Dutch government introduced that "30% tax rule" as a cost saving measures.
Previously expats in The Netherlands would collect bills/receipts for expatriation related expenses (e.g. language classes, international school for kids, differences in cost of living/housing ...etc).
And processing those tax claims was so much bureaucracy that Dutch government realized just giving expats 30% of gross income tax free for 10 years (reduced to 8 and then 5 years) is both less money than actual expenses used to be, and much less paperwork/cost.
And let's not forget that (definitely for non-nomadic expats, though arguably also for digital nomads) country didn't need to pay their birth/growing up, education ...etc.
And (especially for digital nomads) might not need to cover the costs for their old age health, retirement and such.
> but digital nomads are going to get swept up in the general anti-migration narrative that most populaces are now feeling
Can you name one digital nomad visa that has been scrapped in the last year or two?
I can name a few dozen that have been implemented.
When I started in 2017 there was maybe 3 or 4 places you could move on Earth with a six figure USD salary as a remote worker, it was always a grey zone to go places on tourist visas but that's how people rolled and countries knew how good a deal it was for them compared to raising/educating/supporting locals so let it slide. There's over 70 legal valid options now for remote workers in 2025.
The easily proven evidence doesn't stack up with the narrative people and newspapers likes the Guardian are trying to push for clicks.
I personally couldn't care less if locals don't like me. My own countrymen are jealous about me having a good paying remote job too.
It doesn't matter what they contribute to the government and local communities, the digital nomad visa wasn't built with that in mind.
Digital nomads make landlords and property owners richer so there's a high chance the system will be allowed indefinitely since a lot of Croatians are property owners so they directly or indirectly benefit from this gentrification.
The system will only be challenged in politics once enough young Croatian voters find themselves priced out of their own cities like in Barcelona or Lisbon.
> The system will only be challenged in politics once enough young Croatian voters find themselves priced out of their own cities like in Barcelona or Lisbon.
Outside of the direct coastal areas that already struggle with this issue from tourism, the brain drain that followed the 90s Independence War still left a sizable amount of empty real estate just sitting around.
And even in the direct coastal areas... a place to live is cheap. In doubt, just buy it, usually young people pool together some cash from relatives and some from bank loans to get started. Or they build it piece by piece, floor by floor, just like my grandparents did. Work a few years in a good job abroad, return to the homeland, build a house.
>young people pool together some cash from relatives
Where's my cash from my relatives? Guess I should have picked better parents.
>Or they build it piece by piece, floor by floor, just like my grandparents did.
Yes I'm sure building a house today is like in the 1950s. Same rules and regulations. I buy a small piece of land in the city and can just start laying bricks after work and then live in them.
> With what money? Doesn't matter, just buy it bro!
Work in Germany, set aside money, go back to Croatia. Land and construction costs are really cheap compared to Germany. It's a common thing in Croatia.
> Yes I'm sure building a house today is like in the 1950s. Same rules and regulations. I buy a small piece of land in the city and can just start laying bricks after work and then live in them
You still can do that today and extend an existing structure after the initial permit/inspection. All you need is the lower stories be solid enough statically, and you can't use that to get around zoning limitation on building height/story count. And yes, you can even do that in the motherhood of bureaucracy that's colloquially called Germany.
The local economy also gains from the small but continuous spend on restaurants and cafes etc, and the spend is encouraged to be year-round and not just in peak holiday season.
>The local economy also gains from the small but continuous spend on restaurants and cafes etc
Speaking as someone living in Austria ATM, that's the worst kind of industry you want to boost if you want more money in the community, as it only creates dead-end low wage unskilled jobs(often taken by seasonal immigrants who send that money home) and is rife with cash-driven tax evasion, leading to more wealth and income disparity. If you get more and richer tourists, you won't get better paid baristas or waiters with better pension plans, but wealthier business owners who will buy more properties and flashy cars while still hiring the cheapest most desperate labor possible from abroad.
As a government, you should do the opposite, focus on attracting or creating highly skilled innovation jobs (like NL or Sweden did) and the hospitality jobs will follow naturally.
There's a reason countries where the tourism industry is a big part of the GDP, are low income countries.
It's been around for a while, with its advantages and drawbacks. What's going to happen in the future to make it more attractive? The current trend is on deglobalization
No, it's a transitionary step before Governments introduce more comprehensive taxation regimes. You already can't work even a single day in many developed countries with becoming liable to the local taxation regime and as desirable locations developer, they inevitably have to restrict access due to overcrowding and taxation (along with visa availability) is the key lever available.
What AI is doing very effectively is allowing tax authorities to identify digital nomads illegally working in jurisdictions without registering for tax.
I think the purpose of digital nomad visa is exactly to get their taxes. As opposed to say Germany where it's close to impossible to work for a overseas company even as a citizen, not to say get a visa for that
No, that's not the case for the most part. For example, the Croatian digital nomad residence permit that this article is about provides an exemption to income tax for earned income while working for a foreign company and living in Croatia. This means that most digital nomads can work tax-free in Croatia.
This contrasts with, for example, Ireland, where not only does a digital nomad's income become subject to local tax on day 1, so does their company (if they are the beneficial owner).
Croatia's approach is excellent if you want many wealthy (compared to local standards) people to bring an influx of hard currency into your economy, at the cost of inflation. Eventually the benefits outweigh the costs and the government begins to subject digital nomads to local taxation and stricter visa rules.
The benefit is similar to remittances - you get a huge influx of hard currency as digital nomads freely spend their high salaries. That does create jobs and raises tax revenue through consumption taxes and downstream employment. It's very similar to tourism - digital nomads are effectively semi-permanent tourists.
However, like tourism, it causes inflation, prices out locals, and can detract from more sustainable, natural economic growth (the so-called tourism curse). So like tourism, developed economies inevitably place limits on digital nomads.
That can take the form of stricter visas, capped numbers, or by implementing tax reforms.
Since digital nomads use the same public infrastructure and amenities as the people who live and work there, why shouldn't they also pay the same taxes?
> As opposed to say Germany where it's close to impossible to work for a overseas company even as a citizen
That's by design of our employment laws. We are the ones whose social security system will have to pay up when the employer closes down shop or fires their remote employees over night, and we are the ones whose health system has to take care when people burn out from being overworked, so we demand that employers create a local subsidiary with people and bank accounts we can hold accountable when laws are being violated.
Oh, and we also want to make sure that people and companies pay their taxes.
I wouldn't say it is necessary by design, as it is not forbidden and definitely possible. It's just Germany can't handle the complexity of its bureaucracy. Every new government promises to alleviate the bureaucratic burden, but in the end only adds exceptions on top of exceptions making the burden even heavier. So for remote work setup either the worker or the employer should carry it, and it's rarely worth it.
Well, that's what the problem is. When all you as an US startup want is to hire a single or maybe a dozen Europeans, you can either go and pay them in cash or as sole-proprietors and leave the employees to deal with the rest (as long as the US gov't gets its taxes, you're in the clear from the IRS point of view), you hire some intermediate body-shop, or you do it the proper way and pay a loooooot of money for a subsidiary.
You can contract with companies wherever you want as a company but you can only have an employment contract with a company based where the employment laws of your country applies.
It’s actually a terrible toxic idea that guarantees that anywhere beloved, prized, peaceful or beautiful becomes unaffordable as international jet setting tech people nurse a single cappuccino with their laptops in family-run cafés all around the world while driving up the price of property.
The only way a country should approach digital nomads is to charge them massive flat fees and change the law to allow local planners to zone them out of most accommodation.
The arrival of digital nomads will not fundamentally drive up a country’s or a city’s housing prices, as they usually only rent. Renting has no direct impact on the development of local housing prices. On the contrary, the influx of digital nomads can actually increase the income of most low-cost countries, since they will inevitably spend money locally.
Renting does have direct impact on housing prices. As the price landlords pay for units is based on rent they can get. If rent they can get goes up, so does the amount they are willing to pay.
more renters than apartments/homes => rents go up => cap rate goes up => new home prices go up. it isn't instant obviously, but if the renters keep coming and new developments don't accelerate, prices will keep going up. see bay area for a market that keeps going up for two decades or whatever.
> Renting has no direct impact on the development of local housing prices.
Ehh??? Sorry this is wholly untrue. Landlords get easy, often zero-deposit mortgages on houses and then let them out to make money. Of course this affects local house prices, because it absorbs housing stock.
Particularly in long-established, geographically bounded, attractive European towns and cities where there is no possibility of growing the housing stock fast enough to compete.
More to the point, the reason we know the arrival of digital nomads will drive up house prices is that they absolutely already have done, everywhere they have been courted.
I am living in a Digital Nomad hotspot, and you are painting a dystopian picture that is not reality. Most DNs I know work either from Home or Coworking Spaces, which have sprawled up everywhere. You pay around 150-250€/month for your own desk.
There are also now "coworking cafés", that usually target DNs and Coworkers by charging a flat fee (i.e. 5€ a day) a give either a free coffee included, or 10%-20% rebate on drinks/food. These cafés are specifically setup for Laptops (i.e. single table layouts). Other cafés that had those "nursing people" simply put up signs disallowing laptops - which is at every café owners discretion to do so.
In my experience, the local starbucks is crowded with tourists and their laptops (or tablets with keyboards), but these folks are not DNs, they are just waiting for their plane or airbnb to get ready.
Regarding property price and high rent, this discussion is pretty stupid. Every country wants richer-than-average people to come and pay taxes and/or spend their money. I often hear the bogus argument that DNs don't pay taxes which is bullshit, because even DNs pay taxes indirectly, as every amout they spend is someone elses taxable income (this includes rent). If they don't come, those incomes won't exist and no taxes be paid.
Most places in Europe bring in millions of poor immigrants, while some countries (most prominently spain) the people complain about rich immigrants...
I live in what's not exactly a digital nomad hotspot, but they do come. You pay 150€/month for a coworking space in a city where some people pay 300-400€/month rent. These digital nomads come here, pay absurd amounts of rent without blinking an eye.
And the tax thing is not a bogus argument. When people only pay taxes indirectly, they are tourists. Digital nomads pay _much_ less tax overall than other people, because people who pay income tax pay indirect taxes as well. If the digital nomads don't come, they also wouldn't raise rent and café prices for everyone around them. You come here, register yourself as a freelancer and pay income tax? You're very welcome in my book. But if you come to the country to leech off its cheap prices but don't pay income tax, you can go back where you came from.
We bring in millions of poor immigrants for various reasons: It's the human thing to do, these immigrants do cheap and hard labor that a lot of natives won't do (think construction, food delivery, etc.) and as such even provide benefits to us.
Digital Nomads mostly aren't immigrants. They come for a limited time, don't provide much to the local economy outside spending some money (and even then it's not that much because a lot of them come to cheap countries to live for cheap and save money) and then leave again. It's not really comparable.
> When people only pay taxes indirectly, they are tourists. Digital nomads pay _much_ less tax overall than other people, because people who pay income tax pay indirect taxes as well
Bad argument, as the alternative is the DN (just as the tourist) simply not coming to the island. If a DN spends 2000€ a month, that is 2000€ taxable income for someone else. If the DN doesn't come someone else makes 2000€ less of income. This does not compare to people living in the place, as they are there no matter what. Every cent of foreign money flowing into your economy ON TOP is a bonus. It is only bad if it removes someone else who would spend that money, but that is not the case.
And if you would argue that the economy does not need more foreign money and you do not want productivity and wealth increase and have stay things as they are, you are advocating socalism - look at cuba, venezuela or argentina how that worked out.
Well, that only counts if you see the DN as a net positive. Similar to tourists, a lot of people see DN as a net negative because they spend some money, sure, but they also raise rent and hospitality prices. This can harm local communities and economies because it may benefit few people over many or change where people have to go live.
Places relying on tourism as economic activity are very susceptible to economic crisis and it can even go as far as suppressing generation of jobs in other sectors and people leaving because you only find jobs in tourism or you can't afford to live in the city because Digital Nomads live there already. This is obviously exaggerated to make a point, but I think the point still stands in smaller scale.
Foreign money flowing in does not need to be a bonus. DN have the potential to change the microeconomy and in ways that affect your macroeconomy much more than just money flowing in.
Take a place like Barcelona, a famous example for people not being able to live there anymore due to high prices. On top of that, a lot of digital nomads don't interact much with local culture. When people start leaving, is the influx of DN money really still a net positive? Especially considering some of them don't even pay income tax?
I don't want to demonize immigration, but people moving somewhere and treating it like a cheaper version of their hometown is not a positive in any way, culturally or economically.
I am not arguing for socialism by saying that people coming and spending some money (not even that much) is not a sustainable way to do economy. I've got no problem with foreign investors building things that are actually valuable to the economy by building up industry, creating jobs or whatever. Cuba, Venezuela and Argentina have a whole lot of different problems and the reasons they are in the positions they are are much more nuanced than "socialism bad".
> Take a place like Barcelona, a famous example for people not being able to live there anymore due to high prices.
I always hear this bullshit "People can't afford to live there anymore". That is complete nonsense, because unless there are deserted buildings and empty apartments, people DO live there and people CAN afford it. Just not you.
There are plenty of them out there, but they will expect to hire you are a freelancer/contractor, not an employee. Hiring an 'employee' across borders, even in the EU, is a lot of work, unless you use a third-party.
The advantage is you (worker and company) usually pay less taxes, but there are a few disadvantages that put most people off - need to deal with taxes, may need to pay your own social insurance, banks may make it harder to get mortgages. The 'protections' of employment at the end of day means nothing in most EU countries.
(Been working like this for well over a decade - never going back to a job with required office hours again)
Even I, who doesn't require anyone to be in any sort of office (we don't even have one) only hire people from the same country my company is registered in. I've hired full time employees from other countries before, but it's quite the hassle bureaucracy wise.
So yeah, I'm sure it's possible to find remote work from Croatia, especially in Europe cause it's a bit less hassle to employ someone across borders between EU countries. But I do think the chances of finding even a remote job are higher if you're based in a country with plentiful employers.
I work mostly remote, but do have those days that I am required to be on the office per month, and when working from another EU country is allowed, usually requires approval and is regulated how many days per month as well.