Nomads.com

What Nomads.com actually is

Nomads.com is a website that ranks the best places in the world to live and work remotely. It was originally called Nomad List, launched in 2014, and it has since grown into a combined city database and member community for digital nomads. The header still says "formerly Nomad List", which tells you how long this project has been running.

The core idea behind Nomads.com is simple. If you can work from anywhere, the question "where should I live this winter" becomes a data problem. Nomads.com turns that question into a sortable table covering more than 1,500 cities in 195+ countries, then wraps a social network around it.

Nomads.com was hand coded by Pieter Levels, the indie developer known as levelsio, and it is one of the few products in this space that has stayed independent and continuously updated for over a decade.

The problem it solves

Ask a remote worker where to move next and you get anecdotes. A friend loved Chiang Mai. A coworker hated Bali in rainy season. Nomads.com replaces those anecdotes with structured numbers collected across years of member reports.

Every city page on Nomads.com carries the metrics people actually argue about: cost of living for a nomad, internet speed, air quality, temperature and humidity, safety, nightlife, female safety, LGBTQ+ friendliness, and how friendly locals are to foreigners. Nomads.com offers hundreds of filters, and you can sort the entire ranking by almost any of them.

The default sort on Nomads.com is the Nomad score, a composite grade that tries to answer one question: how well does this city work for a location-independent worker. If you care mostly about cost, sort by cost for nomad. If you care about lungs, sort by air quality. The Nomads.com table reshuffles instantly.

How the data is produced

The numbers on Nomads.com come from several layers. Nomads.com members submit cost reports for cities they live in. The site tracks where members check in through its trips feature. Public datasets fill in the rest, from internet speeds to climate averages.

On top of the raw inputs sit derived scores. The Nomad score is the main one, but the sort menu also offers a Family score, a quality of life score, and variants weighted toward different kinds of travelers. This scoring layer is what makes Nomads.com more useful than a plain spreadsheet, because someone else has already normalized the data.

City pages on Nomads.com also show practical details: median trip duration reported by members, Airbnb prices versus local rent, and the current number of nomads in the city. Right now the biggest hubs on Nomads.com are Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Lisbon, London, and Canggu, each with five-figure numbers of nomads planning to be there this season.

Around the ranking, Nomads.com ships a set of tools that regulars rely on. NomadGPT answers questions about cities in plain language, drawing on the Nomads.com database rather than model memory. An API exposes the data for anyone building their own analyses, and an MCP server lets AI assistants query it live. There is a Climate Finder for seasonal planning, a FIRE calculator for savings math, and a residence calendar that warns you as you approach the 183-day tax-residency threshold in a country.

The community layer

Rankings alone would make Nomads.com a reference site you visit once a season. The Nomads.com community is what makes people stay. Membership is free to join, and the current count shown on the site is 48,682 members, with over 1,500 joining in the past month.

The social features on Nomads.com are concrete rather than decorative. Nomads.com runs a group chat based on Telegram, with more than 15,000 messages sent in a typical month. There is a members map so you can see who is in your city. There is a friend finder and a dating app built on shared interests, because loneliness is the honest downside of this lifestyle.

The strongest feature may be meetups. Nomads.com lists 193 meetups a year across more than 100 cities, from weekly coworking sessions in Da Nang to a Thursday social in Asuncion. The site reports 59,855 people attending, roughly four meetups a week somewhere in the world. If you land in a new city on a Tuesday, there is usually a coffee event within days.

Pricing and access

Joining Nomads.com is free, and the free tier already covers the community basics. For deeper research, Nomads.com sells a Lite membership as a one-time payment of $19.99, described plainly as "billed once, then never again", with a 7-day money-back guarantee. There is no recurring subscription pushing your credit card every month.

That one-time model fits the product. You are buying access to a database you will consult a few times a year when planning a move, not a tool you run daily. Reviews back the value: Nomads.com shows 8,984 customer reviews averaging 9.0 out of 10.

Who it suits

Nomads.com suits remote workers who make real relocation decisions: freelancers planning a winter abroad, couples testing two cities before committing, and families using the Family score to weigh schools and safety. The Nomads.com filter set even covers backpackers, retirees, and expats, so the tool stretches beyond the stereotype of a laptop worker on a beach.

Nomads.com is less useful if you never leave your home city, or if you want a full travel agency that books flights and apartments for you. The product is deliberately a research and community layer, not a booking engine.

A few practical notes round out the picture. Nomads.com works best when you feed it real constraints rather than browsing; members who type in an honest budget get shortlists they can act on. The platform is busiest during northern-hemisphere autumn, when hubs like Bangkok and Lisbon fill up with planned trips, so booking ahead matters in season. And because Nomads.com has run since 2014, the long-term members in the chat have seen most visa regimes and rental scams already, which makes asking a question cheaper than learning a lesson.

If the question on your desk is where to live next month, Nomads.com is the most direct answer available: one table, hundreds of filters, and a decade of crowd-checked data behind it. For a closer look at the workflow, see the Nomads.com city ranking and start from the default sort.