The Best Countries to Move To: What the Ranking Does Not Tell You

You are looking for the best country to move to. You are about to land on a list of six zero-tax territories, and you are about to waste your time.

Let us start at the top of our ranking, which scores 217 countries on what a newcomer actually bears.

The top six are not the answer

Six territories are tied first with 10 out of 10: Anguilla, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, the Pitcairn Islands, the Turks and Caicos Islands and the British Virgin Islands. No income tax, no corporate tax, no VAT.

Look at what that means.

Pitcairn holds the 1st rank of 217. Forty inhabitants. No airport. You reach it by ship from New Zealand, over several days, with a handful of sailings a year. Settling is theoretically possible; in practice it almost never happens.

The other five are real, and all closed without money. In the Cayman Islands, entry runs through local employment, a property investment, or a programme for the self-employed involving substantial sums. Import duty runs from 22 to 27% on almost everything, since everything is imported: the cost of living is among the highest in the world. What the government does not take in tax, it takes elsewhere.

Our ranking measures what a country TAKES. It does not say whether it lets you in.

That holds further down too. Qatar and Kuwait levy no income tax, and Qatar has no VAT either. But residency there almost always runs through being hired: there is no programme for a self-employed person moving on their own. These are countries you are posted to, not countries you move to.

The real test is what you are

An employee, a freelancer, someone living off capital and a company founder do not have the same answers. They do not even have the same questions.

If you live off foreign clients

Look for territoriality, not the rate. A territorial country does not put your foreign income in its base: you can bring it in and spend it locally without it being taxed.

• Paraguay, 19th, 8.5 out of 10. Territorial, and below 80 million guaraní of gross receipts, around EUR 11,500, there is no tax at all. You need more than 120 days in the country, and permanent residency has not been a one-visit affair since 2022.
• Georgia, 31th. Territorial, with a self-employed status at 1% of turnover. Watch the trap almost every guide misses: work performed physically in Georgia is Georgian-source, even with a foreign client paying into a foreign account.
• Panama and Malaysia, also territorial, more expensive but better equipped.

Our guides on Paraguay and Georgia set out the conditions.

If you live off your capital

This is where Malta becomes interesting, and it is the most counter-intuitive case in the whole ranking.

Malta shows 35% income tax and 35% corporate tax. It still ranks 22nd, with 8.4 out of 10.

The reason: a newcomer there is resident non-domiciled, and Malta never taxes a foreign capital gain, even when remitted. No other country in the Union offers that. Ireland has the best-known non-dom regime in Europe and it helps far less, because what you remit to live on is taxed at up to 52%.

See our Malta guide.

If you are employed and want to stay in Europe

There is no miracle, but there are mild scales inside the single market:

• Bulgaria, 44th: 10% on income, 10% on companies, the euro since 2026. No regime to apply for, that is the ordinary scale.
• Cyprus, 33rd: non-dom status leaves dividends and interest effectively untaxed for seventeen years.
• Romania and Hungary for the self-employed, with regimes that each carry a trade-off.

If you own a company

Work out what leaving costs first. That is the figure nobody puts in a top ten, and it is often the largest.

Several countries tax the unrealised gains on your shares at the moment you leave, as though you had sold them. It is called exit tax in France, Wegzugsbesteuerung in Germany, departure tax in Canada, and the base varies enormously: Canada catches nearly your whole estate, Australia too.

In France the mechanism is not instalments but a deferral of payment, and its price depends on the destination. To an EU or EEA country it is automatic and unsecured: you declare, you pay nothing. To a third state it is automatic too, but only if that state has signed two conventions with France, one on administrative assistance and one on assistance in recovery. Failing that you must apply for it, appoint a tax representative, post guarantees, and file at least 90 days before leaving.

See how to actually leave.

The destinations everyone talks about

We went through seven competing selection articles, French and English, and recorded the countries they cite. The fifteen that come up most are not the ones our ranking puts at the top. Here they are, with what our data says, which is not always flattering.

The ones that live up to it

The UAE, rank 14th, 8.9 out of 10. The most cited country in the whole survey, and it earns it: no personal income tax, 9% on profits above AED 375,000. The entry price is elsewhere: you have to actually live there, and Dubai's cost of living cancels the gain below a certain income. See our UAE guide.

The Bahamas and Bahrain, 9.3 and 9.3 out of 10, tied. Zero on income, zero on companies, and yet cited far less than Dubai: the difference is not fiscal, it is practical. You do not settle in Nassau the way you settle in the UAE. See our Bahamas guide.

Andorra, rank 25th. 10% at most, two hours from Toulouse, and a European way of life. It is the best Western European compromise for anyone who does not want to go far. See our guide.

Singapore, rank 26th, and Hong Kong, rank 17th. Both are territorial: what you earn elsewhere is not taxed there. That is what puts them so high, and it is what almost no article says, preferring to quote their local scale.

Monaco, rank 60th. Zero on income, except for French nationals, whom the 1963 treaty sends back to French tax. One French article in three leaves out that sentence, which is the only one that matters to a French reader. See our guide.

Mauritius, rank 69th. Stable, 15% on companies, and taxation on remittance: foreign income is taxed only if it enters the country. See our guide.

The ones that do not

This is the part you will not read elsewhere.

Portugal is the country most cited by our competitors, five sources out of seven, and it is 187th of 217. The NHR has been closed since 2024. The IFICI that replaced it targets listed professions, not retirees or people living off capital. With no regime, a Portuguese resident is on the ordinary scale, up to 48%. See what is left after the NHR.

Switzerland, cited four times, is 150th of 217. The forfait exists, it starts around CHF 435,000 of deemed expenditure, and our ranking does not count it: converting a flat charge into a rate would mean assuming your income. For anyone below that level, Switzerland is an ordinary-tax country, expensive to live in. See our guide.

Spain, cited three times, is 203rd of 217. The Beckham law gives 24% for six years, but on Spanish income. It is built for an executive posted to Madrid, not for a freelancer paid from abroad. See our guide.

Bali, cited three times, is 116th of 217. Indonesia taxes its residents on worldwide income, up to 35%. Articles that put it at the top of a tax ranking are really talking about the cost of living, and quote no rate at all. See our Indonesia guide.

Thailand, cited three times, is 93rd of 217. It now taxes remitted foreign income, and much of the web still describes it as it was before that change. See our guide.

Estonia, cited three times, is 115th of 217. Its reputation comes from e-Residency and from corporate tax deferred until distribution. That is excellent for a company that reinvests, and it says nothing about what you will pay as a person. See our guide.

Mexico, rank 162nd, and Vietnam, rank 103rd, close the list. Both tax worldwide income. They are cost-of-living destinations, not tax destinations, and confusing the two is the commonest mistake in the whole competing corpus.

What the survey showed: of the seven articles read, one treats exit tax seriously, one recalls that a public-sector pension stays taxable at home, and the most-read digital nomad ranking quotes a tax figure for two countries out of ten. For the other eight, it gives the price of a massage.

The three traps that come back every time

A passport is not tax residence. The citizenship by investment programmes of Vanuatu, St Kitts and Nevis, Grenada or Türkiye give a passport, so mobility. They change nothing about where you are taxed. The Turkish case is the clearest: the passport is much sought after, and becoming a Turkish tax resident would be pointless, since a resident there is taxed on worldwide income at up to 40%.

A nomad visa is not an exemption. In Costa Rica it is one, but territoriality already produced the result without it. In Colombia it is the exact opposite: the visa is a residence permit, and past 183 days you are taxable on worldwide income. Croatia is the only case where the exemption survives crossing 183 days, and it covers salary alone, not dividends from your own company.

Leaving is not enough to have left. As long as you keep a home, a family or the centre of your interests in your country of origin, that country taxes you, and your new country's territoriality shelters nothing. That is the first thing to settle, before choosing a destination at all.

So, which country?

If you want a short and honest list, by what you are:

And the advice that is not about tax: tax is rarely the first reason to leave, and it is almost always the first reason to get stuck. Settle the departure before dreaming about the arrival.

The full ranking gives all 217 countries, each with what a newcomer bears, and the FiScore page explains how the number is built.

Sources

Every rate quoted comes from the corresponding country page, with its source and verification date. Checked in August 2026. A reported error is corrected.

This page informs, it does not advise. No move is decided on a ranking: have your own situation checked, as our terms say.