Best cities for remote workers, ranked by data

How the scoring works

Every city gets four sub-scores from 0 to 100, then a weighted total. The weights tilt toward overlap because the working week is what makes or breaks a remote setup, but cost, internet, and visa all carry real weight.

• Overlap (35%). Hours per day where the city sits in 9 to 5 simultaneously with each of New York, London, San Francisco, Singapore. We sum across all four and normalise. A city that lands inside business hours for three of the four anchors for most of the day scores near 100.
• Cost (25%). Numbeo cost-of-living index, where New York = 100. Lower means cheaper. A city sitting at 40 (Lisbon-ish) scores well above one sitting at 90.
• Internet (20%). Median fixed broadband from the Speedtest Global Index, in megabits per second. 30 Mbps scores 0, 250 Mbps scores 100.
• Visa friendliness (20%). A three-bucket read on how a remote worker without local citizenship can legally stay six months plus. Easy means a real digital-nomad visa or 180-day visa-free entry. Moderate means workarounds exist. Hard means it is genuinely difficult.

We do not assign any score to weather, food, safety, community, or "vibe". Those are real but they belong in a follow-up read, not in the data layer. We also do not tell anyone they should move anywhere. Use this as a shortlist generator, then go visit. Numbers below are approximations sampled in 2025; treat them as direction, not decimal-precise truth.

Want a baseline to compare against? The methodology assumes you are working with at least one of New York, London, San Francisco, or Singapore. If your team is split across other anchors (say, Berlin plus Sydney plus São Paulo), recompute mentally — push cities that overlap your real anchors up by a tier.