How this site is put together

Where the numbers come from

Cost of living figures are built from official price-level statistics, not crowdsourced entries. The primary sources are the OECD comparative price levels and purchasing power parities, Eurostat price level indices for European countries, and the World Bank International Comparison Program for everywhere else. Earnings come from national statistics offices and the OECD earnings database, with the US baseline anchored to Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

Every index on the site uses the same convention: the US national average is 100. An index of 72 means prices in that category run about 28% below the US average. That single convention is what makes the country pages and the calculator comparable to each other, which is the thing most relocation content gets wrong.

Rent is the exception that deserves a warning. There is no authoritative international rent statistic, so rent figures are national market averages for a one-bedroom apartment, converted to US dollars. They are directionally reliable and locally wrong: Lisbon is not Portugal, and Munich is not Germany. Treat them as a starting point, then check listings in the specific city.

Where a number is an estimate, the page says so

Not every category can be sourced to a published statistic. No international body publishes a like-for-like index for every spending category in every country, and private health insurance premiums are not published at all in most of them. Where a figure had to be derived or estimated, its entry in the page's source list says which it is, and the note above that list repeats it.

Each country also carries an overall confidence rating, shown next to the author on every page.High means most figures were re-derived directly from primary sources during review; medium means the headline figures were, while some category indices are reasoned estimates. That rating is set by what could actually be verified, not by how complete the page looks.

Visas, taxes and healthcare

These sections are not generated from a dataset. Each visa route is read off the destination country's own immigration authority, and every page links to the official page it came from so you can confirm the current fee and processing time yourself. Where a programme has closed — and several well-publicised residence-by-investment routes have — it is removed rather than left up with a note.

Tax sections describe how residency is triggered and what a US citizen still owes Washington after leaving. That second part surprises people: the United States taxes on citizenship, so filing does not stop when you move. What the pages do not do is tell you what your liability will be. That depends on facts we do not have.

How often it is re-checked

Price-level and earnings statistics are published annually or quarterly and move slowly, so the dataset is reviewed quarterly. Immigration rules move faster and are re-read whenever a country announces a change. Each page carries the date its data was last reviewed at the top, and every source carries the date it was accessed. If a page looks stale, that is visible rather than hidden.

What we will not do

No page here is legal, immigration, tax or medical advice, and nothing on the site is a substitute for a professional who knows your situation. The site is free to read and funded by advertising and affiliate links, which are disclosed on the pages they appear on. Those links never change which countries are covered or what the data says.

Who writes it

Nathan Brooks, editor, your new country. Nathan builds and maintains the Your New Country dataset, reconciling figures from the OECD, Eurostat, the World Bank and national statistics offices, and reading each country’s immigration and tax guidance at the source before it is published.

• Reads each country’s immigration, tax and health guidance in the original official source rather than in secondary coverage.
• Reconciles every published figure against OECD, Eurostat, World Bank and national statistics releases on a quarterly cycle.
• Publishes the derivation and the access date beside each number, and marks estimates as estimates.

Found a figure that looks wrong, or a visa route that changed? That is the most useful message you can send: how to send a correction. Corrections are checked against the official source, applied, and the review date on the page is bumped.

The US baseline

Because every comparison on the site is against the United States, the US figures matter as much as the country figures. These are the ones the tables and the calculator compare against, last reviewed 2026-09-04:

• Median full-time earnings: $5,421/month gross, about $4,230 net for a single filer after federal tax, FICA and an average state burden.
• One-bedroom rent: $1,700/month in the centre, $1,350 outside it.
• Health cover: Employer-sponsored single coverage averaged about $777 a month in total premium, most of it paid by the employer, before deductibles and out-of-pocket costs.
• Tax: 37% top federal rate; sales tax averages about 7.5% once state and local rates are combined.

1. BLS, Usual Weekly Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers, 2026 Q2 — accessed September 4, 2026
2. KFF, Employer Health Benefits Survey 2025 (single coverage premium) — accessed September 4, 2026
3. Zillow Rental Manager, US rental market trends (one-bedroom asking rent) — accessed September 4, 2026
4. IRS, federal income tax rates and brackets — accessed September 4, 2026