Methodology

The reference family

Comparisons across destinations only mean something if the family is held constant. Ours is two adults and two children aged 7 and 12, renting rather than buying, in the capital or the main city where families settle. The 7 and 12 split matters because it puts one child in primary and one in secondary, which is where international school fees diverge sharply.

The cost estimator lets you change the family. The Cost Index always uses the reference family, so editions can be compared with each other.

The nine figures a destination must carry

A destination is published only when all nine of these have been read at an acceptable source within the last 90 days:

• visa.primary.fee
• visa.primary.income
• residence.permit_fee
• school.public.access
• school.international.tuition
• health.access
• pets.import_rule
• housing.rent_2br
• housing.rent_3br

A destination missing any of them stays live for readers, carries a visible notice saying what is missing, is marked noindex, is left out of the sitemap, and is hidden from the estimator and the Cost Index. We call that gating. It is the normal state of a destination we are still working on, not a failure state.

What counts as a source

1. Government: the consulate, immigration authority, education ministry, tax authority, animal health authority, or national statistics office.
2. Intergovernmental: Eurostat, the OECD, the European Commission.
3. A named institution publishing its own prices: a school's fee page for its own tuition, an insurer's rate page for its own premium.
4. A named, dated published index where no government figure exists, with the publisher recorded.

Not acceptable, at any time, for any figure: crowd-sourced cost databases, other expat blogs, relocation agencies, immigration law firm content pages, "best countries" listicles, or anything a model recalls without a live source.

Currency

Figures are recorded in the currency the source publishes them in. Conversions to US dollars use a fixed rate recorded per destination with its own source and date, not a live feed, so that a page you read today and a page you read next month can be compared. The rate and its date are shown on each destination's cost page.

Ranges

Some figures are honestly a range rather than a point: international school tuition across several schools, or rent across a city. We record the low and the high and name the schools or the index the range came from. We do not publish a midpoint dressed as a fact.

What we do not estimate

Moving company costs and unpublished insurance premiums are quoted, not published. Where those lines appear in a cost picture, they are marked as quoted and the page explains how to get comparable quotes.

How the first-year figure is built

One-time costs are the visa fees for each applicant, the residence permit fees, the deposit, and pet import where it applies. Recurring monthly costs are rent for the chosen size, health cover, and schooling per child at the chosen type. The first-year figure is the one-time costs plus twelve months of the recurring costs, presented as a low and a high band because several inputs are ranges. It excludes flights, the move itself, and the cost of living beyond housing, schooling and health cover, and the page says so.

Rechecking

Every quarter we recheck every figure for the Cost Index edition and record what changed. Any figure that passes 90 days without a recheck gates its destination automatically, so staleness removes a page from search rather than quietly sitting there.