Georgia Digital Nomad Visa 2026: There Isn't One — and Most Nomads Do Not Need One

By the Editorial Team · Last updated 20 July 2026

Georgia here is the Caucasus country, not the US state. It has no digital nomad visa. Citizens of roughly 94 countries, including the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and most of the EU, may enter and stay one full year. There is no application to file and no income to prove. Confirm your nationality at geoconsul.gov.ge.

We skip the "what is a digital nomad visa" basics — those live on the digital nomad visa pillar. This page answers something stranger. The paperwork you came here to research does not exist. So the useful questions are what happens at month 13, when a residence permit starts earning its keep, and what the 1% tax regime actually demands in return.

The real catches, before the good news

Four things matter here, and only one of them is the visa-free year everyone quotes.

There is no programme to apply to, and that is the entire answer. The Georgia digital nomad visa does not exist. Georgia never needed a remote work visa category, because its ordinary visa free rules already give you longer than most nomad visas do. Article 10(2) of the Law on the Legal Status of Aliens and Stateless Persons gives visa-exempt foreigners the standard 90 days in any 180-day period. Article 10(3) then carves out a longer regime. Nationals of the countries on a government ordinance may stay "for one full year." Most Western passports sit in that carve-out. So the visa question closes before it opens.

The 2020 programme is dark. "Remotely from Georgia" still circulates in nomad listicles as a live application route. We could not find an operating official page for it. More below, because how it died matters.

Year one has no ladder attached. The allowance runs out and nothing upgrades. Georgia does not convert a visa-free year into a residence permit, and it does not offer a nomad-specific permit to step up to. On day 366 you are either on a permit you qualified for separately, or you are outside the country.

The 1% tax is a registration, not a birthright. The rate is real and it is generous. People still describe it as though it applies automatically to any foreigner with a laptop in Tbilisi. It does not. It is a status you apply for as a registered sole trader. It carries conditions, and it carries a monthly filing obligation.

Does Georgia have a digital nomad visa? No, and here is what it has instead

Searches for a Georgia digital nomad visa return a category with no legal existence. The governing text is short enough to quote instead. Article 10(3) of the Aliens Law defers to an ordinance of the Government of Georgia. That ordinance sets the list of countries whose citizens may enter without a visa and stay "for the period different from that provided for in paragraph 2 of this article, namely, for one full year."

That ordinance is No 255 of 5 June 2015, registration code 010120000.10.003.018640. Its original published list runs to 94 numbered entries. The United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan are all on it, as are most EU member states. Two honest limits apply to that count. The list has been amended eight times, most recently on 24 February 2026. And matsne charges for the consolidated text, so the free version we can quote is the 2015 original. Check your own nationality against the live consular list rather than against this paragraph. Our Georgia visa guide for US citizens tracks the current cell and links the official source.

What you get is unusually plain. No consulate appointment, no apostilles, no proof of income, no health-insurance certificate at the application stage, because there is no application stage. You land, you get stamped, you have a year. Nomads notice the difference. "Georgia is an amazing place," one traveller wrote on r/backpacking in February 2026. "I planned 2 weeks, ended up staying 4 months." That is the ordinary shape of a Georgia stay. It is also why the country keeps appearing on long-stay shortlists it never advertised for.

One practical consequence: a stay measured in months changes your connectivity maths. Past the first few weeks a local SIM beats a travel eSIM, as our Georgia eSIM guide sets out.

What happened to "Remotely from Georgia"

The programme was announced on 16 July 2020. The archived announcement on the state pandemic portal quotes then Minister of Economy Natia Turnava. She described a scheme for "freelancers, self-employed foreigners who can work remotely," open to citizens of all countries who would commit to at least six months in Georgia. Applicants filled in an online form for pre-approval to cross a closed border. They also accepted a mandatory 14-day quarantine "at a commercial rate at their own expense," plus six months of travel insurance.

Read that list of conditions again. It is not a nomad visa. It is a border-reopening mechanism for a country whose borders were shut, wearing a nomad visa's marketing.

Its status now, checked 20 July 2026: the dedicated government domain returns SERVFAIL from three independent public resolvers. That means the DNS delegation itself is broken, not that the site is merely down. The Internet Archive holds zero captures for that hostname. We found no live official page describing the programme or its eligibility.

One caution against over-reading that. Georgia's English-language official web estate is patchily maintained. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs e-visa portal was still publishing pandemic-era PCR and vaccination entry rules on its "Crossing the Georgian Border" page on the same check date. A dead page is not the same as a repealed rule. But a programme with no application form and no published criteria is not a route you can plan around.

A note on a number we are not printing. A monthly income threshold is widely attributed to this programme across nomad blogs. We could not trace it to any Georgian government source, so it does not appear on this page. If you need a formal answer on whether the scheme still exists, ask a Georgian consulate in writing.

What happens after 365 days

Mechanically, the run works. Article 10(3) attaches the one-year allowance to an entry. Unlike the 90-in-180 rule in Article 10(2), it sets no rolling cap across a longer window. So people leave for Armenia or Turkey and come back to a fresh stamp. That is the well-worn path, and Georgia has not closed it.

The risk is discretionary rather than arithmetic. Article 11 of the Aliens Law spells out the levers. A border officer may refuse entry where there is "reasonable doubt that he/she will unlawfully stay in Georgia." The same article covers a missing insurance policy, thin funds, or an unpaid fine for an earlier unlawful stay. Nothing in it requires the officer to explain themselves in advance.

Long-stay travellers describe the same pattern elsewhere. "Visa run is not a legal term," one commenter wrote in a 2025 r/ThailandTourism thread. "It's just a way to bypass the maximum stay... it just makes you more suspicious and can have negative impact on your entry to the country which is at discretion of the immigration officer." Another poster, eight runs into a year, reported being pulled aside repeatedly: "This definitely gonna be my last visa run for this year. They might refuse my entry tomorrow."

Bottom line: a Georgian border run is legal and usually uneventful. It is also an annual bet, placed by someone whose lease and bank account now sit inside the country. The cost of losing that bet rises every year you keep making it.

When a residence permit is actually worth it

A permit buys stability rather than permission. You already have permission. What you gain is a status that does not depend on an officer's mood at Tbilisi airport. It also starts the 10-year clock toward permanent residence under Article 15(g).

Two details that guides tend to miss. Article 14 blocks a residence permit issued on the basis of an ordinary C category visa. It also blocks one for people staying under the third-country-visa route in Article 10(3¹). It does not exclude people staying under the one-year visa-free rule in Article 10(3). So applying from inside Georgia during your visa-free year is not barred by that provision. Read those two subparagraphs side by side before you accept a blog's claim that you must leave to apply.

The investment permit carries a second test. Article 16 requires annual turnover evidence from the Revenue Service, and the permit lapses if you cannot produce it. The statute sets that bar at the equivalent of US$50,000 of annual turnover in year one, US$100,000 in year two and US$120,000 in years three through five. An investment permit is not a document you buy once.

Business registration is a separate matter from residence. Article 28 gives foreigners the same investment and business rights as Georgian citizens. You can register as a sole trader without holding a permit at all.

Tax: the 1% regime and its four real conditions

This is where a wrong assumption costs money, so treat everything below as general information and confirm it with a Georgian tax adviser.

Start with residency. Article 34(2) of the Tax Code sets one line. Stay in Georgia for 183 days or more in any continuous 12-calendar-month period ending in a tax year, and you are a Georgian resident for that whole year. Status is set per tax period. Days already counted for one period are not recounted for the next.

Then comes the source rule, which decides everything else. Article 82(1)(u) exempts income of a resident natural person that is not Georgian-source income. That sounds like a clean exemption for foreign clients. Then you read Article 104. It treats services as Georgian-source where they are "actually rendered in Georgia." It does the same where the provider is a Georgian resident and the recipient sits in another state. So a freelancer typing in Tbilisi for a client in Berlin is generating Georgian-source income on the face of that text. The exemption is narrower than the headline suggests.

Which is what makes small business status matter. Articles 88 to 90 set the terms.

The default rate on personal income is 20% under Article 81(1). Small business status taxes turnover at 1% instead. The rate steps to 3% once gross income passes GEL 500,000 in a year, applied from the start of the month you cross it. At the National Bank of Georgia official rate of 2.6315 GEL to the dollar on 21 July 2026, that ceiling is about US$190,000. On US$60,000 of annual revenue the arithmetic is stark: roughly US$600 at 1%, against US$12,000 at the standard 20% rate.

Four conditions do the real work. First, Article 88(1) grants the status only to an "entrepreneur natural person" — a registered sole trader. An employee does not qualify. Nor does a company. Second, Article 88(2) lets the government bar named activities from the regime. Check that exclusion list for your line of work before you plan around the rate. Third, Article 89(2) revokes the status on several grounds. One of them is two consecutive calendar years above the GEL 500,000 line. Fourth, Article 93 wants a return filed and tax paid by the 15th of every following month. Article 165 adds VAT registration once taxable supplies pass GEL 100,000, about US$38,000, in any 12 consecutive months.

Bottom line: the 1% rate is genuine, and it is conditional. None of it settles whether your home country still taxes you. Americans in particular stay on the hook for US filing wherever they sit.

Verdict: is Georgia worth it without a nomad visa?

The Georgia digital nomad visa is the rare case where the absence of a programme is the feature. You get a year on arrival. You get a low headline tax rate if you do the registration properly. You skip the apostille-and-consulate machinery that a European nomad visa demands. It earns a 4/5, held back by what happens next: no ladder from the visa-free year to residence, and a tax regime whose best rate depends on paperwork most arrivals never file.

If the long game is what you are after, the trade against Europe is clearer. Portugal charges roughly €3,480 a month in provable income, plus about four months of processing. In return it offers a five-year path to an EU passport. Our Portugal D8 guide runs those numbers. Georgia asks nothing and promises nothing. Choose according to whether you want a year or a decade.

FAQ

Does Georgia have a digital nomad visa?

No. Georgia has no remote-work visa category, and it does not need one. Under Article 10(3) of the Law on the Legal Status of Aliens and Stateless Persons, citizens of the countries listed in Government Ordinance No 255 may enter and stay one full year. There is no application to file and no income to prove. As of 20 July 2026; confirm your nationality at geoconsul.gov.ge.

How long can you stay in Georgia without a visa?

One full year, if your nationality is on Ordinance No 255. That list included 94 entries in its original 2015 text, among them the US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and most EU states. Visa-exempt nationals who are not on that list get the ordinary 90 days in any 180-day period instead. Confirm at geoconsul.gov.ge before you fly.

Is the "Remotely from Georgia" programme still open?

Treat it as dormant. The programme was announced on 16 July 2020 as a way to reopen the border during the pandemic, with a mandatory 14-day quarantine at the applicant's own expense. Its dedicated government domain no longer resolves, and we found no archived copy of it. There is nothing live to apply to. Ask a Georgian consulate if you need a formal answer.

What is the 1% tax in Georgia and who qualifies?

It is small business status under Articles 88-90 of the Tax Code. It taxes turnover at 1% up to GEL 500,000 a year, about US$190,000, and 3% above that. Four conditions bite. You must register as an entrepreneur natural person, apply for the status, avoid activities the government has excluded, and file monthly. Take Georgian tax advice before you rely on it.

Do you become a tax resident of Georgia after 183 days?

Yes. Article 34(2) of the Tax Code sets the line at 183 days. Stay that long in Georgia across any continuous 12-calendar-month period ending in a tax year, and you are a resident for that whole year. Residency is set per tax period. It also does not end your obligations at home, since your own country may still tax you. This is general information, not tax advice.

Can you do a border run in Georgia after 365 days?

People do, and the mechanism is real, because the one-year allowance attaches to an entry rather than to a rolling window. The risk is discretionary. Article 11 of the Aliens Law lets a border officer refuse entry on reasonable doubt that you will overstay, on missing insurance or funds, or on an unpaid overstay fine. A refusal leaves you outside the country with a lease inside it.

Sources

• Law of Georgia on the Legal Status of Aliens and Stateless Persons, English consolidated text — matsne.gov.ge (Articles 10, 11, 14, 15, 16 and 28, checked 20 July 2026).
• Ordinance No 255 of the Government of Georgia, 5 June 2015, "On Approval of the List of Countries Whose Citizens May Enter Georgia without a Visa," registration code 010120000.10.003.018640 — matsne.gov.ge (free initial version of 8 June 2015; consolidated text is paywalled, latest amendment 24 February 2026).
• Tax Code of Georgia, English consolidated text, revision of 25 June 2026 — matsne.gov.ge (Articles 34, 81, 82, 88-93, 104 and 165, checked 20 July 2026).
• Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Georgia, consular portal — geoconsul.gov.ge (visa information and entry rules; site carries a "test mode" notice as of the check date).
• National Bank of Georgia official exchange rate, 1 USD = GEL 2.6315, valid 21 July 2026 — nbg.gov.ge (used for every GEL-to-USD conversion on this page).
• Government of Georgia announcement of the "Remotely from Georgia" project, 16 July 2020, archived from the state pandemic portal stopcov.ge via the Internet Archive. Domain and archive status of remotelyfromgeorgia.gov.ge checked independently on 20 July 2026.
• Reddit r/backpacking and r/ThailandTourism — first-person Georgia long-stay and border-run reports (2025-2026).