The Countries with the Most Digital Nomads, Mapped and Ranked
A new study found where the people who can work from anywhere are choosing to live.
With most countries dropping their pandemic-mandated restrictions and with remote work still on the rise, moving abroad, to another city, or from country to country surely seems like a winning idea for those who want to experience the world while still keeping their job.
The concept, which has gotten a lot of buzz recently, is that of the digital nomad culture, which is exactly what it sounds like—being constantly on the move while remaining digitally connected both to work but also to keep in touch with your friends and loved ones through messaging and social media.
There are some places, though, that are more popular for digital nomads than others. The reasons vary, and have to do with anything ranging from how easy it is to get a visa to the presence of digital infrastructure and so on. Spain, for example, recently launched an actual digital nomad program, but it isn't the only one—more than 40 countries now offer variations of it, and you can check out the full list of them right here.
To figure out exactly where digital nomads are traveling and "settling down," Resume.io recently conducted a study through Instagram, and came up with a ranking of the countries with the most digital nomads in the world. To create the ranking, the team analyzed thousands of #digitalnomad Instagram posts, and preprocessed them to rid the dataset of spam accounts and bots. Then, by looking at the Instagram location from the post's geotag or the country's name mentioned in the caption, they were able to assign each post to a country and add up the final numbers of estimated digital nomads.
The US sits at the top of the list with an estimated number of 210,664 digital nomads, and it is followed by Spain's 125,038. Third on the list is Thailand, which has an estimated count of 124,729 of them. However, according to the findings, it is London that has the most vibrant digital nomad Instagram community in Europe and the world. When it comes to our continent, the Big Apple is the absolute digital nomad capital of both US and North America.
Take a look a the top ten countries for digital nomads below, as well as the full map showing how each country in the world stacked up:
1. US
2. Spain
3. Thailand
4. Mexico
5. France
6. Indonesia
7. Portugal
8. Italy
9. UK
10. India
