What the order actually says
The Philippines created a digital nomad visa by Executive Order No. 86, signed on 24 April 2025, and its insurance clause is one line long. An applicant must have health insurance valid for the period of the DNV.
Read that carefully, because two things follow. First, the obligation attaches to the period of the visa, not to the duration of your stay. Sites quoting it the second way are paraphrasing, not citing. Second, and more usefully, the order names no minimum coverage amount at all. Not 50,000 dollars, not 100,000. No figure appears anywhere in the text. It does not specify that the insurer must be Philippine, it does not require repatriation cover, and it does not name an approved list.
So on the document itself, this is an easy requirement. Any genuine policy that runs the length of the visa year satisfies the wording. The rest of the order asks that you be at least 18, show proof of sufficient income generated outside the Philippines, hold the nationality of a country that offers digital nomad visas to Filipinos and where the Philippines has a Foreign Service Post, not be employed in the Philippines, and have no criminal record. The visa runs a maximum of one year, is renewable for the same duration, and carries multiple-entry privileges.
The part the roundups skip
Here is the more important finding, and it has nothing to do with insurance. The visa is legally in force and operationally unfinished.
EO 86 required implementing guidelines from the Department of Foreign Affairs, with the Department of Justice, Department of Tourism, Bureau of Immigration and Bureau of Internal Revenue, within 30 days, and a pilot rollout within 60 days, which would have been about 23 June 2025. A Philippine law firm writing in July 2026 says the DFA began accepting applications, and in the same piece says that as of early 2026 the DFA had still not published the list of qualifying countries. The official e-visa portal, checked directly, contains no occurrence of the word nomad and lists no DNV category.
Two operative parameters are therefore missing: which nationalities qualify, and how much income is enough. On the second, the 24,000 dollars a year that appears on essentially every guide is not in the order and has never been officially announced. It is a third-party estimate that got repeated until it looked like a rule.
The honest position is that the visa exists in law, applications reportedly go through Foreign Service Posts, and you cannot determine your own eligibility from any public document. Ask an embassy. Do not trust a page that hands you a clean checklist, because the government has not produced one.
On a tourist stamp, nobody asks for anything
Most people reading this are not on the DNV, because most people in the Philippines are on the visa waiver, and there nothing is required. The Bureau of Immigration's visa waiver page carries no insurance clause. You get 30 days on arrival, a first extension of 29 days for 59 total, and then you can keep extending in one and two month blocks up to 36 months for visa-free nationals or 24 months for visa-required ones. The waiver fee package comes to 3,030 PHP, and past 59 days you need an ACR I-Card at 50 US dollars plus 500 PHP express.
The eTravel registration everyone files within 72 hours of arrival is a data collection platform for border control, health surveillance and economic statistics. It is free, and its FAQ contains no insurance question. There is no mandatory travel insurance to enter the Philippines.
The retirement route is worth a line too, because it changed recently and because it is now open to people who are nowhere near retirement age. The SRRV was restructured with effect from 1 September 2025, dropping the minimum age from 50 to 40 and resetting the deposits: Classic at 50 and over is 15,000 US dollars with a pension or 30,000 without, and at 40 to 49 it is 25,000 with a pension or 50,000 without, with Courtesy tiers at 1,500 and 3,000. On insurance I have nothing to tell you. The retirement authority's own pages block automated access and its checklist is a scanned image, so no primary source confirming or denying an SRRV insurance requirement was obtainable. This page makes no claim either way, which is better than the confident guess you will find elsewhere.
PhilHealth exists, and it is not enough
Foreign nationals can join the national scheme, which is more than most countries in this region offer. Since 1 July 2017 under Circular 2017-0003, PRA-registered foreign retirees and former Filipinos pay 15,000 PHP a year, and other foreign nationals holding an ACR I-Card pay 17,000 PHP a year, enrolled under the informal economy member category, payable quarterly, semi-annually or annually. Foreign nationals employed by Philippine companies are enrolled automatically as employed members on a percentage of salary instead.
The catch is scale. An appendectomy at a major Manila private hospital is reported at 150,000 to 350,000 PHP depending on room class, and the PhilHealth case rate covers roughly 6,500 PHP of that. PhilHealth is a genuine floor and a rounding error against a serious bill. Treat it as a supplement, never as the plan.
The cashier is the real problem
Philippine private hospitals want proof of cover or payment before treatment, and this is where nomad insurance quietly fails.
The figures, all from secondary sources because the big Manila hospitals do not publish machine-readable prices: a GP visit at 800 to 2,500 PHP, an emergency room visit for a foreigner at 10,000 to 50,000 PHP, a three to five day dengue admission at 15,000 to 40,000 PHP in a ward or 40,000 to 120,000 PHP in a private room, and surgery running past a million pesos at the top end.
Now the mechanics. SafetyWing operates on reimbursement and arranges direct billing only occasionally, for large inpatient bills. Pacific Cross Philippines, a locally licensed insurer, direct-bills at accredited hospitals with no cash outlay. In a country where admission starts at a cashier's window, that difference is worth more than a bigger headline limit.
The island problem
This is the argument that should actually move you. Palawan, Siargao and Coron have no tertiary care. A serious case does not get treated where you are, it gets moved.
Evacuation to a properly equipped facility in Singapore or Bangkok runs 15,000 to 50,000 US dollars uninsured, described by one insurer's guide as a realistic cost rather than a worst case for anyone outside Metro Manila. An average air ambulance flight is 12,000 to 25,000 dollars. Where a patient is stable enough for a commercial flight with a medical escort, the cost drops by 50 to 80 percent, but that is a clinical decision, not yours. Siargao expatriates are routinely transferred to Manila as a matter of course.
What to buy
If you are applying for the DNV, the insurance line is the easiest box on the form and the country list is the hard one. Buy any policy running the visa year and spend your energy on the embassy.
If you are living here on extensions, buy for two specific failure modes: the cashier who wants money before treatment, and the flight to Singapore. That points toward a locally licensed insurer that direct-bills, or an international plan with a real evacuation limit, and ideally both.
See the visa page for the extension mechanics and the 36-month ceiling, and Cebu for where the medical infrastructure actually is.