The digital nomad dream has a darkish aspect

At the beginning of 2020, having set herself up as a communications strategist for NGOs and social impression organisations, Sophie give up her everlasting function and moved to Bali. Regardless of the uncertainty of the progressing pandemic, she discovered the house she wanted to grieve her mom, whom she had misplaced not lengthy earlier than. And to Sophie’s delight, the digital nomad way of life has fulfilled lots of her expectations.

She quickly observed, nevertheless, a definite bias towards her alternative of location. Some potential shoppers wouldn’t even entertain a dialog, as a result of she was based mostly in Bali. “I couldn’t make sense of it — it felt so silly,” she explains. “I’m working with organisations like Greenpeace and the UNDP to instigate constructive international change, in addition to being a somatic trauma counsellor, so when folks assume I’m not doing ‘severe work’ out right here, it grinds my gears.”

Now she has higher management over the initiatives she pursues, Sophie tells employers she lives in Indonesia, and is clear about precisely the place as soon as she’s secured a contract. It’s the identical for a lot of of her distant working associates in Bali, who don’t disclose their location to distant employers for worry of dropping work.

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Getting snubbed from initiatives, haemorrhaging your financial savings on fundamental dwelling prices and consistently edging on burnout are normally the hardships related to full-time home-based working in a metropolitan centre like London, New York, or Amsterdam.

Regardless of the dominant utopian narrative offered within the media — assume bossing it on the seaside, bottomless cocktails, and a perennial tan — the fact of balancing international journey with distant work has all the time been onerous. And it’s solely getting more durable: surging prices, political turbulence, and fickle visa guidelines are pushing digital nomads in new instructions.

Forking out for freedom

New analysis from the Dutch neobank Bunq has revealed the hidden monetary, emotional and psychological toll, with its survey of 5,000 employees throughout Europe who determine as digital nomads and/or dwelling internationally. Certainly, only one in 5 say that working internationally has positively impacted their profession, with Britons particularly (25%) saying their profession has truly suffered on account of being a digital nomad.

It’s actually not the image that wistful salaried staff conjure when daydreaming at their desks. For consultants within the area, nevertheless, the robust actuality is broadly identified. “A lot of these experimenting with the life-style can’t maintain it,” says David Cook dinner, an anthropologist and researcher at College Faculty London who specialises in distant work. “Sustaining self-discipline, staying productive, and discovering the house to focus will get worse over time, not higher, alongside all the opposite exterior circumstances.”

Managing the finance aspect is an space of explicit concern. Bunq discovered that 17% of research contributors really feel much less financially safe, whereas 14% are spending greater than anticipated. Though this cohort isn’t weighed down by a mortgage or an enormous rental deposit, they do should consider native taxes, medical payments, nomad visa prices, insurance coverage claims, authorized help, and banking charges.

The highest unexpected bills, in accordance with Bunq, embody medical bills (16%) and native taxes (15%). Much less frequent, however equally unsettling, is that 5% of nomads throughout Europe have needed to pay for emergency evacuation prices.  

All that’s earlier than budgeting for the rise in on a regular basis dwelling prices, which have impacted home-based and distant employees alike. Everyone seems to be feeling the pinch, with the vast majority of Europeans (67%) noticing the rise in meals and beverage costs previously 12 months, as per information from the Dutch agency Innova Market Insights.

Day-to-day budgeting trumps a laundry record of different anxieties too. Within the first quarter of 2025, McKinsey’s ConsumerWise analysis discovered that Europeans ranked rising costs and inflation as their primary concern over points comparable to job safety, worldwide conflicts, local weather change, and political stress, to call a couple of.

Geoarbitrage — decoupling life and work from a particular location to make your earnings go additional —  has lengthy been a apply employed by digital nomads. Coined by Tim Ferriss in his 2009 ebook The 4-Hour Workweek, the tactic is now typically being reconsidered on account of elevated outgoings.

“Lodging has all the time been the most important problem, however in the previous few years, after COVID-19 and the warfare in Ukraine, it’s considerably costlier, generally €200 further a month for a similar place and circumstances haven’t modified,” says Anna Maria Kochanska, a strategist who advises governments on digital nomad coverage, and has been nomadic since 2017.

Anna Maria tends to keep away from Airbnb, negotiating straight with condominium house owners for midterm leases, besides, her rental outgoings are a lot greater in 2025. “I’m based mostly in Barcelona for the time being, and naturally, one answer is to go to new and rising locations, with fewer vacationers and nomads, however my journey prices are going up too, so I’m transferring round much less incessantly.”

Fashionable digital nomad hubs like Barcelona, Lisbon, and Mexico Metropolis are dropping their reasonably priced edge, as obtainable housing dries up, costs rise, and neighbourhoods are reworked to fulfill the wants of itinerant information employees. Native residents are tiring of the impression distant employees are having, and have been protesting towards the inflow.

The souring of once-beloved hubs is main nomads to look elsewhere and decamp to extra off-the-beaten-track locations. Based on 2025 information from Nomad Listing, which tracks cities, places and distant employees by means of the journeys booked on its platform, cities like Sarajevo, Portimao, and Varna are rising as among the hottest amongst nomad, with 46% of them staying in a single metropolis for lower than seven days, and 33% staying between seven and 30 days.

Fatigued by visa strategising

Whereas some digital nomads are travelling much less and avoiding established hotspots to mitigate rising bills, others are turning their backs on location independence completely. Kach Umandap has been nomadic since 2014, initially beginning as a digital assistant, then transferring into running a blog and e-commerce.

“For a Filipino like me, there are a ton of limitations on the locations I can go to visa-free, however I used to be decided to go to each single nation on the earth,” says Kach. “I needed to be actually strategic about planning and already determine the place I might go afterwards, which is maybe not the carefree picture you’ve gotten of digital nomad life.” 

Throughout sure weeks, Kach would spend extra time arranging visas and doing journey admin than her precise job. She typically needed to do costly visa runs to neighbouring international locations to reset the clock. For instance, when based mostly in Vietnam, she wanted to journey to Laos each 30 days, pay for transport, a lodge, and a reserving agent every time. Having achieved the objective of working from all 193 UN member states and spending hundreds of {dollars} annually on visa functions, Kach has returned to the Philippines to slowly set up her base there.

Though new digital nomad visas are being rolled out consistently — the most recent embody Taiwan and the Philippines — many are launched hurriedly, so governments can have a horse within the race within the international expertise tussle. Each has wildly completely different eligibility standards and infrequently excessive minimal earnings necessities. Iceland, for instance, requires a month-to-month wage of $7,763 (€6,868). Few digital nomads truly even interact with these visa packages.

Grappling with a messy panorama and muddy definitions of “a digital nomad,” these eligible are being deterred. For nomads who do attempt, an utility can take months to course of, and placing one in solely to seek out out you aren’t eligible on account of poor signposting is vastly worrying.

“We’ve got the perfect way of life on the earth, but the worst ecosystem,” says Gonçalo Corridor, CEO of NomadX, a world platform for digital nomads and president of the Digital Nomad Affiliation Portugal. “Nomads have the numbers, power, and financial drive, however the cohesion is lacking.”

What’s extra, nomads with ”weaker” passports, comparable to these from Syria, Pakistan, and Nigeria, have a tough time travelling in comparison with these from the EU and North America. With ongoing conflicts, political instability, and altering immigration legal guidelines, crossing the following border for a interval of distant work is getting extra intimidating by the day. 

Folks drop off from full-time digital nomad existence for a lot of causes although, from loneliness and transferring too typically to coping with paperwork and the precarity of their careers. “It’s not for everybody, and though many individuals experiment with the life-style, they uncover the actual battle a couple of months to a yr in,” says Cook dinner, of UCL. “It will get more durable over time, so profitable, long-term nomads should be disciplined, resilient and self-motivated — in some ways, the right neoliberal individual.”

Cook dinner is in his eighth yr of amassing information in Chiang Mai, Thailand with the identical group of individuals and estimates that 90% of the nomads in his analysis hand over the life-style within the first yr or two. “They have an inclination to start out hyper cell, however find yourself craving place and being embedded in communities, which isn’t simple to maintain whereas dwelling on the transfer,” explains Cook dinner. “That is compounded when their earnings state of affairs is precarious.”

A robust pull, regardless of the fee

With 60 million digital nomads predicted to have joined the ranks by 2030, the life-style — regardless of, and even due to its challenges — stays alluring. For the information employees who’re forcibly displaced on account of warfare, local weather catastrophe, or fears of persecution, digital nomadism gives the prospect to earn, even when on the transfer.

For right this moment’s distant employees, change is the one fixed, and roaming patterns will proceed to shift, as folks adapt and discover methods to thrive amid international change. They could select to housesit by means of platforms like Nomador and Trusted Housesitters as a substitute of renting, develop into an e-resident in a rustic like Estonia to maximise revenue and minimise price, or journey much less and embed themselves deeper in a neighborhood. In any case, the identical autonomy and adaptability that pulls folks to this way of life additionally allows them to beat the hurdles that come their means.

Again in Bali, the housing and rental market is booming — and the clamour about overtourism is getting louder. To sluggish its growth and ease native worries, the Balinese officers have floated the concept of a vacationer tax, set to price round $100 (€88) per day.

Within the present local weather, Sophie is paying £750 (€881) a month for her cabin in Bali — simply £70 (€82) shy of the room she rented in London — so she can not save and is feeling the strain to take care of her earnings. “The one factor meaning I could make it work is the tradition and way of life — for instance, I work when my shoppers are sleeping, due to the completely different time zones,” she explains. “It eases my anxiousness and allows me to resolve issues extra creatively.” 

As lots of her associates return house on account of rocketing prices, Sophie is dedicated to staying put. “I’m in a privileged place to be engaged on some massive initiatives, and am paying taxes within the UK and contributing to the native economic system right here,” she says. “I’ve to maintain checking in on myself, however I’ve come to a really acutely aware choice: loving Bali and this life as a lot as I do, why ought to or not it’s any cheaper than the place I began?”