Answers
This is the part of timedatelive that is written rather than generated. Every page below answers one specific question that came up often enough to be worth doing properly, and every number in them is computed from our own datasets or from a source we name in the page itself.
Nothing here is a listicle. If a page says a city gets nine hours and forty-eight minutes of daylight on the shortest day of the year, that figure came out of the same solar geometry an almanac uses, and the page tells you which day, which correction and which time zone rule it used to get there.
Daylight, sunrise and sunset
How much light each base actually gets, and when.
How much daylight do you actually get in December?Sunrise, sunset and total daylight on 21 December for 33 remote-work bases, computed from latitude and longitude. Las Palmas gets 10h 21m. Tromsø gets none.Which cities go dark before 5pm in December?The northern-hemisphere remote-work cities where the sun is down before 17:00 on the shortest day, with exact sunset times.Where noon is not noon: clock time against sun timeIn some cities the sun peaks nearly two hours after midday. We computed the gap between solar noon and clock noon for all 500 cities we track.Where does daylight barely change all year?Cities where the longest and shortest days of the year differ by under half an hour. Computed from latitude for all 500 cities we track.Where do you get 16-hour days in June?Midsummer daylight, sunrise and sunset for the northern cities with the longest days of the year — computed from latitude, not copied from anywhere.Which cities suit early risers?The cities where the sun is up early even on the worst day of the year, computed from latitude and time zone for both solstices.Winter sun and winter daylight are not the same thingJanuary temperature and December daylight for ten verified cities, side by side — and why sorting on one gives you a different answer from sorting on the other.How much daylight do you lose by moving north?A latitude-by-latitude ladder of December and June daylight, from Singapore to Reykjavík, so you can see what a specific move is actually worth.
Time zones and client overlap
Where a working day still lines up with the people paying you.
Which cities overlap both London and New York working hours?Every city in our data sharing five hours with a London working day and four with New York, computed from the IANA time zone database. Two regions manage it.Which warm cities keep a full London working day?The 26 cities that share all eight hours of a London working day, which of them keep it through British Summer Time, and what each costs.Which warm cities keep a full New York working day?The 36 cities that share all eight hours of a New York working day in January, what each costs, and which drift when US clocks change.Where should you not live if your clients are European?Fifty-six of our cities have zero overlap with a London working day. Where the dead zone starts, what it costs, and how far west you must move to fix it.Where should you live if your clients are Australian?Every city with at least five hours of a Sydney working day, what each costs, and why the overlap gets worse rather than better in the Australian summer.How much does daylight saving change your client overlap?286 of the cities we track shift their overlap with London between January and July. Which zones move, by how much, and why Chile swings two full hours.Which places use half-hour time zones, and what breaks?India, Sri Lanka and Nepal sit on offsets that are not whole hours. Here is every city affected, why the offsets exist, and what it costs you in practice.How do people actually work European hours from Asia?What time a London working day starts on your clock in eighteen Asian cities, and which split-shift arrangements people actually sustain.
Nomad visas, read properly
What the income floors, fees and validity periods really mean.
Nomad visa income requirements, divided by what living there actually costsThe income requirement means little on its own. We divide every nomad visa income floor by the cost of the cheapest city we track in that country.Which nomad visas $2,000 a month actually reaches10 countries publish a nomad visa income floor of $2,000 a month or less. What each one really asks for, what it costs, and how long it lasts.How long each nomad visa actually lastsEvery nomad visa in our dataset ranked by validity period, with the issuing country's own wording alongside — where the caveats actually live.What nomad visa applications actually cost to fileEvery published nomad visa application fee, cheapest first, plus the fee amortised over the months of permission it buys. The range is more than a hundredfold.Which nomad visas do not require health insurance10 of the 52 nomad visa routes we track do not require health insurance — and the reason each one is exempt matters more than the fact.How long each nomad visa takes to processEvery published nomad visa processing time, ranked on the worst case rather than the midpoint, and read against how long the resulting permission lasts.The countries with no nomad visa, and what people do instead48 of the 100 countries in our visa dataset publish no dedicated nomad visa, including some of the most popular bases there are. What that means in practice.The nomad visas you cannot simply renewNamibia, Croatia, Slovenia and Japan write a renewal restriction into the validity period itself. What each means, and why short permissions cost more.
City data, honestly
What our own numbers say once you stop cherry-picking them.
Where cheap living and good internet actually overlapCost and connectivity correlate at +0.69 across our 500 cities. These nine are where the relationship breaks in your favour — no cheaper city connects better.What $1,500 a month actually buys$1,500 is almost exactly the median cost across our 500 cities. Here is what the same money buys in Asia, central Europe and Latin America.Where safety does not cost extraSafety correlates with cost at only +0.47 in our data, far weaker than internet quality does. These 26 cities rate 4.5+ for safety at $1,300 a month or less.The cheap cities where the air is the catch13 cities under $1,300 a month rate 2.8 or worse for air quality — including Chiang Mai, which carries the joint highest overall city score in our dataset.Cheap cities you can actually walk23 cities rate 4.4+ for walkability at $1,300 a month or less. Almost all of them share one cause: they were laid out before the car and never rebuilt for it.The best city in each region under $1,200 a monthUnder $1,200 a month you are choosing between regions, not cities. The best of each on our own scoring — and what each one is asking you to give up.What our city score actually measuresWe correlated our headline city score against each sub-rating across 500 cities. It tracks nightlife at +0.84 and safety at +0.02. Here is what to use it for.Where our own city data disagrees with itselfEvery city where our own ratings point in opposite directions — high overall score with poor safety, or top safety with a low score — and why.
Method and judgement
How we check things, and where the data lets you down.
How we verify temperature dataThe rule every temperature figure must pass before we publish it: a stated 1991–2020 normals period and a named meteorological agency. Twenty of thirty failed.Why annual weather scores misleadOur weather rating covers the whole year, so filtering on it for a warm winter returns the Bulgarian Black Sea coast. The mistake, and how to avoid it.How much does the Chiang Mai burning season really matter?Chiang Mai PM2.5 by month from IQAir's historical record — 98.7 µg/m³ in March against a WHO guideline of 5 — and what that means for a long stay.Is Malaysia any good in November and December?The northeast monsoon hits Malaysia's east coast, Sarawak and Sabah — not Penang, Langkawi or Kuala Lumpur. What MetMalaysia says, and what it means for winter.Does a South African visa refusal stop visa-free entry on a British passport?A refused visa and a legal bar to entry are different things under the Immigration Act 13 of 2002. What sections 29 and 30 cover, and when overstaying matters.How to read a cost of living numberWhat our monthly cost figure covers and excludes, the three ways cost-of-living data goes wrong, and how to use the number as a ranking not a budget.What a time zone does not tell youUTC offset, longitude, latitude and working hours are four different things. Madrid runs an hour ahead of its own sun, and half-hour zones break naive maths.How to choose a winter base: a nine-step checklistLatitude before climate, time zone before city, seasonal evidence before annual ratings. Nine decisions in the order that prevents common winter-base mistakes.
How this site is built
The inclusion rule, what we do not measure, and who pays for what. Nobody.
How we choose the 500 cities — and who is missingOne hundred countries, five cities each. The inclusion rule, the countries we leave out, what we measure, what we do not, and where the numbers come from.How the six related cities are chosenThe method behind the six alternatives on every city page: relevance, diversity, novelty and full coverage, with the measured before-and-after.
How to use this section. The pages are grouped by what they are about, not by how important they are. If you are choosing a winter base, start with the daylight group. If you have clients in one place and want to live in another, start with the time zone group. If you are trying to work out whether a nomad visa is realistic on your income, start with the visa group. Every page links to the others it depends on.