The countries with no nomad visa, and what people do instead

Countries with no dedicated nomad visa in our dataset, ranked by the cost of the cheapest city we track there.

The cheap ones people actually use

Hoi An at $900 a month and Da Nang — our highest-scoring Vietnamese city at 4.4 — are on tourist or business entry with periodic exits. Vietnam has no nomad visa and shows no sign of introducing one, and the community there has run on visa runs and e-visa extensions for a decade.

Chiang Mai sits in a country that does have a long-stay route, which is why Thailand is not on this list. But Cambodia, Laos and Nepal — with Battambang at $700, Pakse at $700 and Dharan at $600 — are all pure tourist-status destinations, and all three are among the cheapest places in the whole dataset.

Georgia is the famous exception and it is not on this list at all, because its 365 days visa-free for 95+ nationalities arrangement is recorded as a nomad route even though it is technically visa-free entry. That distinction is the whole point of this page: what matters is the permission you get, not what the scheme is called.

The expensive ones where the absence is the point

At the other end of the table sit Switzerland, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, Netherlands, Sweden, Canada, United Kingdom. These are wealthy countries with strong labour-market protections and no interest in creating a category of foreign resident who works but does not employ or pay local payroll tax. The absence of a nomad visa there is a policy position, not an oversight, and it is unlikely to change.

Tourist status is not permission to work

The honest position, and the one most nomad content avoids: working remotely on a tourist entry is in a legal grey area in most of these countries and outright prohibited in some. Enforcement is generally light because the activity is invisible — you are typing in an apartment and spending foreign money locally, which no immigration service is resourced to detect or motivated to pursue.

Where it becomes real is at three specific points: at the border on a repeat entry, when you try to open a bank account or sign a long lease, and when you have a tax residency question because you stayed more than 183 days. None of those are visa enforcement. All of them are where the lack of status actually bites.

Where the gap is likely to close

Vietnam, Morocco and Sri Lanka have all been reported at various points as considering schemes, and the direction of travel across the dataset over the last five years has been steadily towards more countries publishing one, not fewer. We update the visa index when a scheme is actually published rather than when it is announced, because the gap between the two is frequently years.