15 Cities and Countries That Will Pay You to Hang Out

The glorious Italian island of Sardinia is offering remote workers $16,500 to move to its small coastal villages, and has put roughly $100 million aside for it. As long as the money goes toward renovating a home, you’re gold.

Young workers keep leaving West Virginia, so a scheme called Ascend WV is offering people $12,000 to move to a few certain towns there, along with access to co-working spaces and all kinds of adventure sports vouchers and equipment. 

Half a million visitors to Taiwan over the next two years will be given vouchers for NT$5,000 — about $163, so not nothing, but less than the fare there. Their tourism industry was battered by COVID, so this scheme aims to attract visitors from nearby places. 

Moving to Tulsa could bring a $10,000 bonus — the Tulsa Remote scheme was set up to attract workers to the city, providing free desk space plus cold hard cash. It’s 17 percent cheaper than the national average anyway: sounds okay! 

Strikingly beautiful but slightly off-the-beaten-track, and nowhere near as well-known as other Italian cities, Friuli Venezia Giulia is so confident you’ll like it that they’ll refund your train fare from anywhere else in Italy. 

Starting in 2011, a lot of remote and underpopulated Italian villages have sold abandoned homes for $1 to attract remote workers. In 2021 Maenza, only an hour from Rome, started doing it. Why don’t we all just do that? Shit! 

Ten dollars will get you a plot of land in Pipestone, Manitoba. You have to pay a grand deposit up front, but get $990 back once you’ve built a house. 

The islands off Scotland have an issue with dwindling populations of mainly 90-year-olds, so recently announced a controversial £50,000 “welcome grant” for young families moving to the islands.

Just an hour from the ski resort of Verbier, the Swiss town of Albinen is offering €25,000 a head to families willing to move there, commit to a decade and buy a nice house. Done! 

Rubiá, in northwest Galicia in Spain, will pay you €150 a month to live there — not a princely sum, but considering everywhere else on Earth charges you, that’s pretty sweet. It’s an incredibly pretty place to drink yourself insane alone.

A collection of Spanish villages known as the National Network of Welcoming Villages have a scheme to attract remote workers by offering €3,500 to move there and guaranteeing cartoonishly low rent.

Presicce-Acquarica in the southern Italian region of Puglia not only wants people to move there, it wants people to move there and make more people — a €30,000 relocation bonus and an extra €1,000 for every baby born there. 

You could be given a house and get paid $500 a month to live on the stunning Greek island of Antikythera. The only catches: You need to have kids and be comfortable constituting about 15 percent of the population.

Bemidji, Minnesota — as seen in the movie Fargo — is offering remote workers $2,500, free working space and a fancy concierge service to help them with problems like, “Oh god, where the fuck have I moved to?” 

Relocate to Topeka, Kansas and — if you buy a home there — you could be given $15,000 free of charge, courtesy of the Choose Topeka program. There’s no place like a subsidized home!