The World’s Most Liveable Cities For Expats

Leading residency and citizenship planning advisory firm Global Citizen Solutions (GCS), has published its inaugural World's Most Liveable Cities for Expats, ranking 35 cities across six continents as destinations for the world’s growing population of internationally mobile residents.

The briefing, researched by the firm’s Global Intelligence Unit (GIU), goes beyond traditional urban performance metrics to assess cities through the specific lens of relocation, incorporating passport mobility rights as a core liveability dimension. More than 300 million people now live outside their country of birth — nearly double the figure recorded in 1990 (UN DESA, 2025).

Cities are assessed across seven indicators — cost of living, safety, air quality, healthcare, ease of settling in, English proficiency, and enhanced mobility — drawn from publicly available datasets and normalised on a 0–100 scale, where higher values always indicate better outcomes. Safety and healthcare carry the highest combined weighting, reflecting their relative importance to long-term relocation decisions.

Singapore records the highest mobility score in the index; Copenhagen and several other European cities follow closely. Southeast Asia and the Caucasus dominate the affordability tier.

Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam), Bali (Indonesia), Bangkok (Thailand), and Tbilisi (Georgia) lead the index on cost of living, pairing low operating costs with established expat communities and conditions well suited to location-independent work. For digital nomads, retirees, and entrepreneurs for whom financial flexibility is central, these cities remain strong relocation candidates regardless of composite position.

Lisbon and Barcelona offer rare cross-profile versatility. Both cities combine moderate costs with strong healthcare, high social accessibility. The GIU identifies them as rare cases where retirees, families, and location-independent professionals all find a viable fit within the same destination — helping explain their sustained prominence in voluntary relocation flows from both the UK and the United States.