Methodology

This page explains how we research, score, and maintain the country and city guides on Nomad Almanac. If a score or a claim on this site looks off, this is where you can see how we got to it and check it against the same sources we used.

Research process

Every legal, tax, or residency claim starts from a primary source. We cross-reference before publishing, and no single secondary write-up is treated as authoritative on a rule that affects your money or your status.

• Immigration and visa authorities. Visa routes, eligibility, income thresholds, and processing times come from the official immigration ministry or visa portal of each country, not from agency marketing pages.
• Tax authorities and tax codes. Residency triggers, rates, special regimes, and treatment of foreign income come from the national tax authority and the text of the relevant law, with the original linked where a country publishes only in its own language.
• Cost and connectivity data. Rent ranges, cost of living, and internet speeds are built from current market listings and recent measurement data, refreshed rather than carried over from year to year.
• Lived-experience sources. Neighborhood notes, social and dating context, and on-the-ground detail draw on recent first-hand accounts, used for color and never as the basis for a legal or tax claim.

The two scores

Every place carries two distinct scores. A country gets a Nomad Friendliness score for its legal and tax setup. A city gets a separate Nomad Score for livability. We keep them apart so the map can color countries by how easy they are to stay in legally, while city cards rank by how good the daily life is. Both run on a 1 to 5 scale and are rounded to one decimal.

Overall score (country)

A country’s Overall score is a weighted average of the six things that most decide whether you can base there well, every one of which you can also sort and recolor the map by. Cost of living carries the most weight, because it shapes daily life on a remote income more than anything else.

• Cost of living, weighted 25 percent
• Tax efficiency, weighted 20 percent
• Quality of life, weighted 20 percent
• Visa ease, weighted 15 percent
• Nomad community, weighted 12 percent
• Dating and social life, weighted 8 percent

Quality of life is the umbrella for the lived day to day: it folds safety, internet, climate, healthcare, and infrastructure into a single score rather than scattering them into separate numbers. Nothing feeds the Overall that is not in this list, so the ranking is exactly the six pillars you see, with nothing hidden behind it.

These scores describe the legal and structural reality of a place, not how strictly it is enforced. A tax-efficiency score reflects what the law says a resident owes, not the odds that an authority notices foreign income. Where the law and what actually gets enforced diverge in a way that matters to a nomad, the country’s tax or visa page says so plainly, and frames it as a risk to weigh rather than a workaround to rely on.

Nomad Score (city)

Each city is rated on eight livability components and combined the same way. Legal and tax factors deliberately do not enter the city score, because those live in the country’s Nomad Friendliness. The weighting leans on affordability and internet, the two things remote workers feel first.

• Affordability, weighted 22 percent
• Internet, weighted 18 percent
• Safety, weighted 15 percent
• Coworking, weighted 12 percent
• Weather, weighted 11 percent
• Walkability, weighted 8 percent
• Nomad community size, weighted 7 percent
• Nightlife and English proficiency, averaged together, weighted 7 percent

How we re-rate

When conditions change, we adjust the underlying component scores and recompute the composite from the formula. We never edit a composite score directly. That keeps every Nomad Friendliness and Nomad Score traceable to its parts rather than to a gut feeling.

Content standards

Pages state the rule, date it, and link the source. We avoid promotional language, we do not rank places to sell them, and we do not publish a number we cannot tie back to its components. Money figures are given with the currency stated, never as a bare amount that could be read as either dollars or euros.

We do not accept payment from visa agencies, relocation firms, tax advisors, or tourism boards in exchange for coverage or a higher score. Nothing on this page or anywhere on the site is legal or tax advice.

Update cycle

Content is reviewed and updated when any of the following happen:

• A country changes a visa, residency, or tax rule we cover
• An income threshold or fee is revised
• Rent or cost of living shifts enough to move a component score
• Recent reports show conditions in a city have changed materially

Every page shows a last-updated date so you can judge how current it is. We do not refresh that date without making a substantive change to the content behind it.

Corrections and feedback

We would rather be accurate than be right. If you have lived somewhere we cover and found our information out of date or wrong, tell us through the contact page. Include the specifics: what is wrong, what you saw, and when. We verify corrections against the primary source before publishing them, and every report helps.