Working remotely from Nigeria

If you can keep earning abroad while living here, you have solved the hardest problem in this whole undertaking. Foreign income, local costs, no need to rebuild a career from scratch in an unfamiliar market.

It is the strongest hand you can hold. It is also fragile in specific, predictable ways, and every one of them is easier to handle before you go.

Ask your employer properly, in writing

The conversation most people have is casual. "We're remote anyway, so working from Nigeria is fine, right?" The answer is usually a cheerful yes from a manager who has no authority over the question.

The formal answer involves payroll, tax withholding, social security, insurance, and often data protection. Some employers genuinely do not mind. Some cannot legally have an employee sitting in a country where they have no entity. Many have never been asked and will need weeks to find out.

Ask early, ask in writing, and ask before you resign from anything or ship a container. A verbal yes that becomes a written no after you have moved is a catastrophe. The same yes obtained six months early is an administrative exercise.

If you are a contractor rather than an employee, this is simpler, but check your contract for a clause about where the work is performed. They are more common than people expect.

Understand what this does to your tax position

This is the part that changed, and if you last looked into it before 2026 your information is wrong.

Nigeria's residency test no longer turns on counting days alone. Having a permanent home available to you here, habitually staying here, or holding substantial family or economic ties can make you tax resident, and residents are taxable on income earned anywhere in the world. Your foreign salary is not automatically outside the picture simply because the employer is abroad.

Meanwhile the country you left may not have let go either. The United States taxes citizens on worldwide income wherever they live. The United Kingdom and Canada each apply their own residency tests, and Canada has a departure charge that surprises people.

Being considered resident in two places at once is possible, and resolving it is what double taxation treaties are for. This is a conversation with a cross-border tax professional who has seen your numbers, and it is worth the fee several times over. We cover the change in more detail in the 2026 tax residency piece.

Build the infrastructure before you need it

Your income now depends on a video call not dropping. Treat that as seriously as you would treat your office not catching fire.

Two connections, always. Starlink is the backbone most remote workers here settle on, at around six hundred and sixty-nine thousand naira to install and fifty-seven thousand a month. Pair it with a good fibre or LTE line as backup. One connection is not a connection, it is a single point of failure that will choose the worst possible meeting to prove it.

Power that carries the connection, not just the lights. Work out the load you need to keep up during an outage, which is usually a laptop, a router, the Starlink dish and a light, and size an inverter and battery around that. This is a much smaller and cheaper problem than backing up an entire house, and it is the one that protects your income. Generators are for the house. Batteries are for the call.

A router that fails over automatically. If switching connections requires you to walk to a cupboard mid-sentence, you will not do it, you will apologise and reschedule instead.

Buy this properly once. The temptation to economise here is strong and always regretted.

The time zone is an advantage, mostly

Nigeria sits one hour ahead of the UK for part of the year and level with it for the rest, which makes British hours entirely workable. North America is harder in the useful direction: a nine in the morning meeting in New York is two in the afternoon here, which is fine, but a four in the afternoon Pacific meeting lands near midnight.

Look honestly at where your meetings actually cluster. UK and European employers are straightforward. East coast North America is manageable. West coast means either a genuinely asynchronous role or a working life that eats your evenings, and your family will feel that long before your employer does.

Practical things that catch people

Keep a card and an account abroad live and occasionally used, so a work reimbursement or a software subscription does not fail.

Some services geoblock. Banking apps, employer VPNs and certain platforms behave differently when they see a Nigerian IP address. Test the ones your job depends on before you rely on them.

Have a fallback workspace. A co-working space or a hotel with reliable power, identified in advance, so that the day everything fails at once you have somewhere to go rather than a crisis.

Tell your employer nothing they will discover unpleasantly later. Being straightforward about where you are is much safer than being found out by an IP address during an audit.

The honest summary

Remote work is the single best reason to make this move now rather than in five years, and it is the thing that makes the arithmetic work. Foreign income against local costs is a genuinely strong position.

But it rests on three things holding: your employer's written agreement, a tax position you have actually checked, and infrastructure you paid for properly. Get those three right and this is the most comfortable version of coming home available to anyone.

Leave any one of them to chance and you have built your new life on a single point of failure.

Work out what you actually need, or tell us your setup and we will size the power and connectivity for you.

Figures current as of September 2026. Nothing here is tax or legal advice.