How this list was made
We searched YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Apple Podcasts, the Icelandic government's own English sites and every club and association directory we could find, for English language sources about moving to and living in Iceland, then kept the ones with a real audience and evidence they are still publishing. We favoured people who live there over people who visited, and material aimed at adults planning a permanent move. Anything with no upload or post in twelve months was dropped, except two podcasts we have deliberately kept and clearly labelled as finished. Iceland's English language creator field is small and heavily weighted towards visitors, and this page shows it at that size rather than padding it.
Audience figures. Every YouTube subscriber count was read off the channel's own page on 18 September 2026 and every Instagram follower count off the profile itself on the same day. Every video shown was confirmed by YouTube's oEmbed service to belong to the channel named, and all twelve passed first time. Upload dates come from each channel's official feed and are exact. The three TikTok follower counts are HypeAuditor approximations, because TikTok is the one platform we cannot read directly. Podcast episode counts and dates come from Apple's lookup service, not from the rendered Apple pages, which report episode dates wrong by a year or two. Association fees and membership figures were read off each organisation's own pages, and where a figure carries no date we say so on the card.
What we dropped, and why it matters here. Guide to Iceland's own creator round up still recommends Sorelle Amore as a foreigner living in Iceland who gives tips on how to move there. She left: her channel carries a video announcing it and has since pivoted to personal finance. Sonia Nicolson surfaces repeatedly as a British moving to Iceland vlogger, and her site is now an architecture tutoring business with no Iceland content and no YouTube link on it. Iceland with Sophie is recommended by Icelandic influencer round ups as an English language account and is not: her Instagram bio and captions are in German. Her YouTube channel has 53 subscribers. Lara in Iceland, also widely listed, writes in German too. Benjamin Hardman's 108,000 subscriber channel is off this page despite his living in Iceland, because his last three uploads are two lens reviews and a short from the Drake Passage; his Instagram is here instead. Asa Steinars is here on Instagram for the same reason, and her recent posting is from a sailboat rather than from Iceland. We also left off ten channels carried by a current Iceland listicle whose names are generic, whose subscriber counts run from 24 to 5,100 and behind which we could not find a single named human.
Four things this page will not do. It will not quote a Facebook group member figure, because Facebook blocks automated reading and no dated figure exists for any Icelandic group; the groups named in dated journalism are Away From Home Living In Iceland, The Expats Lounge Iceland, Foreigners In Iceland and Foreigners in Akureyri, and you will have to judge their size yourself. It will not quote a Reddit subscriber count, because reddit.com has been unreachable from this session at both the fetch and the search index level for nine consecutive builds; r/Iceland, r/VisitingIceland, r/Reykjavik and r/learnicelandic exist and we cannot read them. It will not link an Apple Podcasts show called Iceland Travel Podcast with Katrin Jonsdottir, which publishes daily from feed.paris2tokyo.com under a host who does not appear to exist and whose last nine episode titles are two titles regenerated in a loop with the capitalisation and diacritics shuffled; the same operator runs format identical shows for dozens of countries and Iceland is the eleventh of ours in which we have found it. And it will not recommend HMS, the Housing and Construction Authority, as an English source for rent and price statistics, which several relocation guides do, because its English content is effectively absent. Statistics Iceland is the source we use.
A finding worth stating plainly, because it is the most useful thing here. Iceland has moved four agencies onto island.is: the Directorate of Immigration, the health insurance agency, the Directorate of Labour and the pension agency. The old domains utl.is, sjukra.is, vinnumalastofnun.is and tr.is now redirect, and every deep link into their old English sub paths is dead. Every Iceland relocation guide currently ranking on Google still points at them. Nor does any page on island.is carry a last updated date, anywhere, so the only dateable official signals in the country are the agency news feeds and Statistics Iceland's release dates. Five other links that current guides still publish are broken too: mbl.is/english, island.is/en/life-events/moving-to-iceland, allthingsiceland.com/blog, island.is/en/o/icelandic-health-insurance, and the domains iheartreykjavik.net and strangerinastrangeland.co, neither of which resolves at all. One former expatriate blog, livelifewithaview.com, has been converted into a tour booking affiliate site with no personal content left on it.
Commercial interests are stated on the card. Where a creator sells relocation services, planning calls, courses, tours, prints or sponsorship, we say so rather than leaving you to find out, and on this page that is most of them: the four largest accounts are all photographers selling something, and both of the long resident Americans sell paid planning. Nothing here is copied to our servers. Every video, post and player is the platform's own official embed, loaded only when you click it, and every link opens the creator's own page. If you run one of these and want the entry changed or removed, tell us and we will do it.
Instagram and TikTok
Twenty Instagram accounts and three on TikTok, and Iceland is where the audience numbers stop meaning what you think they mean. Four accounts here are above 750,000 followers and every one of them is a landscape photographer selling prints, presets, courses or tours. The seven regional tourism boards between them have fewer followers than any one of those four. We confirmed every handle from the account's own bio or from the official website that links to it, which matters here: an account called visiticeland has twenty one subscribers on YouTube and is not the board, and Gunnar Freyr is gunnargunnar on Instagram while his business is icelandicexplorer.com. Handles also do not match across platforms. Arctic Adventures is arcticadventures on Instagram and adventures.is on TikTok.
Asa Steinars
Asa Steinarsdottir, an Icelandic adventure photographer and film maker. She sells wool sweaters through her own brand, an Iceland map and guide, and runs van rental businesses in Iceland and Norway
1.6 million followers, read off the profile on 18 September 2026, which makes this the largest Iceland account anywhere and the largest we have listed in any country. Landscape, skiing, van life and family. One honest caveat: her recent posting is from a sailboat rather than from Iceland, so this is the account for the country's landscape and not for its daily life. She is also ranked among the top TikTok accounts in Iceland, but two trackers disagree about her follower count there by a factor of two, so we have left the TikTok figure out rather than publish a number we cannot stand behind.
Benjamin Hardman
Benjamin Hardman, an Australian who moved to Iceland in 2015. Photographer and director of photography with credits for Netflix, the BBC and National Geographic. He sells film making and photo editing courses, prints, and polar expeditions
1.1 million followers, read off the profile on 18 September 2026, and the bio says based in Iceland. Ice, glaciers, volcanic ground and Arctic wildlife, and the best single body of work on what Iceland looks like in winter. We have not given him a YouTube card, although the channel has 108,000 subscribers, because his last three uploads are two lens reviews and a short from the Drake Passage. The photography is Iceland; the channel has become gear and Antarctica.
Iurie Belegurschi
Iurie Belegurschi, a Moldovan born photographer long resident in Iceland and the founder of Iceland Photo Tours. The account is the front end of a paid photography tour and workshop business
917,000 followers, read off the profile on 18 September 2026, from only about 381 posts, which is the highest followers to posts ratio on this page by a wide margin. Glaciers, ice caves and aurora, shot to sell workshops. Included because it is the clearest demonstration of what the Icelandic light does between October and March, and because a foreigner who built a national scale business there is a useful example in his own right.
Gunnar Freyr Gunnarsson
Gunnar Freyr Gunnarsson, a Reykjavik based photographer and Canon ambassador who trades as Icelandic Explorer. He sells photo workshops, private tours, prints, posters, presets and sweaters
765,000 followers, read off the profile on 18 September 2026. Read the handle carefully, because this is the exact trap this page exists to catch: his business is icelandicexplorer.com, his Facebook is Icelandicexplorer, older listicles still print icelandic_explorer, and the live Instagram account is gunnargunnar. Landscape and lifestyle photography of the capital area and the ring road, heavily monetised and openly so.
Kyana Sue Powers
Kyana Sue Powers, the American from the Powers Couple channel above. Her bio says she quit her job to travel and married an Icelandic chef, and she works with brands
527,000 followers, read off the profile on 18 September 2026, and the handle matches on Instagram, TikTok and her YouTube channel link, which is rarer than it should be. Daily travel content rather than relocation, but this is the account where her residence permit refusal and the campaign to keep her in Iceland played out, and it is the most followed English language account run by somebody who actually went through the Icelandic immigration system as an adult.
Farm Life Iceland
Palina and Maria, who run a sheep farm in Iceland. They sell an Iceland guide
341,000 followers, read off the profile on 18 September 2026, over about 1,528 posts, with highlights going back to lambing in 2021, so this is a long running account rather than a recent one. Lambing, the autumn sheep round up, working dogs and the ordinary rhythm of a farming year. If your picture of Iceland is rural rather than Reykjavik, this is the most honest version of it on this page, and it will also show you how much of the year is dark and wet.
Hekluhestar
A family farm near Hella in south Iceland with 120 homebred Icelandic horses, running riding tours since 1980 and a guesthouse. It sells rides from two hours to eight days
202,000 followers, read off the profile on 18 September 2026, and among the strongest engagement of anything here. Listed as a service provider on Visit South Iceland's own site and on visiticeland.com, which is how we confirmed it rather than taking a listicle's word. Forty six years of the same family doing the same thing in the same place is also a useful signal about what continuity looks like in rural Iceland.
Visit Iceland
Business Iceland, the national promotion body. The bio reads the official Visit Iceland account, which is how we confirmed the handle rather than guessing it
183,000 followers, read off the profile on 18 September 2026, across 1,596 posts. This is the board's most active channel: its YouTube is still posting, but its TikTok has 16,800 followers and had not posted in roughly nine months when we checked, so we have left the TikTok card off. Destination marketing throughout. There is no separate Visit Iceland account; both official national domains link here.
Visit Reykjavik
The official destination organisation for the Greater Reykjavik Area. The bio says so and visitreykjavik.is links to it
106,000 followers, read off the profile on 18 September 2026, across 2,960 posts. City areas, events, the city card and the Tiptoe Reykjavik responsible travel campaign. This is the only tourism board account on this page with a useful neighbourhood by neighbourhood view of the capital, which matters because the real decision in Iceland is not which region but which ring of Reykjavik. Its YouTube channel has 24 subscribers, so this is the channel to follow.
Gisli Matthias Audunsson
Gisli Matt, an Icelandic chef, restaurateur and food activist. His bio reads formerly Slippurinn, now Ylja
81,000 followers, read off the profile on 18 September 2026. Icelandic and New Nordic cooking, foraging and the seasonal reality of cooking from a 394,000 person island at the end of a shipping route. One correction we are recording because other lists have it wrong: Slippurinn in Vestmannaeyjar closed permanently in 2025 after fourteen years, the slippurinn account is a legacy one, and the chef's current restaurant is Ylja.
Jewells Chambers, All Things Iceland
Jewells Chambers, the American in Reykjavik listed under YouTube and podcasts. Her bio states she has been a New Yorker living in Iceland since 2016
77,000 followers, read off the profile on 18 September 2026, across 943 posts. The handle is identical on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and her own domain, which we checked rather than assumed. Language, folklore, history and the practicalities of a decade of living there. Of everyone on this page she is the one most likely to answer a question from somebody who has not booked anything yet.
Jeannie, Iceland with a View
Jeannie, the American who moved in 2015, listed under YouTube above. She sells itineraries, a packing guide and paid planning
76,800 followers, read off the profile on 18 September 2026, across 2,178 posts. Her Instagram is noticeably more about living there than the YouTube channel is, with the Reykjavik life material sitting here. Note that she and Jewells Chambers are within 300 followers of each other: between them they are the two largest English language voices of foreigners who actually live in Iceland, and both sell planning services.
Visit Westfjords
The official regional board for the Westfjords, based in Isafjordur. Confirmed from the footer of westfjords.is
71,600 followers, read off the profile on 18 September 2026, across 3,736 posts, which is far more than the region's population would suggest and makes this the best followed regional board in the country. The Westfjords are where Icelandic property is cheapest, when anything is listed at all, and where you are furthest from the specialists at Landspitali in Reykjavik. This account will show you the first half of that and not the second. The board has no YouTube channel at all.
The Reykjavik Grapevine
The Reykjavik Grapevine, an independent English language magazine publishing eighteen print issues a year, plus a newsletter, podcasts and a paid subscription tier
36,500 followers, read off the profile on 18 September 2026, across 4,603 posts, and the most useful editorial account in the country for somebody planning to live there rather than visit. Note the handle: their Facebook is reykjavikgrapevine, but Instagram and X are both rvkgrapevine, so do not infer the long form. Culture, music, politics, food and the occasional piece of real reporting on immigration.
Visit South Iceland
The official regional board, based at Tryggvagata 13 in Selfoss. Confirmed from the footer of south.is
18,200 followers, read off the profile on 18 September 2026. Note the handle mismatch: their Facebook is visitsouthiceland and the Instagram is plain southiceland. The south is the growing commuter belt, with Selfoss about 45 minutes from Reykjavik, new construction arriving and mid priced housing, and it is the most realistic non capital option for most of our readers. Their YouTube channel has 69 subscribers.
Visit Reykjanes
The official regional board for the Reykjanes peninsula. The bio reads official account of Visit Reykjanes
17,700 followers, read off the profile on 18 September 2026. Reykjanesbaer and Keflavik are Iceland's fastest growing corner, among the cheapest markets within reach of the capital, and 45 minutes from Reykjavik with the international airport on the doorstep. They are also the ground that erupted repeatedly from 2021 onwards, and this is the board that documented it. Follow it for both halves of that.
Visit North Iceland
The official regional board for the north, northiceland.is. Confirmed from the site's own footer
16,200 followers, read off the profile on 18 September 2026. Akureyri is the only serious alternative to the capital area: about 20,000 people, a university, a regional hospital, a ski hill and cheaper housing, against a 45 minute flight or a drive of four and a half hours or more to reach Reykjavik specialists. Rental supply there is very thin. Their YouTube channel has 538 subscribers, so this is the account to follow.
National Museum of Iceland
Thjodminjasafn Islands, the national museum in Reykjavik. A state institution with nothing to sell you
12,900 followers, read off the profile on 18 September 2026, across 1,959 posts. Twelve hundred years of history and material culture, posted in Icelandic and English. We include one museum on each of these pages where a good one exists, because a reader who is genuinely going to live somewhere wants something to do in February, and because the museum's own account is the one place on this page with no commercial interest of any kind.
Visit Austurland
Destination Austurland, the official east Iceland board, operated by Austurbru in Egilsstadir. Confirmed from the footer of east.is
10,100 followers, read off the profile on 18 September 2026. Note that the board brands itself Austurland rather than East Iceland, and that visiteasticeland is their Pinterest, not their Instagram. The east fjords are Iceland at its most remote and its cheapest, with tight villages, a four figure population spread over a long coast, and healthcare and shopping that route back towards the capital. Their YouTube channel has 732 subscribers.
Visit West Iceland
The West Iceland Marketing Office in Borgarnes. The bio reads official account of West Iceland Marketing Office
9,693 followers, read off the profile on 18 September 2026, and the smallest of the seven official boards. Borgarfjordur, Snaefellsnes, the swimming pools and the walking trails. Worth keeping separate from the Westfjords in your head, because they are different regions with different boards and people confuse them constantly: the west starts about an hour north of Reykjavik, the Westfjords are five hours further.
Kyana Sue Powers
Kyana Sue Powers, the American in Iceland listed above. The handle matches her Instagram, which we verified on both rather than assuming
Approximately 173,800 followers, from HypeAuditor in September 2026. TikTok is the one platform we cannot read directly, so every figure in this group is a third party approximation and we would rather say that than dress it up. Short daily life and travel content, and the best single TikTok account for a reader who wants to see what an American's ordinary week in Iceland looks like.
Guide to Iceland
The travel marketplace listed under YouTube above. A commercial booking platform, not a tourism board, despite a name that reads official
Approximately 165,000 followers on 14 September 2026, up from about 163,500 in late August, from HypeAuditor. That fortnight of growth is the only hard evidence of active TikTok posting we could obtain for any Iceland account, which is why it is here. Attractions, tours and seasonal footage across 1,114 videos.
Jewells Chambers, All Things Iceland
Jewells Chambers, the American in Reykjavik since 2016. Same handle here as on Instagram, YouTube and her own domain
Approximately 69,300 followers, from HypeAuditor in September 2026, with the most recent post twelve days before that snapshot. Language, culture and expat life in short form. The figure had not moved between late August and mid September, so treat the account as active but not fast growing.