A new fad or the future of working: digital nomads in Hungary

The digital nomad lifestyle allows for great flexibility and freedom – that is why more and more people decide to leave traditional office-based employment in search of a more unconventional work arrangement. Hungary is a popular destination for digital nomads, too, largely due to the country’s favourable visa policies for those seeking to work remotely.

Earlier this month, CNBC interviewed a 30-year-old digital nomad about her experience living and working in Hungary as an expat. Denae McGaha graduated college in 2016 and after fruitlessly searching for a job in her field decided to look up teaching jobs in Budapest at the suggestion of a friend.

“I felt like such an imposter,” McGaha recalls her experience after leaving college. “Everyone I knew was applying to grad school or landing job offers in big cities, and I was just tired and lost …. I had no idea what to do with myself, but I knew I wanted to keep travelling.”

Within weeks of applying for a job as an English teacher to kindergarteners in Hungary, she was accepted, and in August 2017, she made the move to Hungary. It is now seven years later, and she is still here, but now working in a completely different field.

After losing her job during COVID-19, she re-vamped her previous blog so successfully that businesses started to approach her to help redesign their own blogs and social media. In 2021, she was hired as a remote digital marketing strategist by an agency in Philadelphia. With her US salary, McGaha was able to reduce her working hours to 20 per week at the company, still earning “more than enough” to cover her monthly expenses.

“I’m grateful that living here has given me so many more options for how to spend and save,” she says. “If I lived in Seattle on my current salary, for example, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the financial freedom I have now or the peace of mind.”

Who are digital nomads?

McGaha says she dreams of being a digital nomad: “I value having the freedom and flexibility that comes with working remotely, including the ability to weave in more travel into my schedule,” she says. “Some Fridays, I’ll hop on a train to the Hungarian countryside for a long weekend and work from there.”

But what is a digital nomad exactly? According to the Harvard Business Review, digital nomadism is “a lifestyle where one leverages remote work to travel and live in varying, often affordable locations around the world,” that “offers an alternative path away from expensive, long-term mortgages and a raft of possessions and instead opens the door for people to maximise their income by living in countries with lower costs of living.”

In short, digital nomads are individuals who have a job that requires only a laptop (or in some cases even just a smartphone) and access to the internet, and therefore can work from virtually anywhere.

Digital nomads can work practically anywhere with an internet connection. Photo: Pixabay

Hungary opens up to digital nomads

Budapest is a very popular destination for digital nomads. According to Világgazdaság, in February 2022, an estimated 3-5,000 digital nomads worked in the Hungarian capital at any one time, which likely doubled in the summer. Many of them likely benefited from Hungary’s efforts to make it easier for digital nomads to come and live in Hungary.

As reported by Schengen News, in 2021, the Hungarian government, following the example of several other European countries, revealed plans to introduce a new visa, the so-called White Card, which specifically aimed at easing the transition of digital nomads into the country. The new residency permit allows internationals to live in Hungary while working for a company outside of the EU for a maximum period of one year after which it can be extended once for another year.

The following requirements must be met to apply for a White Card. The applicant must:

have a valid employment contract in a country other than Hungary;
have a share in a company with profit in a country other than Hungary;
not engage in any gainful activity while in Hungary, and must not hold shares in any company based in the country.

Another important requirement, as 24.hu points out, is that new arrivals must have a monthly income of at least EUR 3,000 (at the time of the introduction of the White Card it was EUR 2,000) and be able to prove that they have earned at least that amount in the six months prior to applying. In addition, family members are not allowed to enter the country on a visa.

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