Can a person who moved to Lisbon last month on a residence visa sell services to clients online in their first weeks there? The answer depends on four documents: the visa itself, a local tax number, a business registration, and a bank account that a payment processor will accept. The website can be finished in a weekend, and each of the four documents has its own queue.
Work Permission Under the New Visa
Many residence permits allow the holder to work for a local employer and say nothing about self-employment, while others allow self-employment only in specific forms. A visa tied to a sponsoring employer usually rules out running a separate business in the new country, even when the business is entirely online. Checking the permit’s exact wording with an immigration lawyer before the first local invoice costs one consultation fee.
Visas built for remote workers are the exception, and their conditions are specific. Portugal’s D8 visa for remote workers requires average monthly income of at least four times the national minimum wage, which came to €3,680 a month in 2026, earned from work for clients or employers outside Portugal. A newcomer planning to sell to local customers needs a different permit, and that difference determines what the website is allowed to offer and to whom. Remote-work visas in other countries follow a similar model, with an income threshold and a condition that the clients or employers are abroad.
Tax Residence and Business Registration
Many countries treat a person as tax resident after 183 days in a year, and some apply the rule from the date of arrival. Residence in the old country does not always end on the same date, and United States citizens remain liable for US tax on worldwide income wherever they live, so a newcomer can owe returns in two places for the same year. Social security contributions follow separate rules, and some countries have agreements that let a person keep paying into the old system for a set period.
Most countries require a local tax identification number before a bank account can be opened or an invoice issued, and freelancers usually enroll as self-employed with the tax office before the first sale. A tax treaty between the two countries generally prevents the same income from being taxed twice, and it still requires the correct filings in both.
Payment Accounts and Banking
Payment processors decide which businesses they accept by country of registration. Stripe, one of the most widely used, lists fewer than 50 countries where a business can open an account, and a newcomer registered in a country outside that list needs another route to take card payments. Local banks commonly ask for a residence permit and a local tax number before opening a business account, and many also want proof of address, so the order of documents matters. Processors also watch new accounts closely, and the first payout to a new business commonly arrives one to two weeks after the first sale.
Currency conversion is a smaller, recurring cost. A seller who charges clients in one currency and pays rent in another loses a percentage on every conversion, and pricing in the currency the business spends is the simplest way to limit it.
A Storefront in Two Languages
A website builder can produce the same set of pages in two languages, which lets a newcomer serve clients in the old country and new ones in the adopted country from a single address. The first customers of a relocated business are often people from the previous home market who already know the founder’s work.
Translation needs a native reader. Machine translation produces grammatical pages that can still use the wrong tone for a local market, and a single review by a native speaker catches those errors before launch. Prices should appear in the currency each audience uses, and a local phone number or messaging account tells visitors in the new country that someone will answer during their business hours. A booking page should also show available times in the visitor’s own time zone, since a client several hours away will otherwise choose the wrong slot.
Local Domain Rules
A country-code domain signals a local business, and each registry sets its own eligibility rules. A .ca address requires a connection to Canada under CIRA’s Canadian presence requirements, such as citizenship, permanent residence or a Canadian-registered organization. A newcomer on a temporary permit may not qualify until the business itself is registered there. The registry can also ask an existing holder for documents that prove the connection, so the eligibility has to remain valid for as long as the domain is kept.
Germany’s registry is more open. Anyone can hold a .de domain without living in Germany, though a holder based abroad can be asked to name a recipient with a German address for legal documents if the domain becomes the subject of a dispute. A .com address has no residence rules at all, and many relocated businesses keep one as the main site with a country-code domain pointing to it.
Sales Tax on Cross-Border Orders
Under the e-commerce VAT rules in force since July 1, 2021, a seller based in the EU whose cross-border sales to EU consumers exceed €10,000 a year in total must charge VAT at the rate of each customer’s country. The EU’s one-stop shop lets the seller report and pay all of that VAT through a single registration in one member state, which removes the need for a separate VAT number in every country where a customer lives. The threshold counts sales of goods and of online services together, and below it the seller charges VAT at its home country’s rate. Sellers based outside the EU get no threshold for online services and owe VAT from the first sale to an EU consumer.
Legal Notices and Privacy
Some countries require specific information on every commercial website. In Germany, section 5 of the Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz, in force since May 2024, requires a legal notice with the operator’s name, a postal address and contact details, and missing information can lead to fines of up to €50,000. The notice has to be easy to reach from every page, which in practice means a link in the site footer. Sites that serve EU residents also need a privacy notice and consent for any tracking cookies under the General Data Protection Regulation, which allows fines of up to €20 million or 4% of worldwide annual turnover for the most serious breaches.
A Head Start From the Previous Home
Immigrants in the United States are 80% more likely to start businesses than people born there, according to research by Pierre Azoulay and colleagues covering 2005 to 2010, and their firms created 42% more jobs relative to the size of each population. A founder who arrives with clients and a working reputation from another market is starting a local business with an export business already attached.
