Save Money On Travelling In Iceland Through Help Exchanges And Volunteering
Travelling In Iceland Through Help Exchanges And Volunteering
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Despite Iceland’s reputation as an expensive country preceding it, with a little planning and a willingness to trade some of your spare time it is possible to visit this staggeringly beautiful land without emptying your bank account.
We examine realistic options for saving money by taking a volunteer role in Iceland, or even making some with a paid one.
Paid Work in Iceland
Some opportunities do exist for working in Iceland. The tourist industry is booming with numbers rising to a point where the new coalition government is considering limiting tourist visitors to protect its natural wonders. These numbers, combined with low unemployment amongst a small population, mean foreigners are often welcomed to take tourism jobs, particularly in remote areas where it can be tricky convincing Icelanders to fill these positions.
From glacier walks to ice cave tours and whale watching, these trips to join while in Iceland give a good idea of the adventurous flavour to Icelandic tourism and the types of work that may be available. We suggest using the official tourism website, Inspired by Iceland, to find contact information for businesses that may be hiring.
An agency called Ninukot is able to arrange work in the hospitality sector for three to six months through its partner agencies in Europe. The jobs, in country hotels or holiday farms, pay around €2000 per month with €15 deducted per day for room and board. They also recruit for farms, the horticulture industry, and au pairs.
Iceland is part of the European Economic Area and EU citizens are entitled to work here for three months before requiring a residence permit. For Americans and other non EU native English speakers teaching English is usually the best bet in most places for fixing up employment, but that is not going to be the case in Iceland, where almost everyone is fluent already.
Saving money through volunteering may instead be a better option. While gap year companies can guide you effortlessly into a volunteer programme, it is possible to save on their fees and arrange volunteer work by yourself. We list some options for volunteering in Iceland in our newsletter as we find them, but we also recommend exploring the websites of the major help exchange platforms.
Help Exchanges in Iceland
Regular readers will be familiar with the concept, but for those new to the Jobs Abroad Bulletin a help exchange is a you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours arrangement, where hosts provide food and lodging to volunteers in exchange for help with their home, business or pet project. Money rarely changes hands and volunteers tend to pay their own travel costs.
Whether work or volunteer visas are needed is debatable and varies from country to country. Most help exchange platforms promote themselves as cultural exchange or learning experiences but Iceland doesn’t allow volunteering without an appropriate visa so we suggest not debating this issue with immigration if you are a non EU national arriving on a tourist visa.
On another page of this website, we had previously listed a hostel that we had seen announcing their volunteering needs via their Facebook page but took them down after a rather curt, no doubt arse covering, message telling us “It is illegal in Iceland.”
Most help exchanges are found through websites such as Workaway or HelpStay, who charge a small yearly membership fee to provide access to host contact details but otherwise allow users to poke about their websites for free.
Iceland has a good number of hosts for its size, the majority wanting help in the home, or in remote areas with their horses, sheep and cattle. We list a few projects in Iceland below*:
Help us on our small hobby farm and in our home in the beautiful Hegranes
Volunteers joining this family on their hobby farm can go horseback riding and take trips on a fishing boat in return for doing the laundry and the dishes, and feeding the animals.
Experience nature in the very far North of Iceland
Past volunteers have helped Árni, a sheep farmer from the northeast of Iceland, during lambing season but right now he mostly needs help with light cleaning around the remote house he shares with a border collie and a barn cat, and maybe practising English.
*The listings given above are suggestions only and were available when we updated and reposted this article in 2026.
Images courtesy www.iceland.is
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