Digital nomads—people who spend the majority of their working year traveling the world, working remotely from their computers, are gradually making up a bigger and bigger part of the already very high population of remote workers in the U.S.
Normally men from the Millennial generation, market data found that the number of people driven to digital nomadism between 2020 and 2021 increased by around 4 million; from 6.3 to 10.2 million workers, and that this number is expected to increase a whopping 24 million over the next 3 years.
It seems like a dream, but it’s actually a relatively easily-obtainable reality since the E-commerce revolution and the associated service sector supporting it have led to so many office closures. Now many jobs which used to traditionally be run out of offices require mandatory remote working status, and with housing prices in so many cities in America being driven up, working from Thailand, Indonesia, or Mexico, where the U.S. dollar goes much farther, is suddenly a lot more appealing to millions of Americans.
This report came from Passport Photo Online, and consisted of industry reports, market data, and a proprietary survey of over 1,000 American digital nomads.
The majority of digital nomads hold a bachelor’s degree or less, and freelance for multiple companies, while the smallest minority work for one company only. Many also do coaching, consulting, or teaching jobs from their computers. This earns the typical digital nomad around $4,500 a month, but almost no digital nomads make more than $75k a year.
WaL spoke with their Digital Nomad Correspondents, Ryan and Amanda Kingsmith, who revealed they were “not surprised” by the increase in the number of digital nomads. They, like the report, said that COVID-19 closed down so many offices that people who were already getting used to working from home, or from a “workation” realized there was nothing keeping them at their current addresses.