Find Your Perfect Retirement Destination: A Data-Driven Relocation Tool for 2025
Fig.1. Broken Beach, Sakti, Klungkung Regency, Bali, Indonesia. Photo by Chaitanya Maheshwari on Unsplash.
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Disclaimer: I am not a financial adviser, and this content is for informational and educational purposes only. Please consult a qualified financial adviser for personalized advice tailored to your situation.
Discover the Best Countries to Retire: How Our Retirement Relocation Tool Can Help
(**The objective of this post is to lay out the methodology of the Retirement Relocation Tool, to answer common FAQs, and to disclose the limitations of following this approach. Please keep in mind that the tool works only for PC at the moment.)
In a previous post, we discussed how geographic arbitrage—moving to affordable countries—can significantly reduce expenses and fast-track financial independence (FI) and early retirement (FIRE). In that post, we identified an initial set of factors that would be desirable for choosing our ideal retirement destination, such as cost of living, healthcare system, safety, political stability, pollution, and climate. The article provided a data-driven approach to identify suitable countries for early retirement.
Our interactive Retirement Relocation Tool helps users find their ideal retirement destination by filtering key factors like cost of living, healthcare, climate, and many others. Building on the above-mentioned article, and after receiving initial feedback from several FI communities on Reddit, we have developed a data-driven tool we hope you enjoy. This tool serves as a starting point to shortlist the best countries for retirement based on your personal preferences and lifestyle goals. It does not replace the need for serious due diligence on a whole set of other factors that are important when deciding where to relocate to (more on this later).
In today’s post, we lay out the methodology underlying the tool, answer FAQs based on feedback received, and disclose any data and methodology limitations that users should be aware of.
How Our Data-Driven Retirement Tool Ranks the Best Places to Retire
How the Retirement Relocation Tool Ranks Countries for Your Ideal Retirement
The tool generates a visual ranking of countries, plotting a Retirement Suitability score against Cost of Living (COL) to help users compare top retirement destinations. The retirement suitability score is an average of 9 different variables that are relevant to selecting a country to retire to. These variables are Safety, Healthcare, Political Stability, Pollution, Climate, English Proficiency, Openness, Natural Scenery, and Natural Disaster Risk. These factors are further described in Table 1 below, together with their sources and data completeness.
Fig. 2. Screenshot of the Retirement Relocation Tool (at the moment available for PC only).
As observed in the screenshot on Figure 2 above, the left panel of the tool presents the 9 different variables that make up the Retirement Suitability score. Users can customize their rankings by selecting or deselecting key factors, allowing the tool to dynamically recalculate results based on their priorities. In addition, each variable has a slider, which can be moved from 5 (includes all countries) to 1 (includes only best countries). For example, if we move a slider from 5 to 4, we are dropping from the plot the worst 20% performing countries in that variable. If we move the slider all the way to 1, we are keeping only the top 20% performers in that variable. These sliders allow the user to define how important these factors are and how strict they want to be with them–one user may want to set Healthcare to 2, while another may consider English Proficiency to be very important and set it to 2. You get the idea.
Users can refine their results by selecting specific continents, helping them focus on regions that meet their preferences. You can remove continents directly above the plot, and this will drop all relevant countries of said continent. Since data availability varies, users can filter out countries with excessive missing values to ensure accurate comparisons for their retirement search. At the top, clear instructions guide users on how to get the most accurate results from the Retirement Relocation Tool.
Data Sources and Factors Used in the Retirement Relocation Tool
Table 1: Variables considered in the Retirement Relocation Tool.
| Variable | Source | Comment | Data Completeness |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost of Living | Numbeo (2025) | Data sourced from an expat-oriented platform | 106 countries |
| Safety | Numbeo (2025) | Perceived safety reported, not actual crime statistics | 106 countries |
| Healthcare | Numbeo (2025) | Quality of healthcare system, incl. factors such as healthcare professionals, equipment, staff, doctors, and costs | 95 countries |
| Political Stability | World Bank (2023) | Aggregate score of the World Bank's World Governance Indicators (2023): Voice and accountability, political stability, effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and control of corruption | 106 countries |
| Pollution | Numbeo (2025) | Estimation of overall pollution levels in countries worldwide | 101 countries |
| Climate | Numbeo (2025) | Estimation of the climate likability of a given country | 88 countries |
| English Proficiency | Education First (2024) | Ranking of countries and regions by English skills, based on test results | 93 countries |
| Openness | InterNations (2024) | Ease of Settling In Index is composed of 3 sub-indicators: Finding Friends, Culture & Welcome, and Local Friendliness | 53 countries |
| Natural Scenery | US News (2024) | Survey data of 17,000 individuals across 36 countries | 89 countries |
| Natural Disaster Risk | WorldRiskReport (2024) | Assesses disaster risk by analyzing exposure, vulnerability, and the potential impact of multiple crises, including natural hazards, conflicts, and climate change | 102 countries |
Retirement Relocation Tool: FAQs
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It’s a fair question–you may be missing a particular variable that is important to you. In general, though, we needed to find variables that were both important for retirement locations and that were also readily available to be used in the form of data. An important aspect this tool does not consider at the moment is Visas or taxes (e.g., CGT). Users must conduct due diligence to see what are the different requirements depending on their individual circumstances. An overview of CGT can be found here.
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As observed in Table 1, we don’t have complete data across all variables. If we chose to plot only countries that have complete data across all 9 variables, the graph would look rather empty. Instead, the user can check or uncheck a box above the graph to exclude or include countries with more than 2 NAs. In general, we recommend hovering over the countries in the plot and examining the data presented: you will clearly see which data is missing for each country.
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Please reach out to us and we will consider expanding the tool to account for other factors!
Lisbon, Portugal. Portugal is a popular destination for retirees and scores very highly on our Retirement Relocation Tool. Photo by Vita Marija Murenaite on Unsplash.
