What we found checking every digital nomad visa

isvisarequired.com · 2026-09-13

Dense Tokyo skyline at golden hour, the red-and-white Tokyo Tower rising at centre among Minato high-rises.
Tokyo at golden hour. Japan's real income floor is ten times the figure most nomad-visa sites print. · Photo: David Kernan / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Say you're pricing up a year of remote work in Japan. Until recently our own directory told you the income requirement was ¥1,000,000 a year. That sounds doable on a normal salary. Japan's Immigration Services Agency actually requires ¥10,000,000, which puts the visa out of reach for most people who would consider it.

That wrong figure was ours. Our digital nomad directory carried income thresholds, government fees and durations for 37 countries with no source attached to any of them, and the numbers were roughly the ones you'll find on every other nomad visa site. That isn't a coincidence and it isn't a defence.

So we read every field off the page published by the government that issues the visa, then handed each finding to a second reviewer whose only job was to disprove it. 218 values changed. Five programmes turned out not to exist at all, which is its own article.

What was wrong

Japan was the largest single error, out by a factor of ten. Thailand's was the oddest. We showed a US$200 government fee, where the Long-Term Resident visa costs 50,000 baht a person, roughly US$1,400. The fee was the least of it. A work permit is not granted to the Work-from-Thailand Professionals category, and the well-publicised 17% flat tax applies only to Highly-skilled Professionals, not to remote workers. If the tax rate was your reason for choosing Thailand, read that sentence again.

We published a monthly threshold Belize has never stated. The Belize Tourism Board gives one figure and it is annual: US$75,000 for an individual, US$100,000 for couples and families — US$6,250 a month for a single applicant. Anyone who budgeted off our figure was planning for a different visa.

Malaysia was wrong twice over, wrong currency and wrong tier for most applicants. We listed RM 24,000 a year, about US$5,400. MDEC's official FAQ requires US$24,000 a year for tech professions and US$60,000 for everything else, so anyone outside tech was looking at five times what we published. That is the difference between a visa you can plan around and one you can't.

The UAE was the rare case where we'd set the bar too high, at US$5,000 a month against an official US$3,500. Being wrong in a reader's favour is still being wrong, and it may have talked someone out of a visa they qualified for.

Almost every error above pointed the same way, making a visa look easier to get than it is. That is the direction numbers drift when they are copied between sites rather than read off a government page, and it is why two sites agreeing tells you nothing at all.

Bangkok's high-rise skyline behind the grass islands and still water channels of Benjakitti Forest Park.

Bangkok. Thailand's Long-Term Resident visa costs 50,000 baht a head, not the US$200 we had on file. Photo: Supanut Arunoprayote / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The records that pointed at the wrong visa

Portugal's remote-work residence visa is the D9, not the D8 we had on file. The D8 covers family accompanying a residence-visa applicant. Ask a consulate for it and you are asking for something else, which is a slow and avoidable way to get nowhere.

Worse, our Philippines record wasn't a nomad visa at all. It described the SRRV, a retirement visa run by a different agency. The Philippines does now have a real nomad visa, created by Executive Order No. 86 and signed in April 2025. It lasts a year, renews, and needs health insurance. The catch is reciprocity: you qualify only if your own country offers Filipinos a nomad visa in return. No official source confirms the Department of Foreign Affairs has begun issuing them, so treat the programme as announced rather than operating.

Numbers no government ever published

The next category was harder to spot, because the arithmetic looks sound. A government states a monthly threshold, a comparison site multiplies it by twelve, and the annual figure that falls out starts circulating as an official requirement. Nobody invented anything. Nobody checked either.

Malta publishes €42,000 a year and no monthly figure. Hungary publishes €3,000 net a month and no annual one. The UAE gives a monthly figure and stops there. Costa Rica's rentista law sets US$2,500 a month, in dollars, while our record carried an annual figure in euros that matched nothing at all. Spain's consular sheets state a percentage rather than an amount.

Our reviewer rejected every derived number, which was right even though it cost us tidy-looking rows. The directory now shows whichever figure the government actually states and leaves the other blank. A blank is honest. A number produced by multiplication is not, and it is exactly the sort of thing that gets repeated until it looks like a fact. If the government you're applying to states a monthly figure, work from the monthly figure, and be suspicious of any site that shows you both.

Income requirements that aren't fixed numbers

A good many of these thresholds are formulas rather than sums, tied to a national wage or income measure that moves:

Romania's version is worth reading twice, because it is the one that catches people out. The test is not what you earn now but what you earned in each of the six months before you apply, so a pay rise in the wrong quarter doesn't save you and a gap between contracts can sink an application that looks comfortable on paper.

A single fixed figure for any of these is a snapshot with no expiry date printed on it. The directory now names the formula alongside this year's value, so you can tell when a number has gone stale and roughly which way it will move.

Aerial view of turquoise shallows and reef around Caye Caulker, a low palm-covered island split by a channel.

Caye Caulker, Belize. The Tourism Board publishes an annual income figure only: US$75,000. Photo: dronepicr / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

What the directory shows now

Every programme in the digital nomad directory now carries the government page its figures were read from and the date they were read, behind a "Verified" badge you can click through. Where a figure couldn't be verified the field is blank rather than a tilde and a guess. Spain's consular fee is one of those, set by reciprocity and quoted in local currency, and Costa Rica's fee page sits behind bot protection, so that one is blank as well.

Where two official sources disagree, the directory says so instead of picking the more convenient one. Cape Verde's immigration authority lists a 5,000 CVE fee, while Turismo de Cabo Verde lists €20 a person plus a €34 airport fee. Both are official, they don't agree, and we're not going to guess on your behalf.

None of this makes the data permanent. Governments change these rules without announcing them, which is the whole lesson of the five programmes that had quietly closed. You can now see where every number came from and how old it is.

Drawing up a shortlist? Open the Verified link for every country you're serious about and read the requirement on the government's own page before you pay a fee or give notice on your flat. For anything pegged to a minimum wage or average salary, check the badge date against this year's figure. And if the plan is to skip the visa and work on a tourist stamp, read this first.

Common questions

A site shows both a monthly and an annual income figure. Which one counts?

Only the figure the issuing government publishes. Where a government states a monthly threshold and a site also shows an annual one, that annual number has usually come out of a calculator rather than an official page, and nothing will back it up when a consulate asks.

Can I apply for the Philippines digital nomad visa now?

It exists on paper, created by Executive Order No. 86 in April 2025, and it requires your own country to offer Filipinos the same thing. No official source confirms the Department of Foreign Affairs has started issuing it, so treat it as announced rather than available and plan around your other options.

Why does an income requirement change from one year to the next?

Several countries peg the threshold to a national wage measure instead of a fixed sum, and those measures are reset annually. Spain's is a percentage of the minimum wage and Portugal's a multiple of the guaranteed minimum monthly wage, so both shift in the new year whatever the comparison tables still say.

Does Thailand's 17% flat tax apply to remote workers?

No. It belongs to the Highly-skilled Professionals category of the Long-Term Resident visa, not to Work-from-Thailand Professionals. That second category also doesn't come with a work permit, which is the part most write-ups leave out.

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