Countries differ a lot on average. In the typical high-income country, income per person is about 27 times that of the typical low-income country, and a baby born today can expect to live about 17 years longer.12 People who move tend to gain a good part of that gap: in one large study, workers from 42 poorer countries typically earned about four times as much in the US as people with the same background at home, and migrants’ life satisfaction ends up most of the way to their new country’s level.34 Between similar countries, there’s little in the averages to move for. And none of them can tell you whether you can get a visa or a job, which is what decides most moves.
See the numbers
| Typical low-income country | Typical high-income country | Middle half of high-income countries | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Income per person a year, in dollars adjusted for prices | $2,200 | $59,400 | $45,400–$78,700 |
| Coverage of essential health services, out of 100 | 43 | 83 | 79–85 |
| Life satisfaction, out of 10 | 4.1 | 6.6 | 6.3–6.9 |
| Life expectancy at birth, years | 64 | 81 | 78–83 |
Your verdict
Three short questions: where you live, up to three countries you’d consider, and what matters to you. The tool starts with the destinations would-be migrants name most often: the US, Canada and the UK, or Germany if you live in one of them.5 On each measure, a country scores the share of the world’s countries it does better than, from 0 to 100. Your verdict compares the best of your picks with home on what you said matters. Prices are off to start with, because the income figure already adjusts for them; turn them on if your money would come from home, like savings, a pension or a remote job.
Your answers stay on this page. They’re never stored or sent anywhere.
Where you live sets much of what you earn
Two people with the same skills can earn very different amounts depending on which side of a border they work on. Economists call the difference the place premium. The best-known estimate compared wage earners from 42 poorer countries who had moved to the US with people at home who had the same country of birth and schooling, years of education, work experience, sex and urban or rural background. Adjusted for prices, the same worker earned 4.1 times as much in the US for the median country, from 2.0 times for the Dominican Republic to 15.5 times for Yemen.3 Differences between the people explained only about a third of the raw pay gap between the countries; the rest went with the place.3
That’s one study, of formal-sector workers moving to one country, with data from around 2000. Its authors also checked whether movers were unusually able in ways the data can’t see, and found that this inflates the premium somewhat, but typically not by much.3
Rich and poor countries are far apart, rich countries close together
The same pattern holds beyond pay. The chart at the top puts the typical low-income and the typical high-income country, as the World Bank groups countries by national income per person, on four of the measures the tool below uses.6
Average income per person, adjusted for prices, is $2,200 a year in the typical low-income country and $59,400 in the typical high-income one.1 Life expectancy at birth is 64 years against 81.2 On WHO’s index of essential health services, the two score 43 and 83 out of 100,7 and people rate their lives 4.1 and 6.6 out of 10.8
Among high-income countries the spread is much narrower. The middle half of them score 6.3–6.9 out of 10 on life satisfaction, and their life expectancy is 78–83 years.82 So a move from one rich country to another shifts the averages far less than a move from a poor country to a rich one.
Migrants end up about as happy as the people around them
The Gallup World Poll asks around 1,000 people a year in each country to rate their lives on a ladder from 0, the worst possible life for them, to 10, the best.8 When the World Happiness Report compared people born abroad with people born locally in 117 countries, using Gallup surveys from 2005 to 2017, the two groups’ averages lined up almost exactly: a correlation of 0.96, where 1 would be a perfect match.9 Immigrants keep a little of their old country’s level, an effect the authors put at 10–25%, but their happiness depends mostly on the quality of life where they live now.9
A companion chapter, using surveys from 2009 to 2016, compared migrants with similar people in their home countries who had no plans to move. On average, migrants rated their lives 0.47 points higher after moving.4 The gain was bigger where the gap between the countries was bigger: migrants from sub-Saharan Africa to Western Europe gained 1.44 points, where the gap between the locals of the two regions was 2.29. Moves between similarly rich regions could pay off too: migrants from Western Europe to North America, Australia and New Zealand gained 0.84 points. But migrants within North America, Australia and New Zealand showed no clear change, and neither did Western Europeans who moved to Central and Eastern Europe. Most of the gain came in the first five years, and it didn’t grow after that.4
This is survey data, not an experiment, and people who choose to move may differ from those who stay in ways a survey can’t see. Still, the evidence points one way: for how you’ll feel, the country you move to matters more than the one you left.
Newcomers start behind the locals
A country’s average isn’t where a newcomer starts. Across 15 OECD countries, immigrants starting work earned 34% less than native-born workers of the same age and sex. The gap closed by about a third within five years and by about half within ten.10 Degrees don’t always travel either: across OECD countries, 44% of immigrants with a degree worked in medium- or low-skilled jobs, against 17% of locals with a degree. The gap was largest in Italy and Norway and close to zero in Canada and the US.11
What decides a move isn’t in the averages
Wanting to move is common; moving is rarer. In 2025, 15% of adults worldwide told Gallup they’d like to move to another country permanently if they could, about 900 million people.5 About 304 million people, 3.7% of the world’s population, live outside the country they were born in.12
What usually makes the difference is a way in. Of the 6.2 million new permanent immigrants to OECD countries in 2024, 44% came for family reasons, 17% for work, 13% for humanitarian protection and 19% under free-movement agreements, such as the one between EU countries.13 Which of those routes is open to you depends on your passport, your work, your family and the destination’s rules, and only the destination’s government can tell you that.
Country averages also hide what makes or breaks one person’s move: the city, the job, the language, and the people you’d leave or join. A country can rank well and still be the wrong place for you, and the other way round.
What to do
If the data doesn’t favour a move
- Don’t let a ranking talk you into it. On the averages, your picks don’t beat home by much. A job offer, a partner or a wish for adventure are better reasons, and only you can weigh them.
- If one thing bothers you at home, look at what would fix that one thing, such as a different job or city, before you look abroad.
- Check again when your situation changes. A job offer abroad or a second passport changes what’s possible.
If it does
- Start with the route, not the ranking. Look up the visa categories on the destination government’s own immigration site. For the EU, the European Commission’s EU Immigration Portal covers stays of more than 90 days for work, study and family.14
- Budget for a slow start. Newcomers usually earn well below the local average for their first years.10
- If the language is new to you, start learning it now. It’s the one barrier you can lower from home.
- Talk to people who made the same move, from your country to that one, about the parts the data can’t show.
Assumptions and method
How the comparison works
Six measures in very different units, from dollars to years to homicides per 100,000 people, have to become one answer. The tool does it in three steps.
- Each measure becomes a rank. A country’s score on a measure is the share of the world’s countries it does better than, from 0 to 100. A country at 80 on life expectancy has a longer life expectancy than 80% of the countries with data. Ranks put every measure on the same scale, and one extreme country can’t stretch it.
- The gap is what matters. For each country you pick, the tool takes its score minus your own country’s score on each measure, then averages those gaps, counting the measures you said matter a lot twice and leaving out the ones you said don’t matter.
- The gap becomes your verdict. If the best of your picks is 25 points or more ahead of home, moving there comes out well ahead; 10 to 25 points ahead, it comes out ahead; within 10 points either way, it’s a close call; 10 or more points behind, staying comes out ahead.
- What would flip it. The tool tries each measure mattering a lot, and not at all, and shows the ones that would change your verdict.
Where a figure is missing for either country, that measure is left out of that comparison rather than guessed, and the verdict card says which measures it rests on. Prices start switched off, because income is already adjusted for what things cost where you’d earn it; switch them on if your money would come from somewhere else.
Assumptions and sources
Measures: income is gross national income per person in current international dollars, converted at purchasing power parity, so that a dollar buys the same everywhere.1 It’s an average, so very high earners pull it up, and it includes income that never reaches households. Prices are the World Bank’s price level for household spending: its purchasing-power conversion factor over the exchange rate it uses for national income, with the US at 100.15 Safety is intentional homicides per 100,000 people a year, compiled by UNODC.16 It counts only killings, so it says nothing about theft, traffic or harassment. Health care is WHO’s service coverage index for universal health coverage, from 0 to 100, the geometric mean of 14 measures of reproductive and child health, infectious diseases, noncommunicable diseases and access to services.7 Life satisfaction is the World Happiness Report’s average for 2023–2025.8 Life expectancy at birth is for women or men, depending on what you choose; “person” uses the average of the two.2 It assumes today’s death rates for a whole life, including childhood, so it isn’t what an adult who moves can expect.
Coverage: the tool covers the 218 countries and territories in the World Bank’s country list.6 Not every one has every measure: we have income for 198, prices for 206, homicides for 163, health care for 193, life satisfaction for 161 and life expectancy for all 217. Homicide figures are missing for most low-income countries: we have them for 8 of 25. We use each country’s latest figure since 2015, and the tool shows the year of any figure more than three years older than the newest. When either country lacks a figure, that measure is left out of their comparison and the tool says so. We don’t fill gaps with regional averages, because the guess would then decide the comparison. Taiwan isn’t in the World Bank’s list, so the tool can’t include it yet.
Scoring: on each measure, a country’s score is the share of countries with data that it does better than: 0 for the worst, 100 for the best; for prices and homicides, lower is better. The overall gap is the weighted average of the score differences between a country and home, with weights of 0 (no), 1 (yes) or 2 (a lot). Ranks make small differences among very safe countries look bigger than they are, so check the rates themselves in the table. Your verdict: if the best of your picks is 25 points or more ahead of home, moving there comes out well ahead; from 10 to 25, it comes out ahead; within 10 either way, it’s a close call; 10 or more behind, staying comes out ahead. A gap of 25 means that, on what you weighted, about a quarter of the world’s countries sit between home and there. These cut-offs are our judgement, not a standard.
Left out: tax, housing costs, climate, political freedom, discrimination and how welcoming a country is to newcomers. We don’t summarise visa rules: the destination government’s own site is the source for those. Nothing here is legal or immigration advice.
How every verdict on this site is worked out, and how we check it: our method.
Footnotes
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World Bank, GNI per capita, PPP (current international $), World Development Indicators, accessed 1 Oct 2026. ↩ ↩2 ↩3
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World Bank, Life expectancy at birth, female and male, World Development Indicators, from UN World Population Prospects, accessed 1 Oct 2026. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4
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Clemens et al., The Place Premium: Wage Differences for Identical Workers across the US Border, Center for Global Development Working Paper 148, 2008, introduction and table 1. A revised version is The Place Premium: Bounding the Price Equivalent of Migration Barriers, The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2019. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4
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Hendriks et al., Do International Migrants Increase Their Happiness and That of Their Families by Migrating?, World Happiness Report 2018, chapter 3, figure 3.1 and table 3.1. ↩ ↩2 ↩3
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Gallup, Desire to Move Permanently to U.S. at New Low, 23 Apr 2026. ↩ ↩2
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World Bank, World Bank country and lending groups, fiscal year 2027. ↩ ↩2
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WHO, UHC service coverage index (SDG 3.8.1), Global Health Observatory, 2025, accessed 1 Oct 2026. ↩ ↩2
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Helliwell et al. (eds.), World Happiness Report 2026, chapter 2 and the data for figure 2.1, 2026. Based on the Gallup World Poll. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4
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Helliwell et al., International Migration and World Happiness, World Happiness Report 2018, chapter 2, discussion of figure 2.4 and conclusions. ↩ ↩2
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OECD, International Migration Outlook 2025, 2025, chapter 4, key findings. ↩ ↩2
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OECD, International Migration Outlook 2025, 2025, chapter 4, box 4.3 and table 4.1. ↩
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UN DESA Population Division, International Migrant Stock 2024: Key facts and figures, January 2025, paragraph 1. ↩
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OECD, International Migration Outlook 2025, 2025, chapter 1, figure 1.3. ↩
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European Commission, EU Immigration Portal. ↩
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World Bank, PPP conversion factor, private consumption and DEC alternative conversion factor, World Development Indicators, accessed 1 Oct 2026. ↩
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World Bank, Intentional homicides (per 100,000 people), World Development Indicators, from the UNODC homicide statistics, accessed 1 Oct 2026. ↩
General information from public data, not personal financial advice. No one paid for this page, and nothing on it depends on you buying anything. Reviewed 2 Oct 2026.