Free tool
Destination Scorer
Set what matters and how much, score your shortlist, and get more than a total: which criterion is actually deciding the answer, and how small a change would flip it.
This tool holds no data about any country — the scores are your own research and judgement. Everything stays on your device.
1 What matters, and how much
Set anything you don't care about to zero and it drops out entirely. These weights shape the result more than the scores do — it's worth a minute.
2 Your shortlist
Countries, cities, regions — whatever you're actually choosing between.
3 Score each one
0 to 10, on your own research. Leave anything blank that you genuinely don't know yet — a blank is treated as unjudged, not as average, and the destination waits out of the ranking until you fill it in.
The ranking
What's actually deciding this
Where the distance between the top two comes from.
What this score can't see
A weighted total is good at the things you can put a number on, and blind to everything else. The reasons people most often come home aren't on any spreadsheet:
- Isolation. Almost everyone underweights it, and it is the most common reason a move doesn't last. Making friends in a new country in your fifties is harder and slower than it was in your twenties.
- The other person. If you're moving with a partner, score it separately and compare. A move that works for one of you and not the other doesn't work.
- A parent's health changing. Distance from family is a criterion until it suddenly isn't — it's worth asking how a twelve-hour flight would feel on the worst day rather than an ordinary one.
- Visiting is not living. Two weeks in May tells you almost nothing about February, about the bureaucracy, or about a Tuesday with nothing on.
- How reversible it is. What it would cost — in money and in practical terms — to come back after a year. Options that are easy to undo deserve more credit than a score gives them.
The ranking is best used to find out what you actually believe, and to pick which one or two places are worth going to test properly.
Get your comparison as a printable
Your weights, your scores, the ranking, and what's actually driving it — on one page. Plus the research checklist for the criteria you left blank, so the gaps are a to-do list rather than a shrug.
Ready to print
Two pages: your full comparison, and a research checklist for anything still unscored.
Why the weights matter more than the scores
Most people building a comparison like this spend their effort on the scores — researching costs, reading about healthcare, comparing visa routes — and set the weights in about thirty seconds. It's the wrong way round. Scores tend to cluster: the places on your shortlist are all there because they're broadly plausible, so they score six, seven or eight on most things. The weights are what pull them apart.
Which means a result frequently rests on a single slider. Move cost of living from five to three and a different country wins. That's not a defect in the method — it's the true shape of the decision, and it is much better seen than buried inside a total. This tool shows it directly: which criterion is deciding the answer, and the exact weight at which the answer changes.
If your winner flips easily, the honest reading is that you have two viable options and the spreadsheet isn't going to separate them. That's a useful finding. It means the next step is a visit, not more research.
Why a blank isn't a five
The most common flaw in comparison tools is treating an unanswered question as an average answer. It seems harmless and it quietly ruins the output: a place you've barely looked into arrives in the middle of the table, indistinguishable from one you've researched properly, and the ranking has silently mixed knowledge with ignorance.
Here a blank means unjudged. Destinations with gaps sit in a separate list with the missing criteria named, which turns them into a short research to-do rather than a number you'd have been wrong to trust.
Scoring honestly
- Score the place you'd actually live. Not the country — the city or region, and ideally the neighbourhood. Costs and healthcare vary more within countries than between them.
- Score today, not the brochure. Visa rules and tax treatments change, and a lot of what circulates online describes a scheme that closed two years ago. Check the current position from an official source before you score it.
- Use the full range. If everything scores seven or eight, the ranking is just your weights. Be willing to give a two.
- Score separately if you're a couple, then compare. The disagreements are the useful part.
- Come back after a visit. Scores from research and scores from a fortnight on the ground are different things, and the change between them tells you something.
Related reading
Common questions
Does the tool know anything about these countries?
Deliberately not a thing. It holds no cost-of-living figures, no visa ratings, no healthcare or safety indices. Those numbers date quickly, vary enormously between a country and one city inside it, and a website reproducing them would be handing you facts about a place you might genuinely move to — with no way for you to know how old they were. So the scores are yours. The tool's job is to structure your judgement and then show you something about it you couldn't see.
Then what does it do that a spreadsheet doesn't?
Three things. It refuses to rank a destination you haven't finished scoring, so a place you know little about can't drift into mid-table looking considered. It tells you which criterion is actually deciding the result — usually not the one you'd guess. And it tells you the weight at which the answer flips, so you can see how fragile your winner is. A spreadsheet gives you a total and no sense of whether that total means anything.
Why won't it rank a destination with a blank score?
Because a blank isn't a five. If an unscored criterion quietly counts as average, a place you've barely researched arrives mid-table wearing the same clothes as one you've thought hard about, and the ranking stops meaning anything. Blank means unjudged, so the destination waits in a separate list with the missing criteria named. It takes ten seconds to fill in and the result is then worth reading.
The weights feel arbitrary. Does that matter?
It matters more than the scores, which is the single most useful thing this tool will show you. It's common for a result to rest entirely on one slider — move cost from five to three and a different country wins. That isn't a flaw in the method, it's the actual shape of the decision, and it's better to see it than to have it hidden inside a total. If your answer flips easily, the honest conclusion is that you have two viable options rather than a winner.
Should I just go with whatever comes top?
No. A weighted score is good at what it can measure and blind to everything else, and the things that most often send people home aren't on any spreadsheet — isolation, a partner who isn't happy, a parent's health changing, the gap between visiting somewhere and living there in February. Treat the ranking as a way of finding out what you actually believe, and as a shortlist to go and test properly.
Where does my comparison go?
Into your own browser's local storage and nowhere else. We never receive it. If you enter an email for the printable comparison, we get your first name and email address and nothing else — not your destinations, not your weights, not your scores.
Once you have a shortlist of two
The Expat Starter Blueprint is the part after the comparison — visas and residency, the money and tax questions to ask before you commit, and the sequence to do it in so nothing blocks anything else.