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Instagrammers sell the digital nomad lifestyle to those who dream of escaping the 9-5 to work remotely while traveling the world. Although the digital nomad lifestyle looks glamorous, many people wonder what digital nomad salaries are and how much money remote jobs pay.
Wondering how much money you can earn as a remote worker is a fair question.
I’m going to do my best to answer this question because I always hated the response “it depends”. The reality is that how much money you make as a digital nomad does “depend” on many factors. However, I’m going to outline what factors you can consider to help you gauge how much you can expect to earn as a digital nomad.
Digital Nomads Have Real Jobs
The first thing to understand is that digital nomads aren’t backpackers taking on random jobs to survive. Digital Nomads have real, legitimate jobs. How digital nomads make money online are often by working remotely for a distributed team, freelancing or they are entrepreneurs.
That being said, any digital nomad who has a remote job can expect to earn the same as they would if they were in the 9-5. For example, if you’re a social media manager at a brick and mortar agency and earn $55,000/ year, there’s no reason you could expect to earn any less working remotely. Working remotely is not a privilege, it’s a smarter way to work and remote teams understand this. It saves them money by not having to pay for overhead costs like office space and it allows their teams to be more productive because they can work when and where they’re most productive.
As a remote worker, it becomes more about the value you add, rather than office politics.
Digital Nomad Salary Stats
Let’s look at the hard stats on how much money digital nomads and remote workers make. According to a report done collaboratively with FlexJobs and Global Workplace Analytics, the average annual income for most remote workers is $4,000 higher than that of non-telecommuters.
Another FlexJobs report indicates, “18% [of remote workers] report making six figures or more and 22% make between $50,000 and $99,999.“
Needless to say, there is money to be made as a digital nomad. The only time I see people getting paid less than what they should is when they’re looking in the wrong places for a remote job or they don’t realize their worth and are undervaluing themselves.
Online Salary Report Generator
Since digital nomads make comparable salaries to those in the 9-5, we can also explore some online tools that provide salary benchmarks for different career paths. The great thing about these online tools is that they consider more factors than just the role itself, self as years of experience.
PayScale
PayScale is a popular online tool that generates a salary report of how much you can expect to earn based on a series of questions. The questions asked include the role you’re considering, how many years experience you have, your highest level of education completed, any additional certifications etc.
You do need to enter a location for this, so I would suggest you just enter your current location. That being said, to translate location into a remote work equivalent, I would suggest choosing a state that has “mid-range” salaries. For example, salaries in New York and California tend to skew higher because of the high cost of living so if you enter that as your location, you might get inflated salary results (unless you work remotely for a remote company based in New York or California).
Once you complete the questionnaire PayScale will generate a customized report for you that outlines:
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Market salary range
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Bonuses
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Your market worth over time
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Pay by experience level and gender
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Recommendations of similar roles and how in-demand each role is
Here is a sample report I did for a copywriter, 26 years old, graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree. Here you can see the median salary for a copywriter is $46,000/year, along with the market range.