A consistent seven-year survey series puts America's digital-nomad workforce at 18.5 million and still growing, if slowly. Step outside the US and the same population is measured at anywhere from roughly 35 million to 80 million — a reminder that a fast-growing workforce segment is also a poorly counted one.
Since 2018, the staffing and independent-work firm MBO Partners has run the same annual survey question past a fresh, nationally weighted sample of American workers: do you describe yourself as a digital nomad, someone who regularly works remotely while travelling? The 2025 wave — fielded in April 2025, the 15th consecutive year of the series — counts a respondent as a digital nomad only if they self-identify as one, combine work with travel, and spend at least 30% of the year travelling.1 On that definition, the count reached 18.5 million, a rise of 2.2% on 2024 and 153% on the pre-pandemic baseline of 7.3 million in 2019.1 The series is self-reported and commissioned by a company with a commercial interest in the remote-work market, so it is treated here as attributed industry data, not official statistics — but its year-on-year growth rates match independently across each year's separate release, which is the closest thing to corroboration a privately run series can offer.1
The pandemic-era surge (2020–2022) has given way to a much flatter trend: growth has run at 2–5% a year since 2022, consistent with a workforce segment that has finished its initial expansion and is now settling into the mainstream rather than continuing to double.1
No government or international body tallies digital nomads the way it tallies, say, tourist arrivals or work-visa grants — there is no agreed legal definition to count against. Published global estimates for 2025 range from roughly 35 million to 80 million, depending on whether the source extrapolates from MBO's US survey, from a community platform's self-selected membership, or from something in between.2 None of these methodologies has been made fully transparent enough to referee the gap, so the honest reading is a wide, unresolved range rather than a single global figure.
MBO Partners' survey measures how many Americans call themselves digital nomads and how they work; it does not ask, or publish, where in the world they are.1 The "best places for digital nomads" lists that fill that gap are composite suitability scores — built from cost of living, safety, internet speed and tax rules — not counts of where nomads have actually gone. One widely shared 2025 ranking of 1,370 cities said as much directly: its methodology explicitly excluded real visitor data "to avoid skewing results by short-term popularity."5 On that ranking Bangkok placed first and Thailand supplied more top-100 cities than any other country5 — a scoring outcome, not a census.
The nearest thing to real behavioural data is Nomad List, a subscription community where members self-report their current city; it is genuine check-in data, but drawn from a self-selected membership that skews Western, English-speaking and tech-sector.2 What is measurable with more confidence is the supply side: of the 64 nomad-visa schemes indexed by Global Citizen Solutions in 2025, the Americas hold 23 (36%) and Europe 21 (33%) — together 69% of all programmes — against 13 in Asia (20%), 6 in Africa (9%), and just one in Oceania, Australia.3 (Other trackers count the same landscape differently, from the high 40s to around 60, depending on which schemes they classify as genuine nomad visas rather than adjacent remote-work or freelance permits.4) Put the two findings side by side and there is a mismatch: formal visa supply is heaviest in Europe and the Americas, yet popularity-style rankings consistently put Southeast Asian cities at the top, plausibly because many nomads there simply stay on tourist entry rather than apply for a dedicated visa.5
Two of the more established programmes show how differently a "digital nomad visa" can be defined. Portugal's D8 visa, launched in October 2022, is open to non-EU/EEA/Swiss nationals who can prove monthly income of at least four times the Portuguese minimum wage — €3,680, or roughly $4,210 at today's exchange rate, as of 2026 — plus about a year's savings buffer (€11,040) and private health insurance.6 The visa itself costs roughly €110–300 plus a further ~€170 residence-permit fee, and official processing runs about 90 business days, though a case backlog at Portugal's immigration agency, AIMA, has pushed some applicants' waits to 6–9 months as of mid-2026.6 The most specific issuance figure we could find puts more than 2,600 D8 visas granted by 2024, with American applicants the largest single group, followed by Brazilian and British nationals6 — but that number comes from a visa-agency estimate, not a government release, since Portugal's own migration statistics do not break the D8 out as its own category. It may already be well out of date.
Indonesia's equivalent, the E33G "Remote Worker" visa introduced in April 2024, sets a far higher bar: proof of at least $60,000 in annual income from a foreign employer or client (roughly $5,000 a month), plus a minimum bank balance and international health insurance.7 The government fee is about 7 million rupiah (roughly $430–530), rising to $600–1,600 once agent and ancillary costs are included, for a one-year permit.7 Sources disagree on what happens after that first year — some describe multiple renewals, others a hard two-year cap — and we could not find an authoritative Indonesian government source that settles it, or any published count of how many E33G visas have actually been issued.7
There is no agreed legal or statistical definition of "digital nomad," so every count is really a count of whoever fits that source's working definition — a remote employee on a two-week trip, a freelancer who never returns home, and a retiree wintering abroad on a laptop are sometimes all included and sometimes not. MBO Partners' own methodology has not been made fully public, and no independent body has audited it or the rival global estimates against a common yardstick. No source we could find publishes an actual geographic breakdown of where nomads are located at a given time; the popularity rankings that stand in for this measure attractiveness, not headcount, and Nomad List's real check-in data comes from a self-selected, unrepresentative membership. On visas specifically: we could not find a government-published count of Indonesia's E33G visas issued, nor an official Portuguese figure for the D8 specifically, since Portugal's migration statistics report residence permits by broader category rather than by visa sub-type. Sources also disagree on the E33G's renewal terms, and we could not resolve which account is current.
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