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Work from Nepal for the World

Software Developer

Build the websites, apps and systems companies run on, from a desk in Nepal, for a team anywhere in the world.

Pays abroad
US median $135,980 a year (2025)
To learn
1–2 years of steady study
Hours
A few hours’ overlap; much of it in writing
Will AI close it?
Growing

The work, day to day

A software developer turns what people need into programs that work: a shop’s checkout, an app’s login, the system that sends a hospital its lab reports. Most of a day is reading and writing code, testing it, fixing bugs and reviewing teammates’ changes. Remote teams work more in writing than in meetings: a ticket says what to build, a pull request shows the change, and a short video call settles what writing can’t. Most remote jobs are in web development: the part people see, the part on the server, or both.

What it pays

In the United States the middle software developer earned $135,980 a year in May 2025, and their number is expected to grow 10% by 2035 (US Bureau of Labor Statistics). That is the top of the market; companies hiring from Nepal pay less. The best figures for Nepal are from IIDS’s study of 2022: about 66,509 freelancers exported IT services, 38,556 of them counted on global platforms (14,728 in software development) and the rest estimated. They earned an average of US$4,723 a year. In Nepal’s IT companies a senior worker’s salary averaged US$15,322, about Rs 20 lakh. Salary websites quote much higher remote pay for Nepal but don’t say how they count, so we give no figure for a remote developer here. Many are paid through foreign accounts and never counted (Kathmandu Post, 2026).

Will AI close it?

Growing: AI makes more of this work.

Employers expect more of these jobs, not fewer: the World Economic Forum’s 2025 survey puts software developers among the fastest-growing jobs to 2030, and the US expects 10% more by 2035. What changes is the work: AI writes first drafts of code, but 46% of developers distrust its accuracy and two in three say its biggest problem is answers “almost right, but not quite” (Stack Overflow, 2025). The developers who stay in demand decide what to build, check and test what AI writes, and understand the whole system.

How AI helps you do it from Nepal

AI tools put a developer in Nepal on level ground with one abroad. In Stack Overflow’s 2025 survey 84% of developers used or planned to use them, and about half of professionals every day. Use one to explain code you don’t understand, write routine code and tests, find a bug, and polish your English in tickets and emails, so a client judges your work and not your grammar. Be careful: never paste a client’s code or data into an AI tool without permission, test everything it writes, and learn to code without it first, since live coding tests often allow no AI.

Software Developer · 1 of 2 · science-playground.com/learn/remote-work/software-developer

The skills, in order

  1. How the web works, with HTML and CSS: build a few pages by hand.
  2. One programming language well: JavaScript, or Python.
  3. Git and GitHub: saving versions and working with others.
  4. A framework employers ask for, such as React, and the server side: an API and an SQL database.
  5. Testing, debugging, and reading other people’s code.
  6. Written English: clear questions, tickets and updates.

Where to learn them from Nepal

  • CS50x (Harvard): free online; starts from nothing and teaches C, Python, SQL, HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
  • The Odin Project: a free, open-source course to become a full-stack web developer, with projects to build.

Show your work

Employers hire remote developers on what they can see. Put three or four finished projects on GitHub, each with a live link and a short README saying what it does and what you learned. Make one solve a real problem for someone in Nepal: a school’s notice board, a shop’s stock list. Fix a small bug in an open-source project; it shows you can read others’ code and work in public. Expect a take-home task or a live coding test on a shared screen, so practise explaining your thinking aloud in English.

Finding the work

Three routes lead to most first remote jobs. Join one of Kathmandu’s software companies, many of which earn from clients abroad, and learn how remote teams work. Use job boards’ filters for jobs open worldwide (Remote OK has one) and skip ads that say US or EU only. And ask a company that wants you but has no office in Nepal to hire you through an employer of record: Deel employs people in Nepal on companies’ behalf, and Remote can pay contractors here. Work in your client’s morning or evening for an hour or two of overlap; the rest can be async.

Your first 90 days

  1. Month 1: CS50x’s first weeks or The Odin Project’s foundations, an hour or two every day. Open a GitHub account and save everything there.
  2. Month 2: build your first small website from scratch and put it online. Ask three people to use it, and fix what confuses them.
  3. Month 3: build one project for a real person or shop near you, write its README, and read ten remote job ads to list the skills they all ask for.

Getting paid into Nepal, the 5% tax, contracts and the scams aimed at beginners: Getting Paid in Nepal (science-playground.com/learn/remote-work/getting-paid).

More than the printed sheet

A day in the work

Say you work from Kathmandu for a company in New York. Its working day, 9 am to 6 pm, is 6:45 pm to 3:45 am in Nepal in the American summer, and an hour later in winter (Nepal doesn’t change its clocks). So remote teams agree a few hours of overlap: you might work from noon to 9 pm, with the team’s daily call at their 10 am, 7:45 pm in Nepal. Europe is easier: London’s 9 am is 1:45 pm in Nepal in its summer and 2:45 pm in winter, so your afternoon meets their morning. A team in Dubai starts its day at 10:45 am Nepal time, nearly yours.

The other hours are spent in writing. Before you stop, you push your code, write in the ticket what you did and what is stuck, and ask your questions; your teammates answer while you sleep. The tools are much the same everywhere: in Stack Overflow’s 2025 survey, about 8 in 10 professional developers used GitHub and half used Jira, a ticket tracker. A week usually has a planning call, short daily check-ins (often written), and code reviews, where a teammate reads your change before it joins the main code.

A third of the developers in that survey worked fully remotely, and more than a third more in hybrid jobs. But it can be lonely. Nepali freelancers told the Kathmandu Post of night meetings across time zones, language barriers and isolation: “it can get quite lonely”, one said (2020). Plan for it: fixed working hours, and friends in the trade to talk to.

The pay, worked through

There is no reliable figure for what a remote developer in Nepal earns, so take a round number only to show the arithmetic: a contract for US$2,000 a month, paid by bank transfer (SWIFT) into your account in Nepal.

1. The client’s bank sends US$2,000. On the way, one to three intermediary banks may each take US$10–30 (Grey). Say one takes US$20: US$1,980 arrives. With the charges code OUR, the sender pays all the fees and the whole US$2,000 arrives: ask for it.

2. Your bank credits it. Nepal Bank Limited’s price list, for example, makes crediting a foreign-currency transfer to your account free, unless a correspondent bank charges it. Other banks set their own charges: ask yours.

3. It is changed into rupees. On 12 October 2026 Nepal Rastra Bank’s buying rate was Rs 154.48 to the dollar; your bank uses its own rate for the day. US$1,980 × 154.48 = Rs 305,870.

4. The bank keeps 5% advance tax as it pays the money in (Republica, 2026): Rs 15,294. You receive Rs 290,577, about Rs 2.9 lakh.

Over twelve such months that is about Rs 34.9 lakh. The numbers move: the dollar’s rate changes every day, and two rupees more or less to the dollar changes this month’s pay by about Rs 4,000. Whether the 5% is the whole tax on a large income isn’t settled (see Getting Paid in Nepal), so keep some aside until a tax adviser has told you. A contractor also pays for the laptop, the UPS and the backup connection, and saves for the months between contracts.

Why don’t more companies abroad simply employ you? An employer of record costs them more than your pay: Deel’s fee starts at US$599 a month, plus the employer’s costs in Nepal, which Deel puts at 12.6% of the salary (12% in contributions, the rest insurance). Many small firms would rather pay a contractor.

Nepalis doing it

Rest of World (2022) told the story of a software engineer in his late twenties, called Ramesh in the story because he didn’t want his name used, who left a Kathmandu company for a foreign start-up and kept working from Kathmandu as a contractor. “Although I have a similar job [now], I have more cash in hand,” he said, but also: “I also don’t have any social security. But I have a fatter paycheck, I think I can manage the risks.”

Kathmandu’s software companies do the same work as whole teams. Leapfrog Technology, founded in 2010, has offices in Kathmandu and Seattle, says it has more than 500 people and has served more than 250 companies, among them Microsoft and the University of California, San Francisco, and keeps its phone line open in US working hours. Verisk Nepal has built software for its parent company’s businesses since 2009, and Fusemachines Nepal, set up in 2013, works on AI and web and iPhone apps (Onlinekhabar, 2023).

Your first portfolio project

Build something with Nepal’s own data. Open Data Nepal, run by Open Knowledge Nepal, has 630 datasets, many as CSV files, and an API your code can fetch them from. Two ideas, each about a month’s work:

An air-quality page for your town. The portal’s “Realtime air quality datasets” collect the Department of Environment’s readings for places such as Bhaktapur, Pokhara, Dhankuta, Damak and Dang. Show the latest reading and what it means for a child walking to school. The portal says a bot copies these numbers from the government’s site and it can’t guarantee them, so show when each reading was taken, and what your page does when one is missing.

A school-numbers explorer, from the Flash Report, the Ministry of Education’s yearly count of every school: schools and students by province, from 2018/19 to 2025/26.

In each README, say where the data comes from and under what licence; some datasets give none, so ask the publisher before you use one in something you sell.

Questions people ask

Do I need a degree?
It helps, but it isn’t the only way. In the United States developers typically have a bachelor’s degree in computing (US Bureau of Labor Statistics). Yet in Stack Overflow’s 2025 survey about one professional developer in six had none: 5% had finished only secondary school, and 12% had studied at a university without finishing. What you can show on GitHub and in the employer’s test counts for a lot; some employers will still ask for a degree.
Is my English good enough?
Nepal came 58th in EF’s 2025 English Proficiency Index, in its “moderate” band. Nepal’s strongest skill was writing (547) and its weakest listening (495). That suits remote work, which is mostly written. Practise listening and speaking for the calls: explain your code aloud in English.
Can I learn on a phone?
You can watch the lessons and read on one, but writing code needs a keyboard and a bigger screen. You don’t need a new computer: CS50’s coding space, cs50.dev, runs in a web browser with nothing to install, only a GitHub account, so an old laptop will do.
Is it legal to work for a foreign company from Nepal?
Yes, when the money comes in through a bank: Nepal Rastra Bank lets freelancers and service exporters bring in foreign earnings, and the 5% tax is for exactly this income (see Getting Paid in Nepal). The government’s policy and programme for 2083/84 also promised legal arrangements for a remote work policy, to let people in Nepal work for employers abroad (Kathmandu Post, May 2026).

Related

  • Getting Paid in Nepal: bank transfers, Payoneer, Nepal Rastra Bank’s rules, the 5% tax, contracts and scams, for all three jobs.
  • UI/UX Designer: the people whose designs you build; many developers learn some of both.
  • Data Analyst: SQL and Python again, for answering questions rather than building apps.
  • Starting a Business in Nepal: registering, a PAN and loans if you grow into a company, and what work abroad really pays and costs.

Sources for this part

The sheet’s own sources are listed on it, above.