Expat Insider 2018 Country Ranking Factors

The rating process emphasizes the respondents’ personal satisfaction with various aspects and considers both emotional topics, such as feeling at home in the local culture, and more factual aspects (e.g. affordability of healthcare) with equal weight.

Methodology

For the country ranking, survey participants were asked to rate up to 48 different factors concerning various aspects of life abroad on a scale of one to seven. The respondents’ ratings of the individual factors were then bundled in various combinations for a total of 17 subcategories, and their mean values were used to draw up the five topical indices listed above. These five indices, as well as the responses to the question “How satisfied are you with life abroad in general?”, were then averaged to arrive at the overall country ranking.

For a country to be listed in any of the indices and in the overall ranking, a sample size of at least 75 survey participants per destination was necessary. The only exception to this rule is the Family Life Index, where a sample size of at least 40 respondents raising children abroad was required. In 2018, 68 and 50 destinations, respectively, met these requirements. However, in many countries the sample size exceeded 75 or even 100 participants by far. In Germany, for example, close to 1,700 expats participated in the Expat Insider 2018 survey.