How to Choose Which Country to Move To: A Framework

You have made the decision: you want to move abroad. Maybe the cost of living finally broke you, or the healthcare system let you down one too many times. Maybe you just want a different pace of life. Whatever the reason, you have crossed the psychological threshold from "that would be nice someday" to "I am actually doing this."

And then the real problem hits: how do you choose a country to move to when there are 195 options and every expat blog on the internet has a different opinion? One article says Portugal is paradise. Another says Thailand is the only smart choice. Your friend who spent three months in Medellin swears Colombia is the answer. Everyone is confident. Nobody agrees.

The reason most people struggle with this decision is not a lack of information. It is the opposite: a flood of anecdotes, personal preferences, and listicles that do not account for what actually matters to you. What you need is not another opinion. You need a framework.

At WhereNext, we built exactly that. Our scoring methodology evaluates every country across seven data-driven dimensions using institutional sources like the World Bank, WHO, Global Peace Index, and Numbeo. This article walks you through the same framework so you can apply it to your own decision, whether you use our tool or a spreadsheet and a pen.

The 7 Dimensions That Actually Matter

After analyzing relocation data from tens of thousands of expats and cross-referencing it with institutional research, we identified seven dimensions that consistently predict whether someone thrives or struggles abroad. Every country in our system is scored from 0 to 100 on each of these dimensions. Here is what they are and why they matter.

1. Cost of Living

This is usually the first thing people think about, and for good reason. Your income does not change when you move, but your expenses can shift dramatically. A salary that feels tight in San Francisco can fund a genuinely comfortable life in Lisbon or Chiang Mai.

But cost of living is more nuanced than a single number. We look at rent, groceries, transportation, dining, and healthcare costs separately because they do not move in lockstep. A country can have cheap rent but expensive groceries, or vice versa. Our cost score aggregates all of these into a single index anchored against global benchmarks. See the full breakdown in our cheapest countries rankings.

2. Safety

Safety is the dimension people underweight until they experience the consequences. It is easy to brush off a moderate safety score when you are reading about a country from the comfort of your couch. It is a different story when you are walking home at midnight in an unfamiliar city.

We score safety using the Global Peace Index, UN crime statistics, political stability indices, and reported expat safety experiences. A country can be safe nationally but dangerous in specific regions, so our safety rankings also note regional variation where the data supports it.

3. Healthcare Quality

Healthcare is the sleeper dimension. Most people under 40 barely think about it until they need it. But one medical emergency abroad with no plan can wipe out years of cost-of-living savings overnight. We score healthcare using the WHO healthcare access and quality index, hospital density, expenditure per capita, and the availability of English-speaking medical professionals.

Countries like Portugal, Spain, and Japan score above 85/100 here because they combine universal access with genuinely high-quality care. Some affordable destinations in Southeast Asia also score surprisingly well thanks to their robust medical tourism infrastructure.

4. Climate and Environment

This might sound like a soft metric, but climate has a measurable impact on wellbeing, mental health, and lifestyle satisfaction. Seasonal affective disorder is real, and a six-month winter can erode the appeal of even the most affordable country. We score climate based on average temperatures, sunshine hours, air quality indices, and natural disaster frequency. If you know you need sunshine to function, this dimension should be weighted heavily in your personal framework.

5. Visa Accessibility

You can fall in love with a country all you want, but if they will not let you stay, it does not matter. Visa accessibility is the most practical dimension in our framework. We score countries on the availability of long-term visa options (digital nomad visas, retirement visas, investor visas), processing time, income requirements, and the existence of a path to permanent residency or citizenship.

Countries like Portugal (D7 visa), Mexico (180-day tourist entry), and Georgia (one-year visa-free) score exceptionally well here. Countries with restrictive immigration policies or high financial thresholds score lower, regardless of how appealing they are on other dimensions.

6. Lifestyle and Culture

Lifestyle encompasses the less quantifiable but deeply important aspects of daily life: food culture, social infrastructure, recreation options, English proficiency, expat community size, and overall cultural openness to foreigners. We score this using expat satisfaction surveys, cultural offering indices, English proficiency rankings, and quality-of-life metrics from Mercer and EIU.

Spain consistently scores highest here. But lifestyle fit is deeply personal. Someone who values outdoor adventure will weight New Zealand differently than someone who prioritizes nightlife and food scenes.

7. Career and Economic Stability

If you are working remotely for a foreign employer, the local economy might seem irrelevant. It is not. Economic stability affects currency fluctuations (which affect your purchasing power), infrastructure investment, internet reliability, and the general trajectory of the country you are living in. We score this using GDP growth trends, inflation rates, employment data, and foreign direct investment flows.

This dimension matters most for people who plan to integrate into the local economy, start a business abroad, or stay long enough that economic shifts will affect their daily life.

The Balanced Top 5: Countries That Score Well Across Every Dimension

Some countries dominate a single dimension but fall short on others. Thailand is incredibly affordable but scores lower on safety. Iceland is ultra-safe but expensive and isolated. The most interesting countries for most people are the ones that score consistently well across all seven dimensions with no major weaknesses. Here are the top five balanced performers.

How to Weight the Dimensions: Building Your Personal Framework

Here is where most people go wrong: they treat all seven dimensions as equally important. They are not. Or more precisely, they are not equally important to you. A 25-year-old remote developer earning $5,000/month has very different needs from a retired couple on a $2,500/month pension.

The key to choosing the right country is deciding your personal weighting before you start comparing options. Here is a practical exercise.

Step 1: Identify your non-negotiables

Non-negotiables are dimensions where you have a hard minimum threshold. For example: "I will not move somewhere with a safety score below 75" or "I need a country with a digital nomad visa because I cannot work on a tourist visa." Write these down. They are your filters, not your weights. Any country that fails a non-negotiable gets eliminated immediately, regardless of its other scores.

Step 2: Rank your priorities

Take the remaining dimensions and rank them from most to least important. Be honest with yourself. If you say safety and healthcare are equally important, you have not thought hard enough. Force a rank order. For most people, the ranking looks something like this:

• Budget-constrained movers: Cost of living > visa accessibility > safety > healthcare > climate > lifestyle > career
• Families with children: Safety > healthcare > lifestyle > career > cost > visa > climate
• Retirees: Healthcare > safety > cost > climate > lifestyle > visa > career
• Digital nomads: Visa accessibility > cost > lifestyle > climate > safety > career > healthcare
• Career-focused professionals: Career > visa > healthcare > safety > lifestyle > cost > climate

Step 3: Assign weights

Distribute 100 points across the seven dimensions based on your priority ranking. Your top priority might get 25 points. Your bottom priority might get 5. There is no right answer here; the point is to make your implicit preferences explicit so you can compare countries on a level playing field.

This is exactly what our personalized quiz does automatically. You tell us your priorities, and we recalculate every country score with your custom weights. The result is a ranking that is genuinely tailored to your life, not a generic one-size-fits-all list.

The Step-by-Step Framework: From 195 Countries to Your Shortlist

Here is the exact process we recommend for narrowing down your options. This works whether you use WhereNext or do it manually.

Phase 1: Eliminate (195 countries to 15-20)

Apply your non-negotiables as hard filters. If you need a safety score above 70, that immediately eliminates dozens of countries. If you need a digital nomad visa, the list drops further. If you cannot handle cold winters, Northern Europe and Canada are gone. Do not agonize at this stage. The goal is elimination, not evaluation.

Phase 2: Score and Rank (15-20 countries to 5)

Apply your weighted scoring to the remaining countries. Multiply each country's dimension score by your personal weight, sum the results, and rank them. The top five countries on this weighted list are your shortlist. You can do this with our comparison tool, which lets you put countries side by side across every dimension.

Phase 3: Research Deep (5 countries to 2-3)

Now you go beyond the numbers. For each of your top five, research the specific city you would live in (country-level averages hide enormous city-level variation). Read recent expat forums. Check visa processing times — a great visa on paper means nothing if processing takes 8 months. Look at flight connections back home. Check rental prices on local platforms, not just Numbeo averages.

Phase 4: Test (2-3 countries to 1)

If at all possible, visit your top two or three countries before committing. Spend at least two weeks in each, ideally a month. Rent a normal apartment — not a hotel, not an Airbnb in the tourist district. Try to live a normal routine: work from a coworking space, shop at local grocery stores, navigate the healthcare system for a basic checkup. A test run reveals things that no data set can capture: how it feels to walk the streets, whether the pace of life suits you, whether the food agrees with your stomach.

The 5 Most Common Mistakes People Make

We have seen thousands of people go through this decision. These are the mistakes that come up again and again.

1. Optimizing for a single dimension

Chasing the cheapest country without considering safety, healthcare, or visa stability is a recipe for regret. The person who moves to the cheapest possible country and then cannot access decent medical care has not saved money. They have taken on risk. Always look at the composite picture.

2. Confusing vacation vibes with living reality

A country that is amazing for a two-week vacation can be exhausting to live in. The chaos that feels exciting on holiday becomes draining when it is your daily commute, your grocery run, your utility bill negotiation. This is why test runs matter so much. The romantic version of a place and the daily-life version are almost always different.

3. Ignoring visa pathways

People fall in love with a country and then discover they have no legal pathway to stay. Or they rely on tourist visa runs — entering and re-entering every 90 days — which is stressful, legally gray, and increasingly cracked down on by immigration authorities. Research the visa situation first, before you research anything else.

4. Not accounting for currency risk

If you earn in US dollars and spend in Thai baht, a 15% currency swing is a 15% change in your cost of living. Countries with volatile currencies can turn a comfortable budget into a tight one overnight. Our economic stability dimension captures this, but it is worth paying extra attention if you are on a fixed income.

5. Skipping the healthcare plan

This is the mistake with the highest potential cost. International health insurance, understanding the local system, knowing which hospitals accept foreigners — these are not things to figure out after you arrive. One emergency room visit without insurance in a country with a privatized healthcare system can cost more than a year of premiums.

Putting It All Together

Choosing which country to move to is not about finding the objectively best country. There is no such thing. It is about finding the best country for you, given your income, your priorities, your risk tolerance, and your lifestyle preferences.

The framework is straightforward:

1. Understand the seven dimensions that drive quality of life abroad.
2. Define your non-negotiables and your personal weighting.
3. Use data — not anecdotes — to eliminate and rank countries.
4. Go deep on your shortlist with city-level research.
5. Test before you commit.

You can do this manually with a spreadsheet, or you can let us do the heavy lifting. Our personalized quiz takes about two minutes, captures your priorities and non-negotiables, and generates a custom-weighted country ranking based on the same institutional data that powers everything you have read in this article. From there, use the comparison tool to put your top picks head-to-head, or dive into individual country profiles for city-level detail.

The data is here. The framework is here. The only thing left is your decision.