The European Digital Nomad: Where to Next?

By Dr Mike Talbot, EU Mediation CEO and Founder

There has always existed a proportion of remote workers who don’t have a permanent or single place to plug in and sit down to work. Affectionately referred to as the ‘Digital Nomads’, wherever they lay their laptop, that’s their home (with apologies to Marvin Gaye/Paul Young). Of course, since the advent of lockdowns, furloughs, and the explosion of COVID-induced remote working, their number has swelled.

These workers have also realised that they can go anywhere they choose: if you are going to be sitting in a wi-fi-enabled café holding a Zoom meeting, it doesn’t matter if your view from the café window is of the gorgeous Atlantic coast of the west of Ireland, the breath-taking Finnish Fjords, or a quaint Greek fishing village.

In my own travels with EU Mediation, I am struck by how many more multi-national remote workers I encounter in public places around Ireland and mainland Europe. And some EU countries have become very welcoming of these groups: Portugal, for example, introduced its ‘Non-Habitual Tax Residency’ (NHR) in January this year, offering a flat rate of 20% to attract the nomads. These workers tend to be medium-to-high earners, so they are welcomed by landlords, café owners, etc, whose customers the nomads will become.

But there is a problem. With 50% of Portuguese workers on an average of €1,000 per month, and with the nomads arriving in high numbers (Lisbon saw 16,000 extra people arriving in the wake of the non-resident tax-ceiling initiative), this group has been having an impact on inflation. There is a similar pattern elsewhere in Europe but, just in Lisbon, there has been a marked increase in short-term rental units, an associated increase in rents, and even a hike in the cost of eating out.

So, Portugal has changed its mind. The NHR has been dropped, and the disincentive to stay in Lisbon has caused what some are even calling a ‘brain drain’. According to Gonçalo Hall, the CEO of Nomadx, a global platform for digital nomads based in Portugal, the nomads are now moving off to Spain or Dubai.

I have written before about how working remotely obviously has an impact on people’s relationships with colleagues, but this is a new dimension to the trend of increased remote working: conflict with the locals! We have seen the change from the norm of the employer dictating where you will work to the new norm of workers deciding for themselves where their base(s) will be. But this current trend, of people coming to work in towns and cities where they haven’t been invited, represents a new dimension in work-related conflict.

The Lisbon locals’ disaffection with the digital nomads is also reminiscent of the anti-tourism protests in Spain earlier this year, in response to what the natives consider to be ‘over-tourism’. We haven’t yet seen people on the streets with anti-digital-nomad banners(!), and don’t expect to, but the future of the wandering worker, and the degree to which they are welcomed into their chosen and changing workplaces, remains to be seen.