Digital nomads in Southeast Asia are nothing new — but this city in Vietnam is now on their radar

"In this video I will show you why I think Da Nang, Vietnam, is clearly the best city for digital nomads," Joose the Nomad says, his baby-blue eyes sparkling as he addresses his 80,000 YouTube subscribers.

The video cuts to a sweeping aerial of Da Nang's skyscraper-studded coastline before lingering in slow motion on Joose running shirtless on the beach.

Not everyone is impressed.

"He shows the beach, the fitness studio, and some boring Westerner-focused food that doesn't really represent the city," Ngô Xuân Thảo tells me over a bubbling hotpot after I show her the video.

Ngô, 38, is from Hue, 62 miles northeast of Da Nang. She works online as a translator and speaks near-perfect English. Her experience of this city, she tells me, is vastly different than his: It's a city with rapidly rising rents and a cost of living that's outpacing wages.

The gap between Joose's sun-soaked version of Da Nang and Ngô's experience as a local trying to make rent captures a tension playing out across the city — one that raises a broader question about who benefits as Da Nang becomes a magnet for digital nomads.

Da Nang — described by The New York Times as "the Miami of Vietnam" in its "52 Places to Go in 2019" list — has become the digital nomad community's latest outpost in Southeast Asia. Vietnam was included again in the Times' 2026 list, as international attention grows alongside high-end developments, including Southeast Asia's first Nobu Hotel scheduled to open later this year.

I went to see whether the city is on its way to becoming the next Chiang Mai, Thailand or Bali, Indonesia, places where digital nomads have settled en masse, driving up living costs, contributing to congestion, and accelerating gentrification — trends I've watched firsthand during more than a decade of living in Hanoi, Vietnam, as a travel writer.

Vietnam has not introduced a long-stay visa to lure digital nomads like Thailand, but that hardly seems to matter.

Nomads.com, an online digital nomad community of nearly 40,000 people, listed Da Nang as Southeast Asia's fastest-growing digital nomad hot spot in 2025. Most nationalities can apply online for three-month e-visas without trouble.

Authorities seem eager to ride the wave: Nomad Fest in March 2025 actively courted digital nomads, and state-sanctioned local media regularly spotlight the city's growing popularity with remote workers.

But who exactly is the wave lifting?

Ngô moved here in early 2025, drawn by the city's work-life balance, a rare promise in urbanizing Vietnam. Big cities like Hồ Chí Minh City brim with opportunity but face mounting urban and environmental strain. Small cities like Hue remain largely unscathed by Vietnam's urban development, but they lack good jobs.

Ngô hoped that Da Nang struck the right balance — until she discovered the cost of living.

Before she started working online, Ngô says she received decent in-person job offers for international NGOs paying 12,000,000 Vietnam Dong, or $455, a month. The studio apartment she found cost her more than half of that. "If I want a separate bedroom, then I have to pay at least 12,000,000. How can I afford that?"

Ngô's landlord raised her rent after she spent a few months in the city center, prompting her to move 20 miles south to Hoi An, where she found rents to be 30% cheaper.

For many digital nomads earning international salaries, however, $455 a month in rent is a steal.

"Landlords rent out apartments short-term because they think they can keep raising the prices every few months," she says. "The digital nomads are one reason. Landlords assume that foreigners will pay more."

I drive a rented motorbike over Da Nang's iconic Dragon Bridge, the city's showpiece infrastructure project, and cruise along the 6-mile-long, palm-studded beachside boulevard.

I'm heading to Hana's Coworking, a new workspace popular with digital nomads. After arriving, I edge past a beaming security guard and weave through the lower floors, thick with dust and the clatter of construction.

Upstairs, the chaos gives way to calm. Where I meet Hana Nguyễn — the founder — the scene is an oasis of quiet productivity. Coders, marketers, and other nomads sit in ergonomic chairs, tapping at their keyboards and gazing out at the swaying trees on the street below. "Now this room is full," Nguyễn tells me. "That's why I'm expanding to the second floor."

After the pandemic, Nguyễn, 36, began spending time with digital nomads and opened a coworking room on an unused hotel floor. The idea took off, and soon she convinced her parents to convert their family home into an office for remote workers.

Turns out, it wasn't a beaming security guard who greeted me at the entrance — it was Nguyễn's father.

Nguyễn, who moved to the neighborhood with her family in her teens, says digital nomads' presence in Da Nang is "good for the city, the community, and jobs."

"Some foreigners even hire Vietnamese for online work — designers, translators, assistants." When I asked her if rising rent prices have become a problem, she dismissed it as a minor issue driven mainly by short-term tourism, and besides, she said, "we just find different places to stay," referring to other Vietnamese residents.

Markos Korvesis, a career coach who organizes digital nomad events around the world, including Da Nang's annual Nomad Fest, said he has seen neighboring apartments turned into Airbnbs, with owners charging up to $100 a night.

"In a building I stayed in for many months, the prices were increasing because of tourists, not nomads," he tells me.

According to data from analytics platform AirDNA, between March 2022, when Vietnam reopened its borders after the COVID-19 pandemic, and November 2025, the number of Airbnb and Vrbo listings in Da Nang increased by 43.8%. And while average nightly rates have fallen from their peak in 2023, they still sit 17.6% above 2022 levels.

Without an official digital nomad visa, the city government has no way to track which foreigners are working remotely, but it's safe to assume they make up only a small fraction of the millions of annual visitors.

According to local media, Da Nang received close to 2 million international visitors in 2023 — and more than 7 million last year.

"Digital nomadism does definitely gentrify, that was very clear in Medellín, Portugal, everywhere," says Daniel Schlagwein, who researches digital work at Chulalongkorn University and the University of Sydney.

"But it gentrifies along the same trajectory as the broader visitor economy," he says.

In Chiang Mai, Schlagwein found that many locals actually preferred this kind of visitor.

"Digital nomads work during workdays in their coworking spaces just like locals, they stay longer, and they spend their money more widely in local restaurants and rentals," he said.

"They are not crowding temples every day like mass-package tourist groups or partying on a Tuesday night like backpackers."

Sipping a cappuccino, I take in the cosmopolitan café. A Vietnamese couple canoodles in the corner; Dutch tourists browse bags of coffee; and the approachable woman in front of me works quietly on her laptop. After we strike up a conversation, I learn she taught yoga online in Asia and Europe before arriving in Da Nang.

"I think Da Nang has the right mix of nomads, tourists, and locals," Tsering Yangzom, 37, told me. "Here, people who live and work as foreigners seem more connected — like there's still a sense of balance."

Aside from the possible issue of rising rents, Da Nang does, for now at least, feel like a city in equilibrium.

Other hot spots like Bali offer a template — or a warning — about how long that can last.

"At first I was really against the digital nomads, but now I see there are two kinds," says Gus Dark, a Balinese artist and cultural commentator known for his satirical illustrations.

"The first are people who come to work remotely but treat Bali like a screensaver — just a beautiful backdrop. They don't engage with the community. The second are those who connect with the culture and genuinely want to explore the island. Some of them seem to care about Bali even more than the Balinese."

As Da Nang's relationship with digital nomads is still being written, perhaps the outcome depends on who chooses to come.

Knowing that Joose the Nomad now lives in Bali, I ask Gus Dark what kind of digital nomad this YouTuber might be. "These kinds of influencers rarely appear on the local scene," he says with a laugh. "So I don't really give them much attention."