Why Digital Nomads Are Growing: IT Workers, AI, and the Decoupling of Work from Place
Jacky Wang··8 分钟阅读·
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Airport lounges, coworking spaces in Bali, apartments in Chiang Mai, and small Portuguese coastal towns have become temporary offices for some developers, designers, marketers, and founders. These workers are not merely replying to email during a holiday. They build their income, careers, and collaboration around the internet while periodically changing where they live.
They are commonly described as digital nomads. Yet a digital nomad is not simply someone who works from home, nor someone pretending to work while travelling. It is a way of separating work from the employer’s office and deliberately combining it with travel, temporary residence, or cross-border life.
The important story is not the laptop on the beach. It is the changing relationship between work and geography.
How did digital nomadism emerge?
No single invention created this lifestyle. Four long-term changes converged.
Work output became digital
Software, designs, advertising accounts, financial models, consulting reports, and online courses can all be produced and delivered through a network. When an outcome does not depend on a factory, laboratory, or face-to-face service, location becomes less important to production.
IT met this condition early. Its essential tools—source repositories, cloud servers, documentation, test environments, and communication systems—are now largely online.
Companies learned to operate distributed teams
Remote work existed before the pandemic, but the large-scale experiment after 2020 forced more organizations to build remote onboarding, video collaboration, asynchronous processes, and cloud access controls. Later return-to-office policies did not erase that infrastructure.
Digital nomadism consequently expanded beyond freelancers. MBO Partners estimated that the United States had 18.5 million digital nomads in 2025: 11.2 million held traditional jobs and 7.3 million were freelancers, self-employed people, or other independent workers. Nomadism is no longer synonymous with freelancing.
Earning and spending locations separated
A remote professional may serve clients in a high-income market while living in a lower-cost city. This “geoarbitrage” is neither available to everyone nor free of social consequences, but it changed how some knowledge workers choose where to live.
Online banking, cross-border payments, electronic signatures, global hiring platforms, short-term rentals, and coworking services also turned many logistical problems into purchasable products. For people who need to receive money across countries, hold multiple currencies, or pay an overseas account, tools such as Wise multi-currency accounts and international transfers can reduce the friction of opening accounts, converting currencies, and arranging international payments. They do not replace local banking, tax reporting, or foreign-exchange compliance, and availability and fees should be checked for the relevant country and transaction.
Disclosure: This is a referral link. The author may receive a referral reward if a reader signs up through it; this does not change the article’s assessment of whether the service is suitable.
Governments created legal entry paths
A tourist visa is not automatically permission to work. Cross-border remote work can create tax, social security, employment, and data-compliance obligations. As the population grew, more governments introduced digital-nomad visas or long-stay programs. MBO Partners counted 64 countries with such visas in 2025, although income thresholds, tax treatment, family rules, and permitted work vary widely.
More visas reduce administrative friction; they do not eliminate compliance. Being technically able to log into a company system and being legally permitted to work long term are different questions.
How many digital nomads are there?
There is no authoritative global count. Some definitions include only long-term international travellers. Others include domestic multi-city living, workcations, and temporary travel. Studies may use self-identification, visa records, platform membership, or accommodation behavior.
MBO Partners provides one of the more consistent annual U.S. series. Its 2025 survey estimated 18.5 million American digital nomads, up 2.2% from 2024 and 153% from 2019, representing roughly 12% of the U.S. workforce. Its methodology applies travel-time and location criteria rather than counting every remote employee.
These figures describe the United States under one research definition. They should not be presented as a global workforce census.
How many work in IT?
MBO Partners’ 2024 occupation distribution placed information technology first, at 19% of digital nomads. The same year’s total was 18.1 million. Multiplying the two gives an estimate of about 3.44 million U.S. digital nomads working in IT.
That “roughly 3.4 million” figure is this article’s calculation from the survey’s total and occupation share. It is not a directly published official count, and it does not cover IT workers outside the United States.
The more useful insight is that even within highly remote-compatible IT work, only part of the workforce is truly nomadic. Many “remote” jobs still restrict employees to a state, country, or time zone because of payroll entities, employment law, client data, security audits, export controls, and collaboration requirements.
Software development, product design, cloud operations, data analysis, technical writing, digital marketing, and online consulting are relatively portable. Data-centre operations, hardware laboratories, classified environments, on-site customer work, and tightly synchronous roles are much harder to make nomadic.
Why is it easier than it was ten years ago?
Cloud infrastructure moved the office machine onto the network
Code lives on Git platforms. Test environments can be created temporarily. GPUs are rented on demand. Databases and observability systems can be accessed through controlled networks. Developers no longer have to sit next to company servers, and production tools no longer travel in a suitcase.
Collaboration tools made more work asynchronous
Video calls handle the moments that require real-time conversation. Project systems, shared documents, code review, and screen recordings reduce the need for everyone to be online together. Mature distributed teams do not stay on video all day; they write down decisions, context, and ownership so work can move across time zones.
Connectivity and security tools reduced mobile-work risk
Faster mobile networks, eSIMs, password managers, multifactor authentication, device encryption, zero-trust access, and VPN technologies such as WireGuard make work on temporary networks more manageable. The site’s Ubuntu WireGuard guide covers encrypted tunnels, but organizations still need device management, least privilege, and data classification. A VPN is not a complete security program.
AI is becoming a portable support team
Coding assistants, translation, meeting summaries, research, and content tools reduce the overhead of working across languages, time zones, and functions. In MBO Partners’ 2025 survey, 83% of digital nomads described themselves as early technology adopters, 78% said technology made them more competitive, and 85% said their work depended on digital connections and technology.
AI does not automatically turn everyone into a digital nomad. It is leverage: experienced workers with trusted client relationships can spend less time on repetitive and administrative tasks, while workers without differentiated skills may face greater global competition.
The costs missing from the beach photographs
Digital nomads exchange commuting for time-zone friction, unreliable networks, isolation, constant accommodation and transport planning, healthcare questions, tax uncertainty, and difficulty building long-term community.
MBO Partners reported in 2025 that only 11% had remained digital nomads for more than five years, while 73% had done so for three years or less. The study estimates that 19% to 22% return to a more conventional lifestyle each year. Travel is also slowing: average locations visited fell from 7.2 in 2023 to 6.2 in 2025, while average time per stop increased from 5.4 to 6.4 weeks.
This points toward “slomading”: staying for one or two months instead of changing cities weekly, trading novelty for stable connectivity, routines, and deeper social relationships.
The future is not universal travel; it is configurable work location
Digital nomads will not replace offices. Manufacturing, healthcare, logistics, laboratories, field engineering, and many services remain tied to place. Even IT companies face security, regulatory, and organizational limits on international work.
The more likely change is that location becomes a policy rather than a fixed answer: which roles may move across cities or countries, for how long, with access to which systems, under whose tax and data responsibility, and with what emergency return requirements.
For individuals, the foundation is not a lightweight laptop. It is portable career capital: demonstrable expertise, stable clients or employment, cash reserves, asynchronous communication skills, and a basic understanding of visas, tax, and insurance.
Technology has made nomadism easier to enter, not cost-free. Its lasting significance is not permanent travel. It is that more knowledge workers can choose where work happens.
Jacky Wang
8 分钟阅读
