Digital nomad visas, country by country

A digital nomad visa is a residence permit for people who earn their money somewhere else. You get the right to live in the country. You do not get the right to work in it. Taking a local job, or billing a local client, is normally the one thing the permit forbids. You show a remote income above a monthly threshold, a clean criminal record, an address, and health insurance. In return you get one to two years, renewable. What varies is how much income counts as enough, and what counts as adequate insurance.

Where a country publishes a number, the European permits in our set mostly land on 30,000 euros of medical cover, and several programmes outside Europe ask for 50,000 US dollars. Treat those as the paperwork floor, not a sensible amount of insurance. A travel policy usually stops at 90 days, and a nomad visa runs for a year or more, so the policy expires inside the permit. If the country insists on a locally licensed insurer, no international policy will satisfy it.

The cover these permits are actually asking for lasts the whole permit. Nomad insurance is built for that. A 90-day travel policy expires inside it.

If you need one policy that clears the paperwork and keeps running between countries, see our guide to digital nomad insurance that meets visa minimums.

Applications rarely fail because someone had no insurance. They fail because the policy did not match the wording.

• The dates do not cover the permit. A trip policy runs for months. A permit runs for a year. The certificate shows both.
• Repatriation of remains is missing. Where a country names that clause, strong medical cover is not enough.
• The insurer is not licensed locally. No amount of international cover changes that answer.
• The cover is below a stated minimum. Where none is published, adequate means a serious hospital admission in that country, not the cheapest plan.
• The document is wrong even though the policy is right: a partner's name, a screenshot, a receipt, or a certificate that does not name the country. Ask for a certificate with your passport name, the policy period, the territory, and the benefit amounts.

Renewal asks for the same proof again, on a policy that still runs to the end of the new term. A one-year policy bought for the first application expires in the middle of the second.