Your perfect candidate is sitting in a café in Lisbon. She's got the skills. She's available. She's eager to start. There's just one small detail: she's there on a tourist visa, and you're wondering if that matters.
It does. Quite a lot, actually.
Remote work has blurred the lines between where people live and where they can legally work. Companies now routinely find candidates who happen to be traveling, studying abroad, or hopping between countries on digital nomad permits. You might have the instinct to hire fast and figure out the paperwork later. However, visa compliance isn't something that can be fixed retroactively, and the consequences of getting it wrong fall on both the employer and the worker.
So what's actually allowed? That depends on the visa type, the country, and whether you're bringing someone on as an employee or a self-employed contractor. Let's break it down.
Key takeaways:
- Tourist visas typically prohibit employment in nearly every country, and yes, that includes remote work. Violations can mean deportation, multi-year entry bans, and unexpected liability for employers.
- Student visas come with tight restrictions. Most students limit their work to on-campus jobs or internships tied to a specific course of study, with caps on the number of hours they can work each week. Remote work for an international employer is rarely covered.
- Digital nomad visas sound like the answer, but they create tax and compliance headaches that make them practical mainly for contractors — not employees.
Understanding the Difference Between Visa Status and Employment Authorization
Here's where companies get tripped up: they assume that a visa that allows someone to be in a country will also enable them to work there. These are two separate permissions. A tourist visa says you can visit. A work permit says you can earn a living. They're not interchangeable.
Think of it like a concert ticket. Getting through the door doesn't mean you can go backstage. Tourist visas enable individuals to enter for leisure, family visits, or brief business purposes, such as attending conferences or meetings. Student visas are issued for educational purposes. Neither comes with backstage access to the labor market.
And here's the part that catches employers off guard: verifying work authorization is your responsibility, not the candidate's. It doesn't matter that your company is based in Dublin or Denver. If you're paying someone to work from Tokyo, the fine folks at Japan’s Labour Standards Bureau will come calling. For a closer look at how these categories differ, check out our guide on visas vs. work permits.
Hiring Remote Workers on Tourist Visas
Your new hire mentions she'll be spending a few weeks in Thailand. She's got a tourist visa, great Wi-Fi, and every intention of staying productive. From her perspective, nothing changes. From an immigration law perspective, everything does.
How Does a Tourist Visa Work?
Tourist visas are designed for short-term stays, such as sightseeing, visiting family, attending a wedding, or catching up with old friends — not for living or working in a country. Some countries extend this to limited business activities, like sitting in on meetings or participating in industry conferences. But employment? Off the table.
Most tourist visas cap stays at 30 to 90 days. The fine print explicitly prohibits work, and that prohibition doesn't care where your employer is located or which bank account receives your paycheck. If you're performing labor while physically in the country, local immigration law applies.
The Myth of Working Remotely While Visiting Another Country
The pandemic changed how we think about offices. Suddenly, "the office" could be a kitchen table in Austin or a beachfront rental in Bali. Plenty of remote workers took this to its logical extreme: if I can work from anywhere, why not work from everywhere?
The problem is that immigration authorities often disagree. To them, work is work. Answering Slack messages from a hammock in Costa Rica is still performing labor on Costa Rican soil. The fact that your salary comes from a German company doesn't change that.
Do people get away with it? Sometimes. Enforcement varies wildly. However, "I probably won't get caught" isn't a compliance strategy, and when things go wrong, they do so quickly.
Enforcement and Risk Considerations
When an employee on a tourist visa is caught working in a foreign country, they face immediate cancellation of their visa. Deportation proceedings follow. Depending on the country, they could be barred from returning for three, five, or even 10 years. In the U.S., overstaying or working illegally can trigger a decade-long ban from re-entry.
Employers don't walk away with clean hands either. If authorities determine you employed someone without proper authorization, you could face fines. You might owe back taxes or social contributions in that country. And if the relationship looks like employment under local law, you could be on the hook for benefits the worker should have received. The reputational hit isn't trivial either, especially for companies that market themselves as compliance-conscious global employers.
Practical Guidance on Tourist Visa Employment
This one's straightforward: don't do it. No amount of clever structuring makes tourist visa employment legal. Using a tourist visa for work purposes is a violation, full stop.
Smart companies build this into their remote work policies. Employees require explicit approval to work from any location other than their designated one. No "working vacations" without checking whether the destination allows it. If someone wants to spend three months in Barcelona, the conversation has to include whether they can legally work from there.
Hiring Remote Workers on Student Visas
A graduate student in Toronto reaches out about a freelance project. She's got the skills, she's in a convenient time zone, and she's eager. The problem? Her study permit doesn’t permit freelance work.
What Type of Work Student Visas Typically Allow
Student visas are intended for studying only. Countries grant them so people can enroll in degree programs, learn the language, or complete professional training. Work authorization is often an afterthought, and it is usually heavily restricted.
Take the United States. F-1 visa holders can work on campus, up to 20 hours a week, while classes are in session. Full-time during breaks, sure. But off-campus work requires jumping through hoops: Curricular Practical Training, Optional Practical Training, or special hardship exceptions. Each comes with its own paperwork, approvals, and limitations. The United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia have their own versions of these rules, each with different thresholds and requirements.
Notice what's missing from all of this? Remote work for foreign employers. Student visa regulations weren't written with that scenario in mind.
When Limited Work May Be Permitted on a Student Visa
There are exceptions. Some countries allow students to work part-time during the term and full-time over the summer. Graduate students may have more flexibility in pursuing research or teaching positions. Internships tied to degree requirements often get a pass.
But these carve-outs typically assume local employment. A student visa that permits 20 hours of work at the campus bookstore doesn't automatically extend to 20 hours of freelance coding for a startup in Singapore. The authorization is narrow, and reading it broadly invites trouble.
Working While on a Student Visa: Risks for Employers
Hiring a student for remote work sounds harmless. They're already in the country legally. They're clearly talented, or they wouldn't have been admitted to the program. What's the harm?
The harm is that unauthorized employment can imperil the student's visa status entirely. Revocation. Removal proceedings. A black mark on their immigration history that follows them for years. Meanwhile, the employer has created an employment relationship that local authorities might decide comes with local obligations. Taxes. Benefits. Social security contributions. The specter of permanent establishment, where having workers in a country regularly tips over into having a taxable corporate presence there.
Practical Guidance for Hiring Workers on a Student Visa
The safe play is to wait until students graduate and have proper work authorization. Wait until they've obtained residency or you've sponsored them for a work visa. If you absolutely must engage a current student, talk to an immigration attorney in their country first. The stakes are too high for guesswork.
Hiring Remote Workers on a Digital Nomad Visa
Finally, a visa designed for remote work. Countries rolled out digital nomad programs to attract precisely the kind of workers you want to hire. So why do tax advisors keep telling you to proceed with caution?
What Is a Digital Nomad Visa?
After 2020, countries got creative. They saw an abundance of remote workers with stable incomes and wanderlust, and they thought: why not invite them over? Digital nomad visas allow people to reside in one country while working remotely for employers or clients based in another. The worker gets a legal way to enjoy cheap rent in Vietnam or the beaches of Croatia. The host country gets someone spending money locally without taking a job from a resident.
Visa requirements vary, but most programs require a valid passport, proof of income (typically EUR 2,500 to EUR 5,000 per month), proof of employment, health insurance, background checks, and evidence that the applicant works for a company outside the country or freelances for international clients. Digital nomad visas typically allow stays ranging from one to three years, and some also provide a pathway to apply for permanent residency.
Sounds perfect, right? An employee wants to relocate to Portugal, they get a digital nomad visa, everybody wins.
Not quite.
What Digital Nomad Visas Usually Allow
The visa authorizes the individual to stay in a foreign country and to work remotely. It typically prohibits them from working for local companies or taking on local clients. So far, so good.
But here's what the visa doesn't do: it doesn't resolve the employer's obligations. Immigration status is just one question. Tax is another. And on the tax question, digital nomad visas are surprisingly unhelpful.
Employer Obligations and Gray Areas
A Grant Thornton analysis looked at digital nomad programs in 21 countries. The findings should give any HR team pause: 79% of these visas offer no relief from individual income tax, and 85% don't exempt employers from corporate tax exposure. The immigration problem is solved, but the tax problem is wide open.
What does that mean in practice? If your employee works from Spain or Portugal for more than 183 days in a year, they likely become a tax resident. That can trigger withholding requirements, social security contributions, and labor law compliance for the employer. You wanted to let someone work from the beach. You ended up with a permanent establishment in a country where you never planned to operate.
This is why digital nomad visas work much better for contractors than for employees. A freelancer handles their own taxes and business registration. They bear the compliance burden. But with employees, that burden flows uphill to you.
Digital Nomad Visas: Practical Guidance
If you're engaging contractors, digital nomad visas can work beautifully. The contractor lives where they want, serves your company legally, and manages their own compliance. Clean and simple.
For employees, proceed with caution. Before signing off on anyone's relocation plans, map out everything: tax withholding, permanent establishment risk, social security, and local labor laws. Immigration status matters, but it's only the first question—not the last.
Compliant Alternatives for Hiring International Remote Workers
None of this means you can't build a global team. It just means you need to do it the right way.
An Employer of Record allows you to employ people who already have the legal right to work in their home country. The EOR acts as the legal employer. It handles payroll and tax filings, and ensures all HR elements, from contracts to paid leave, meet local requirements. You get the talent without relying on a visa that’s on shaky legal ground or the need to establish a legal entity.
Independent contractors are a viable option if the business relationship genuinely fits that model, but misclassification risks make this approach unsuitable for ongoing, full-time roles.
For critical hires who need a long-term solution, sponsoring a work visa provides a clear and compliant path to employment, even if it takes more time.
An EOR Helps You Compliantly Build Your Global Team
RemoFirst helps companies with the visa application process in more than 85 countries, ensuring that any workers you hire on a visa are legally allowed to work for your company. We also help businesses employ workers in more than 185 countries and manage and pay contractors in over 150.
Book a demo to see how RemoFirst can help you build a global team correctly from the get-go.
