Remotely from Georgia — a COVID-era Digital Nomad Scheme That Became Redundant

'Remotely from Georgia' was a special entry and quarantine-exemption scheme created by a joint order of Georgia's Minister of Economy and Sustainable Development and Minister of Foreign Affairs on 24 August 2020, and publicly launched days later by then-Prime Minister Giorgi Gakharia.

It aimed to let remote workers, freelancers and business owners from around 95 already visa-free-eligible countries enter and stay in Georgia for 180 days to a year during pandemic border restrictions, provided they showed at least US$2,000/month income (or $24,000 in savings) and completed a COVID-19 quarantine.

Applicants applied for entry under the scheme; government-adjacent reporting tracked application and arrival numbers through early 2021.

About 700 applications and 31 arrivals were recorded by end-September 2020, rising to over 2,000 applications, 90 nationalities and 740 arrivals by January 2021. No programme-specific economic-impact figures — tax revenue, spending, jobs — were ever published by the Georgian government or found in independent sources.

The scheme's underlying legal function was narrow: it only ever bypassed pandemic-era quarantine and entry rules for citizens who could already visit Georgia visa-free for up to a year. Once Georgia eased border restrictions around February 2021, nomad-visa trackers and Georgia's own tourism board began describing the programme in the past tense as effectively redundant, since the country's standing visa-free regime already allowed the same remote work. No independent evaluation of the scheme was ever published. It is included as an honest cautionary case: a well-publicised, fast-to-launch 'talent attraction' scheme built to solve a temporary problem can lose its rationale entirely once conditions normalise, especially if it never created rights that did not already exist under other policy.