What Is a Digital Nomad? An Honest Answer From People Who Feed Them

You have heard the phrase. Someone at a wedding said it about themselves and you nodded, because the alternative was admitting you were not entirely sure whether it meant a person with a job or a person avoiding one. Good news. You are about to never have to nod uncertainly again.

We are well placed to answer this, because we run a coliving house in Spain that is, on any given week, roughly seventy percent digital nomad by volume. A fourteenth century masia in the Montseny, an hour north of Barcelona, ten rooms, twelve to fifteen people, fibre in the thick stone walls and oak forest out the window. Several hundred of these creatures have passed through our kitchen. We have watched them work, argue about the best flat white in a village of four hundred people, and attempt to explain their job to a Catalan grandmother. So here is the definition, from the inside.

The one sentence version

A digital nomad is a person whose work travels with them, because all it needs is a laptop and an internet connection, so they choose to live in places other than the one their employer or their clients happen to be in.

That is the whole thing. Everything else is decoration.

The word "digital" is doing the heavy lifting: the job exists on a screen, which means it can happen anywhere the screen can connect. The word "nomad" is doing the romantic lifting: instead of staying put, the person moves, sometimes every few weeks, sometimes settling somewhere for a season, sometimes drifting for years. Put them together and you get someone who earns a normal living in an abnormal number of postcodes.

What a digital nomad actually does for money

This is the part people get wrong. A digital nomad is not a job. It is a way of arranging a job. The jobs underneath are ordinary.

The nomads who have stayed with us have been software developers, product managers, UX designers, copywriters, video editors, an accountant, two therapists who see clients over video, a woman who runs the entire back office of a dental practice in Ohio from a bedroom that looks at a mountain, several founders of small companies, a translator, a couple of people in crypto whose work we never fully understood and stopped asking about, and one man who did something with spreadsheets that paid remarkably well and that he described differently every time.

The common thread is not the industry. It is that none of them needed to be in a specific building to do the work. If your job can survive you being three hundred kilometres from the office, it can probably survive you being two thousand. That realisation, arriving in a few million inboxes at once around 2020, is most of why the word is suddenly everywhere.

What separates a digital nomad from the neighbours

It helps to say what a digital nomad is not, because the edges are where the confusion lives.

A digital nomad is not a tourist. A tourist is on holiday and the money is flowing out. A nomad is working and the money is flowing in. Same beach, opposite direction of cash. This distinction matters more than it sounds, because it is the reason a nomad stays for two months instead of two weeks, and the reason they end up knowing the name of the woman at the bakery.

A digital nomad is not simply a remote worker. Every digital nomad is a remote worker, but most remote workers are not nomads. Your colleague who works from her spare room in Manchester and has done so for four years is remote. She is not nomadic, because she is not going anywhere. The nomad is the remote worker who took the "work from anywhere" clause literally and then kept moving.

A digital nomad is not an expat, exactly, though the two blur. An expat has moved to one other country and settled. A nomad has, in principle, not settled, which is either the appeal or the problem depending on the week and the person. Plenty of nomads quietly become expats the moment they find a place they stop wanting to leave. We have watched it happen at our own dinner table more than once.

Where they go, and the mistake most of them make

The classic map is Bali, Lisbon, Barcelona, Mexico City, Chiang Mai, Medellin, and a rotating cast of cheap and photogenic cities with good coffee and fast wifi. Spain has quietly become the European default, which is a longer story we tell in our guide to Spain for digital nomads, and there is a full explanation of the visa side in the Spain digital nomad visa for Americans.

The mistake, and we say this with love because we watched ourselves make it too, is that most first-time nomads land in the middle of a big city, pay city prices for a small flat, work alone, and are surprised after two months to feel oddly lonely in a place full of people. The nomad life sold on Instagram is a laptop on a beach. The nomad life as actually lived is often a person in a rented studio, eating dinner over the sink, three time zones from everyone who knows them well.

This is not a tragedy and it is not the point of this article to fix it. But it is why coliving exists, and why a house like ours is full. Put ten of these people under one roof, give them a proper desk and a shared kitchen and a Saturday hike, and the loneliness that quietly follows the lifestyle around simply has nowhere to sit down. The work still gets done. It just gets done next to people.

So, are you one?

Here is the pocket test. If you can do your job with a laptop and wifi, and you could in theory do it from a different country next month without anyone important noticing, you have the raw material. Whether you become a digital nomad depends only on whether you decide to move. The technology stopped being the obstacle years ago. The obstacle now is mostly the inertia of a comfortable sofa, which is a very good obstacle and no shame to anyone who keeps it.

And if you do decide to move, our one piece of advice, from a house that has hosted the whole spectrum, is this: go somewhere with other people in it. The freedom is real and worth having. The isolation is also real and nobody puts it in the brochure.

Frequently asked questions

Do you need a special job to be a digital nomad? No. You need an ordinary job that happens to be doable on a laptop. Developers, designers, writers, marketers, consultants, online therapists, remote customer support, and small business owners all qualify. The job is normal. The arrangement is what makes it nomadic.

Is a digital nomad the same as being self-employed? Not necessarily. Some nomads are freelancers or run their own companies, but plenty are full-time employees of a company that lets them work from anywhere. The defining feature is location independence, not who signs the paycheck.

How is a digital nomad different from a remote worker? All digital nomads are remote workers, but a remote worker becomes a nomad only when they use that freedom to live in different places rather than staying put in one home. Movement is the difference.

Do digital nomads pay tax? Yes, though where is the complicated part and depends on citizenship, residency, and how long they stay in each country. Many countries now offer a specific digital nomad visa with its own tax terms. We keep the actual numbers out of a definitions article on purpose, because a wrong figure is worse than none. The Spain digital nomad visa guide covers the Spanish version properly.

Is being a digital nomad lonely? It can be, especially in a city where you work alone in a rented flat. It is much less so in a coliving or any setup that puts other people around you. The lifestyle does not have to be solitary. That is largely a choice about where you base yourself.

Further reading

If the idea has its hooks in you, here is where to go next:

• The Digital Nomad Lifestyle, Honestly, what the days actually feel like, minus the beach photo.
• Spain for Digital Nomads, why everyone is here and why most are doing it wrong.
• Coliving in Spain: A Practical Guide to Your First Month, the antidote to the lonely studio.
• Coliving in Montseny, the actual masia, the actual forest, an hour from Barcelona.