Prague is one of the world’s best cities for remote working

The pandemic has made remote working a new norm the world over. In Europe, more people were forced to work from home than ever before as a result of Covid restrictions, while recent analyzes have highlighted the potential for remote working to continue in the long term without any loss in productivity.

People living and working in Prague experienced the city in a new light amid the quiet of pandemic lockdowns, and now, in-depth research has shown Prague to be among the world’s best locations for working remotely.

Apartment provider Nestwick investigated which cities have the best infrastructure and legislation for remote workers. The company analyzed various characteristics of 75 cities around the world often cited as being among the “most livable.” Categories evaluated included immigration requirements for foreign remote workers, living costs and taxes, as well as more loosely-related criteria touching on quality of life, such as equality and inclusivity, healthcare, pollution and even weather.

Prague came in eleventh place, with an overall score of 82.61 out of 100. The city scored very highly on the availability of accommodation and the relatively low cost of the rent of a home office. The availability of a “Digital Nomad Visa” in the Czech Republic was another plus, allowing foreign nationals to enter the country and work remotely for international employers or customers.

On the other hand, Prague scored poorly on infrastructure for remote working, including the legal requirement for employers to provide equipment or allowances for remote workers, and the presence of specific tax allowances for people working remotely. It also scored relatively poorly in the Culture and Leisure category, which measured the density of entertainment venues, ranking in TimeOut’s "Best Cities in the World," and other entertainment-related criteria.

The top three spots in the list were taken by Melbourne, Dubai and Sydney in descending order. Prague is the third highest ranking European city, behind only Tallinn in Estonia (fourth place) and Berlin (tenth place). The Czech capital easily outperformed comparable Central European destinations, with Vienna ranking eighteenth and Budapest down in 52nd place.

“The last year has really proved to companies that remote working is not only a possibility, but actually something that can be beneficial to everyone involved. The technology has been in place for a while now, but it’s taken seeing it in practice for the idea to really take hold,” said Omer Kucukdere, Founder and CEO at Nestwick.

Official EU data suggests that almost 40 percent of people working in the EU began to work remotely full-time during the pandemic. A year earlier, in 2019, only 5.4 percent of those working in EU countries usually worked from home. The major shift came when employees, as well as self-employed people, started working remotely in large numbers.

Before the pandemic, the Czech Republic had one of the bloc’s lower remote-working rates; as a general rule, countries in Central and Eastern Europe saw less remote working than countries in the west and north. Now, though, remote working has become standard, and the results of Nestwick's study show a clear potential for this phenomenon to continue in Prague in the post-pandemic world.