Successful Croatian Digital Nomad Permit Stories

By , DNS

Access to Croatia is not as easy as it once was for Brits, now that the Brexit reality has kicked in, and – like other non EU/EEA citizens, Brits can only stay for 90 at one time these days. Having heard of the Croatian digital nomad, Brit Kevin Macadam decided to try his luck, as he explains below. I did send Kevin questions for an interview, but I think the text reads better without my questions. Here is Kevin’s story:
Our journey to Croatia originally began last year when we were out walking our dog in rainy Yorkshire and discussing where we might want to live when we retire.

And then we looked at each other and said why are we waiting to retire as we both were working remotely.

We had just come back from holiday on the Amalfi coast in Italy and said it would be great to live in Italy and so we started to look and how we could live there.

Unfortunately to get temporary residency we had to set up an Italian company and have our wages paid into that company so that they could take their share of tax.

Our employers wouldn’t have agreed to that and so we thought that was that. I then spotted the term Digital Nomad Visa online and looked at which companies offered them in Europe as we had to consider we would take our cat and dog with us. Georgia – too cold Estonia – too cold and then we saw Croatia! Having already been on holiday to Hvar and Dubrovnik we knew we loved the country and I already had friends there as I have been involved in British baseball for the last 30 years and knew the Croatian baseball president and the secretary of the European baseball federation who live in Zagreb and Karlovac respectively.

So that’s how we decided on Croatia, we already knew we loved the scenery, the food, the cost of living and the people.

We travelled over on the 1st March 2021 in a small window when we were allowed to leave the UK and arrived on the usual 90 day allowed time. We then applied for the DNV around 6 weeks into our stay. We had tried to get over before the 31st December but the U.K. was in a strict lockdown so we couldn’t get over.

We applied online via the Croatian government website and submitted all our supporting documents and waited. We were asked to attend the police station and went for interview and then went to a separate department to go through the paperwork. Unfortunately we thought our DBS check on U.K. government paper would be sufficient but apparently we needed it to be apostilled so we sent it back to the U.K. and then got them sent over by courier and once submitted in person again our residency was approved.

Read full story on our DNA web portal!