A Short Methodology

The Expat Insider 2024 survey was conducted by InterNations from 1 to 29 February 2024.

The online questionnaire was promoted through the InterNations community as well as the company newsletter and social media profiles, but responses were not limited to InterNations members.

The target audience included all kinds of expats, from international retirees and self-made expats who looked for work abroad to foreign assignees (i.e., employees sent on a corporate assignment abroad), and others who moved for a variety of reasons. A total of 12,543 expats participated in the survey, representing 175 nationalities living in 174 countries or territories worldwide.

The results are published in the form of an overall ranking of popular expat destinations, with additional information on five topical indices: Quality of Life, Ease of Settling In, Working Abroad, Personal Finance, and Expat Essentials. For a country to be listed in any of the indices and in the overall ranking, a sample size of at least 50 survey participants per destination is required. In 2024, 53 destinations met this requirement. In most destinations the sample size exceeded 75 respondents. For example, in Germany and the UAE, over 1150 and 680 expats, respectively, participated in the Expat Insider 2024 survey.

For the ranking results, survey participants were asked to rate up to 53 factors related to expat life on a scale of one to seven. The survey emphasized personal satisfaction with these factors and considers both emotional (e.g., feeling welcome) and factual (e.g., healthcare costs) aspects with equal weight. The individual factor ratings were grouped into 16 subcategories, which were then used to draw up the five topical indices mentioned above. These five indices as well as the responses to the question “All things considered, how happy are you with your life abroad in general?” were averaged to arrive at the overall country ranking.

Please keep in mind:

The ratings compare the survey participants’ individual satisfaction with various factors, instead of looking at related facts from external sources. For example, “personal safety” measures how safe expats feel in their respective destination, but it does not refer to actual crime rates provided by that country’s law enforcement authorities.

The indices do not cover every potential aspect of living abroad (e.g., international schools/education) nor are the results meant to be an endorsement of any specific destination. It is rather a comparison of how expats rate their everyday life abroad based on subjective scores.

All percentages on this website have been rounded to full integral numbers. In some cases, this may lead to responses to one question adding up to 99% or 101%. These instances are simply due to rounding and are not based on erroneous data.