How we score countries

Principles

• Public, citable data only

  Every number comes from the World Bank's open datasets. You can look up any figure yourself using the indicator code we show.

• No invented numbers

  If a source has no recent value for a country, we show the gap. We never fill it with an estimate. The score is then based on the remaining indicators, and we flag that.

• Same answers, same result

  Your ranking is plain arithmetic: weighted averages of published indicators. There's no AI involved, so you can reproduce it yourself.

• Scores are relative

  A score of 100 means best among the countries we cover, not perfect. A score of 0 means lowest in our set, not zero.

The seven dimensions

Each dimension averages one or more indicators. Indicators with long tails (such as prices, income and homicide rates) are log-scaled first, so a few extreme values don't flatten everyone else.

How a score is calculated

1. Each indicator is rescaled to 0–100 across the 116 countries we cover (min–max). For indicators where lower is better, the scale is flipped.
2. A dimension score is the average of its rescaled indicators. Inflation is scored by its distance from 2%, so both high inflation and deflation lower the score.
3. Your answers set an importance for each dimension, which becomes a weight: Not important = 0, A little = 1, Important = 3, Essential = 6. The steps grow on purpose so that one essential priority outweighs several minor ones. Your match score is the weighted average of the dimension scores.
4. If a country has no data for a dimension, that dimension is skipped for that country and the remaining weights are rescaled. Results marked “partial data” rely on fewer indicators.

match = Σ (weightᵢ × dimension scoreᵢ) ÷ Σ weightᵢ
(only over dimensions where the country has data)

Worked example

Here's how Portugal scores for the example profile used in our sample report. These are the live values from our current dataset.

Which countries are included

We start from an editorial list of countries that are realistic relocation destinations. We then exclude any country where the World Bank lacks enough recent data (at least 7 of 8 core indicators). That leaves 116 countries. These 11 places on our list are currently excluded:

• Cuba · too little recent data
• French Guiana · not covered by the World Bank
• Guadeloupe · not covered by the World Bank
• Liechtenstein · too little recent data
• Monaco · too little recent data
• Martinique · not covered by the World Bank
• French Polynesia · too little recent data
• Reunion · not covered by the World Bank
• Taiwan, Province of China · not covered by the World Bank
• Virgin Islands, British · too little recent data
• Mayotte · not covered by the World Bank

We also leave out Russian Federation, Belarus, Islamic Republic of Iran, North Korea, and Ukraine because of international sanctions, armed conflict or severe practical barriers to relocating there.

What we don't measure

These matter a lot for a move, but we don't have reliable, openly licensed data for them across every country yet. So they're not part of the score:

• Visa and residency rules, which depend on your citizenship and change often.
• Personal income tax and special regimes for newcomers.
• Climate and weather.
• How widely English or other languages are spoken.
• Rent and housing costs. The price level is a national average across all consumption.
• Differences between cities and regions within a country.
• Recency. Official statistics usually lag by one to two years, and we show the year for every figure.

Data sources

• World Bank — World Development Indicators

  CC BY 4.0 · source last updated July 13, 2026

• World Bank — Worldwide Governance Indicators

  CC BY 4.0 · source last updated September 25, 2026

Our dataset was last rebuilt from these sources on October 6, 2026. It's regenerated by a script that downloads the latest values. No figure is entered by hand.