Tools

Why our scorer knows nothing about any country

The obvious version of this tool arrives pre-loaded: cost-of-living indices, visa difficulty ratings, healthcare rankings, a safety score out of a hundred. It looks far more impressive than an empty grid, and we're not building it.

Those numbers go stale fast — visa schemes open and close, tax treatments change with a budget — and they average away exactly what matters. The cost of living in "Portugal" is not the cost of living in central Lisbon, and healthcare access in a capital is not healthcare access three hours inland. A figure on a website gives you no way to know how old it is or what it actually covers, and you'd be making a decision about where to live on top of it.

So the scores are yours, from your own research, on the specific place you'd actually live. What the tool contributes is the part people can't do in their heads.

The bit that's worth having

A spreadsheet gives you a total. It doesn't tell you that the total came out that way because of one slider. Our scorer works out which criterion is actually deciding the result — remove it and somebody else wins — and the exact weight at which the answer flips. That's usually a surprise, and it's the most useful thing a comparison like this can tell you: not who won, but how fragile the win is.

It also refuses to rank a destination you haven't finished scoring. Treating a blank as an average is the standard flaw in tools like this, and it quietly ruins the output — somewhere you've barely researched drifts into mid-table looking as considered as the place you've thought hard about. Blank means unjudged, and the destination waits, with the gaps named as a research list.

Your comparison stays in your browser. If you enter an email for the printable, we receive your name and email and nothing else.