How we choose the 500 cities — and who is missing
Any ranked list of places is really two claims stacked on top of each other. The visible claim is the order. The invisible one — the one that does most of the work and almost never gets stated — is the choice of who was allowed into the list at all. A city that was never considered cannot come last. It simply does not exist as far as the reader is concerned.
This page states both claims for our catalogue of 500 cities: the rule that put a city in, the countries that rule leaves out, the eight things we measure, the much longer list of things we do not measure, where each input comes from, and what would have to happen for money to change any of it. Nothing here is flattering. It is meant to be checkable.
We cover exactly 100 countries and exactly 5 cities in each one, which is where the 500 comes from. The count per country is fixed rather than proportional, so a large country is not allowed to flood the catalogue and a small one is not squeezed out.
The countries themselves were chosen for being places remote workers actually go and can legally stay in for a while. That is a real editorial judgement and it excludes some very large countries. They are named below.
The inclusion rule, in one line
One hundred countries, five cities each. Every country in the catalogue carries the same weight as every other country, regardless of population, land area or economy.
This is a deliberate trade and it cuts both ways. The gain is that the list cannot be dominated by whichever country happens to have the most cities of a given size — you are not reading a ranking of the United States with some foreign entries appended. The loss is that the fifth city in a small country is competing on equal footing with the fifth city in a large one, and those are not equally strong entries. If you rank all 500 together, part of what you are seeing is that some countries had a deeper bench than others.
| Region | Countries | Cities |
|---|---|---|
| Europe | 35 | 175 |
| Americas | 23 | 115 |
| Asia | 21 | 105 |
| Africa | 12 | 60 |
| Middle East | 6 | 30 |
| Oceania | 3 | 15 |
Regions are the six the site navigates by. Europe is the largest block, and that is a fact about where remote workers currently cluster and where long-stay permissions are easiest, not a claim that Europe is better.
Who is not here, and why that matters more than the ranking
The catalogue leaves out some of the largest countries on earth. Among the absent: China, Russia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Iran, Iraq, Ukraine, Venezuela, Myanmar, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Algeria, Angola, Uganda and DR Congo.
The reasons differ. Some are excluded because a foreigner cannot realistically arrange a legal months-long stay while working remotely, or because the practical route to doing so changes faster than we could keep a page accurate. Some are excluded on safety grounds, and some because sanctions or banking restrictions make ordinary remote-work life — getting paid, holding money, buying a flight out — genuinely difficult rather than merely inconvenient.
None of those reasons is a statement about the countries or the people in them, and we want to be careful not to let a coverage decision read as a verdict. But we also will not hide the consequence: this is a self-selecting list. It is a catalogue of places that are open to a particular kind of visitor with a particular kind of passport and income. Rankings built on self-selecting entrant pools tend to be read as if they measured the whole world, and they never do. When you see a city near the top here, the correct reading is “near the top among 500 places that made the cut”, not “one of the best places on earth”.
The eight things we measure
| Input | Scale | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Cost of living | USD / month | A single realistic monthly figure for one remote worker living modestly but not roughing it: rent, food, transport, utilities and a coworking allowance. |
| Remote-work score | 0–5 | The composite headline number. It blends the inputs below with cost. |
| Internet speed | 0–5 | Rated, not a raw Mbps reading. See the caveat below. |
| Safety | 0–5 | General perceived safety for a visitor, not a crime rate. |
| Walkability | 0–5 | Whether daily life works on foot. |
| Air quality | 0–5 | Typical, not live. Live readings are on each city page. |
| Fun & nightlife | 0–5 | Social and evening life available to a newcomer. |
| Weather | 0–5 | An annual figure. It is not the weather in the month you are going, and using it that way is the single most common mistake made with this dataset. |
The eight inputs behind every ranking, table and comparison on the site.
Two of those need a warning rather than a footnote. The weather score is annual, so a city with a glorious summer and a brutal winter can score identically to one that is mild all year — we wrote a whole page about why that misleads. And the internet figure is a rating on a five-point scale, not a measured throughput: it is useful for “will video calls work here” and useless for “will I get 300 Mbps in this apartment”.
What we do not measure at all
This list is longer than the one above, which is the honest shape of the situation. None of the following is in any score on this site, and if any of them is the thing that decides your move, our ranking cannot help you with it:
- Healthcare quality and cost, and whether your insurance is accepted.
- Visa ease for your specific passport. We publish the visa rules we can verify, but the score does not know your nationality, and nationality changes everything.
- Safety for you specifically. Our safety number is a general one. It does not break out risk by gender, by race, by religion, or for LGBTQ+ visitors — and in several cities in this catalogue those differences are larger than the entire spread of the safety score.
- Legal environment for LGBTQ+ people, which in some countries here is a criminal matter and not a comfort matter.
- Disability access. Our walkability figure assumes you can walk.
- Schools and childcare, and anything else specific to moving with a family.
- Tax residency and its consequences — days-present thresholds, double-taxation treaties, what your home country does when you leave. This is the item most likely to cost a reader real money and it is entirely outside our data.
- Noise, and the quality of a place to actually work from at 3am when your client is awake.
- Seasonality, beyond what our daylight and holiday pages compute separately.
- Anything at neighbourhood level. A city score is an average over places that can differ from each other more than two cities differ from each other.
- Language accessibility and how far English gets you day to day.
- Trajectory. We describe a city as it is, not whether rents there are rising 20% a year, and for a stay of six months or more that is often the thing that matters.
Where each number comes from
| Data | Source | How it is refreshed |
|---|---|---|
| Time zones, DST rules | IANA Time Zone Database | Follows the database; the clocks compute from it directly. |
| Sunrise, sunset, daylight | Computed in-house from solar geometry | Calculated per city from latitude, longitude and date. Not fetched. |
| Live weather and air quality | Open-Meteo | Live on each city page. |
| Currency rates | ExchangeRate-API | Indicative rates, not transactional quotes. Never use them to price a transfer. |
| Public holidays | Official government publications | Checked against the issuing authority for each country. |
| Nomad visa rules | Official immigration and consular publications | Re-checked periodically; each visa page carries its own check date. |
| City photography | Wikimedia Commons and public photography APIs | Credited on the photo credits page. |
| Cost of living, scores, rankings | Compiled by the TimeDateLive editorial team from public data and community input | Reviewed periodically. This is the input with the most human judgement in it and the one you should treat with the most suspicion. |
The last row is the important one. The first seven are mechanical; the eighth is us, and we would rather say so than let a table imply otherwise.
The fuller version of this, including the licences involved, is on the data sources page.
Money
Nobody pays to be in this list. No city, tourist board, coworking space, visa consultancy, relocation agency or property developer has paid for inclusion, for a position, for a score, or to be excluded. We have never been offered money for any of those things and we would refuse it, because a ranking that can be bought is worth nothing to the person reading it. Where we earn anything at all it is disclosed on the affiliate disclosure page, and no affiliate relationship touches any number on this site.
The site carries advertising and some outbound links may earn a commission. Neither touches the data: the scores are computed before any of that exists, an advertiser has no route to a ranking, and no page has ever been written or altered because of a commercial relationship. The editorial policy is the formal version of this paragraph.
If you think a number is wrong
Tell us and we will look. The useful form of that message names the city, names the figure, says what you think it should be, and says how you know — a receipt, a speed test, a government page, twelve months of actually living there. We would rather have one specific correction than fifty general complaints, and we have changed figures on the strength of exactly that kind of message. The address is on the contact page.
The one thing we will not do is change a number because someone with an interest in the city would prefer a different one.
Common follow-up questions
How many cities and countries does timedatelive cover?
Exactly 500 cities across exactly 100 countries — five cities in every country, so no country is over-represented because of its size.
Why are China, Russia and India-sized absences missing from the list?
Some large countries are absent because a foreigner cannot realistically arrange a legal months-long remote-working stay, because the practical rules change faster than a page can stay accurate, or because sanctions and banking restrictions make ordinary remote-work life genuinely difficult. It is a coverage decision, not a verdict on the country, but it does make the list self-selecting.
Can a city pay to be included or to rank higher?
No. No city, tourist board, coworking space or agency has paid for inclusion, for a position or for a score, and we would refuse such an offer. Advertising and affiliate links exist on the site and are disclosed, but they have no route to any number in the data.
What does the remote-work score not include?
Healthcare, visa ease for your particular passport, safety differences by gender, race or sexuality, disability access, schooling, tax residency, noise, neighbourhood variation, language accessibility and cost trajectory. If one of those decides your move, the score cannot answer it.
Is the weather score for the month I am travelling?
No. It is an annual figure, so a city with a hot summer and a hard winter can score the same as one that is mild all year. Use the daylight and climate pages for the specific month instead.