I imagine most people are familiar with the concept of country of residence, i.e. the country where you are physically living. There are other types of residence as well, like tax residence, which may not always be the same as your physical residence.

However, there’s one other type of residence that I’ve come across over the past couple of years, namely “Google Residence”, which is determined by Google based on how much time you’ve spent in a country.

My recent Google Residency timeline:

• February 11, 2020 - I moved to Taiwan during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

• April 22, 2021 - I received an email from Google saying that my residency would be changing from Sweden to Taiwan.

• August 31, 2022 - I moved from Taiwan to the Netherlands where I would be spending a year.

• October 4, 2023 - I started the process of moving from the Netherlands to Japan.

• December 20, 2023 - I received an email from Google saying that my residency would be changing from Taiwan to the Netherlands, despite no longer having any physical presence in the Netherlands 🤔

Here’s my attempt to visualize this using Excel:

From the email I received from Google we can see that it takes about a year for the association to update.

If you recently moved, it can take about a year for your country association to update. You can find more information about your country association, and a way to request a change if you think it’s wrong, by reviewing the Google Terms of Service.

I’m not quite sure what will happen next. It seems like once your Google residence changes, it will remain for at least a minimum of maybe 6 months to 1 year. Then, the 1 year evaluation period starts, after which a new Google residence will be selected.

So I guess I will be a Google resident of the Netherlands until some time in 2024, and then 1 year after that, some time in 2025 perhaps, Google will realize I am no longer living in the Netherlands and presumably change it to Japan 🤷‍♂️