Methodology and sources

Every number on NomadCritic is computed from a named open dataset when the site is rebuilt (daily). Nothing is estimated by hand, and no city pays to be listed or ranked.

Shared working hours

For each city and each employer time zone we take every working day (Monday–Friday) of 2026 and count the hours that fall between 9:00 and 17:00 both in the employer's zone and in the city. The calculation runs on absolute moments in time, using the IANA time zone database (version 2025b, via Python's zoneinfo), so it follows each country's real rules: daylight-saving time on either side, southern-hemisphere summers, half-hour offsets, Morocco's Ramadan clock change, and the weeks each spring and autumn when the US and Europe change their clocks on different dates.

Ranges such as "3–4 h" are the lowest and highest days of the year. "Awake" figures stretch your day to 7:00–22:00: how much of the team's day you could cover by starting early or finishing late. The employer zones are US Eastern (New York), US Pacific (San Francisco), UK (London) and Central Europe (Berlin). With JavaScript on, the site recomputes these for any time zone in your browser, from the same rules (sampled weekly for the year range).

We checked the calculation by hand for cities with and without daylight-saving time, including Lisbon, Medellín, Santiago, Bangkok and Marrakesh, on dates either side of every clock change.

Fit score (0–100)

The home page ranks cities by a single Fit score for the time zone and month you pick: 50% shared working hours (the year's average, out of 8), 30% that month's comfort score, and 20% prices (100 minus the price level, so cheaper scores higher). The weights are a judgement call, which is why every page also shows the three ingredients separately and lets you rank by any one of them.

Comfort score (0–10)

The comfort score asks: how pleasant is an ordinary day of living and working here? It is not a beach or sightseeing score. It starts at 10 and loses points for:

• Heat and cold. Average highs between 20 and 27°C lose nothing. Each degree below 20°C costs 0.7 points, each degree above 27°C costs 0.75. Average lows below 8°C cost 0.25 points a degree: cold mornings, evenings and heating bills.
• Rain. Each 60 mm over 60 mm in the month costs a point, up to 3.
• Humidity. Dew point is the best single measure of muggy air: 16°C costs 0.5, 18°C costs 1, 20°C costs 1.75, 22°C or more costs 2.5.

8 or more is Great, 6.5 Good, 5 Fair, below 5 Poor. A "comfortable month" scores 6.5 or more.

Data. Monthly mean daily high and low and total rainfall are 1991–2020 averages from TerraClimate (Abatzoglou et al., 2018, Scientific Data), a ~4 km global grid released into the public domain (CC0). Dew point is calculated from TerraClimate's vapour pressure, averaged from its yearly files: the 1991–2020 summary file rounds vapour pressure too coarsely for a precise dew point. A coastal city whose centre falls in a sea cell uses the nearest land cell, and its page says so. We checked these figures against official 1991–2020 station normals for Lisbon, Buenos Aires, Bangkok, Medellín, Singapore and Mexico City: highs within 1.6°C, lows within 2°C except Mexico City's nights (2.5–3°C colder than the in-city station). See About for details.

Daylight is computed from latitude for the middle of each month.

Price level

The price level is the World Bank's price level index for household final consumption (World Development Indicators series PA.NUS.PRVT.PLI): what the same basket of household spending costs in a country, at market exchange rates, relative to the United States = 100. A price level of 50 means everyday life costs roughly half as much as in the US for the same things. Where a country's household figure is two or more years older than its whole-economy figure, we use the whole-economy price level (PA.NUS.GDP.PLI) instead and say so. Bands: under 40 very low, 40–55 low, 55–70 moderate, 70–90 high, 90 and above very high.

It is a national figure. Capitals and nomad hubs usually cost more than the national average, and rent, the largest cost for most remote workers, varies most of all. Use it to compare countries, not neighbourhoods. The World Bank publishes no figure for Taiwan. Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators, licensed under CC BY 4.0; last checked 2026-11-01.

Places, airports and photos

Population, elevation, airports and Wikipedia links come from Wikidata (CC0). Airports are open civil airports with an IATA code within 70 km. Photos come from Wikimedia Commons, only under licences that allow reuse (public domain, CC0, CC BY, CC BY-SA), and each is credited on its page.

Travel advice

Advisory levels come from the U.S. Department of State (public domain) and the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0), refreshed daily. Each city page links to the official advice. We do not publish visa rules: they depend on your passport, change often and are not openly licensed. Check the destination government's official site.

What we leave out

• Internet speed. The best-known open speed-test dataset forbids commercial use, so we don't use it.
• English proficiency and city-level costs. We found no openly licensed source we could publish.
• Air quality. Some cities, Chiang Mai among them, have a smoky season (roughly February–April) that the comfort score does not see.
• Averages are not forecasts, and recent years often run hotter than the 1991–2020 average.