How Medellin and Buenos Aires compare on cost, visas, working hours, weather, internet and safety. Every figure comes from our city guides and tools, checked and dated there.
Dollars and pounds at today's exchange rate. Download speeds are the typical figure from each guide, which says where it comes from: some are for the city, some for the whole country, so treat a small gap as no gap.
Rent, a coworking desk, a cheap lunch on each of 22 working days, and getting around: the same four costs our budget calculator uses. The rent figures aren't always the same kind of figure (some are furnished one-beds, some are averages across every size of flat), so read the note under each.
$1,080 to $2,110£810 to £1,580 a month
$878 to $2,130£659 to £1,600 a month
Visa V Nomada Digital
The catch. The bar is pinned to the minimum wage, so it moves every January. The 2026 wage survived a court challenge in July, though a final ruling is still due.
Digital nomad temporary residence
The catch. You apply in person at the immigration office in Argentina, and only passports that can visit visa-free qualify.
See where your own income stands in every country. Check your income
A 9am to 5pm day in the employer's city, shown in local time, for today's date, so it allows for the clocks changing.
Different hours or another employer city? Use the time-zone planner
The average high in °C each month, coloured by the rule on our best-time page: green is a high of 20 to 32°C with under 150mm of rain; red is a high of 38°C or more or under 12°C, 250mm of rain or more, or 33°C or more with 150mm of rain or more. Hover over a month for its rain.
| City | Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Medellin | 28° | 28° | 28° | 28° | 28° | 28° | 29° | 29° | 28° | 27° | 27° | 27° |
| Buenos Aires | 30° | 29° | 27° | 23° | 19° | 16° | 16° | 18° | 20° | 23° | 26° | 29° |
Medellin: seasons and events · Buenos Aires: seasons and events
Level 3: reconsider travel
Level 1: normal precautions
The US level is for the whole country, as the State Department sets it, and some countries have stricter advice for particular regions.
From each city guide, word for word.
You want a city where the weather stops being a variable — 21 to 22 degrees every month, no heating, no air conditioning, no seasonal reckoning — and where a genuinely good metro means you never need a car. It suits asynchronous or US-facing work, because UTC-5 with no clock changes is the cleanest overlap with North America you will find down here. And it suits anyone who will actually learn Spanish, because the reward curve is steep: the difference between the Poblado bubble at 3.3 million pesos a month and real Medellin at 2.3 is mostly linguistic.
You are expecting the Instagram version. This is a Spanish-speaking city with the English proficiency of a country ranked 76th in the world, and every interaction that matters happens at a counter with a queue. It rains on twenty-five days in October. The nomad visa is a two-year cul-de-sac that leads nowhere near residency, the income bar jumped 23 per cent overnight because it is pinned to the minimum wage, and citizenship got harder rather than easier. And be clear-eyed about the crime: the murder rate is a third of the national average and falling, but El Poblado and Laureles are first and second in the city for drug-assisted robbery, with 428 cases by August against 227 in all of 2025. Both the British and American governments say so in writing.
You have hard-currency income and you want a genuinely major city rather than a stopover. Three years of temporary residency gets you permanent status, and the rental market has more supply than it has had in years — freely negotiable, landlords who will take dollars, no guarantor if you pay ahead. It suits anyone whose Spanish is decent or who intends to make it so, and anyone who would rather live somewhere with a life of its own than somewhere assembled for visitors. And it suits people who can hold two ideas at once: that this is a country in the middle of a violent macroeconomic adjustment, and that right now, for somebody earning abroad, that adjustment has produced a stable and unusually good-value place to work from.
If you want the number on the page to still be the number in three months, go somewhere else. Inflation is 33.5 per cent a year and every peso figure here will be wrong by Christmas. The exchange-rate arbitrage that made this city famous among nomads is dead — the blue rate beats the official rate by about one per cent, so anyone still telling you to bring five thousand dollars in cash is describing 2023. English will get you fed and will not get you through an immigration appointment. Under the 2025 decree you now need health insurance and proof you can support yourself, and if you leave for six months your residency evaporates. Citizenship still says two years and now says continuous, which means two years without going home.
Most visas want health cover for the whole stay. Compare nomad health insurance · Build your trip checklist