Remote work lovers, you’ve come to the right place — Toronto was just ranked one of the top 10 cities in the world for “creative digital nomads” to work.
The report, by online printing company Solopress, assessed the world’s best cities for a number of metrics, including the average cost of living per month, Airbnb rates and WiFi quality to determine the best places for creative workers interested in travelling while working to visit. Toronto ranked 8th, behind cities including Los Angeles, Hong Kong and Istanbul in the first place spot.
The study found the average hourly rate freelancers charge for creative jobs is around $67, and found the average monthly price for an Airbnb is just over $6,600 — well below the monthly price in the U.S. cities that made the list, but more than double the cost for higher-ranking cities including Istanbul, Bangkok and Budapest. The cost of hot-desking per month in Toronto came in at $196, while the city’s WiFi speed is 19 mb/s.
We have entered a new age of the workforce, where the thought of entering a physical office space is enough to turn people off from a job entirely. Thanks to evolving technology that has allowed many of us to do our jobs from our homes (and maybe even from a tropical island with a strong WiFi connection), the temptation of remote and hybrid work is too strong to turn down for many. Not everyone can take advantage — the report highlights creative jobs such as writers, graphic designers, illustrators, web designers and video editors as ideal jobs for the digital nomad lifestyle. But for those that can, it’s difficult to resist the option to do your job from anywhere.
Torontonians might not exactly recognise this city as a work from home haven — after all, many of us have had to return to the office, despite the fact that, according to Statistics Canada, roughly 40 per cent of Canadian jobs can be done from home. At the beginning of the pandemic, 40 per cent of Canadian workers were working most of their hours from home — but that number quickly dropped to 23 per cent by August of 2021. While remote work has been associated with higher productivity and even a reduction of greenhouses gases from commuting, companies began mandating office attendance with corporate policies, rather than voluntary attendance guidelines.
That being said, obviously digital nomads have been able to take advantage of some of the city’s supposed remote work perks, like faster internet services (perhaps they all missed the Rogers power outage?) and a lower cost of living (maybe they’re just living in a different Toronto altogether). At least someone’s getting to work remotely in this city!
