For retirees moving abroad
A pension is portable. The tax on it may not be.
Cost of living and sunshine are the easy part. Where your pension and Social Security get taxed, how healthcare works, and what happens to your estate across two countries, is the part the brochures skip.
What you’re up against
Where does the pension get taxed
Public pensions, private pensions and Social Security can each be taxed differently: sometimes only at home, sometimes only abroad, sometimes in both until a treaty sorts it out. The answer changes the whole budget.
Passive-income visas have income tests
Many retiree routes (passive-income and elective-residence visas) require a proven, steady income above a threshold that tends to rise each year. Meeting it on paper is its own small project.
Healthcare access, not just cost
Whether you can join a public system, must carry private cover, or fall between the two, is decisive after 55 and rarely modelled next to the tax picture.
An estate split across borders
A home in one country and heirs in another can put two sets of inheritance rules on a collision course. Forced-heirship and cross-border estate tax surprise families who planned the move but not the exit.
How this works for you
Tax on the income you already have
The design treats you as a passive-income or investor mover: it names the likely residence and flags where holding structures or foreign-income rules quietly change the answer.
Design your retirement base→Cost, banking and citizenship, side by side
Every country page carries the cost signal, banking access, tax-residence threshold and citizenship line together, so the comparison is not spread across twelve browser tabs.
Two retirement bases, head to head
The comparison pages put two countries against each other on entry, tax residence and timelines, which is the decision-stage view most retiree content never gives you.
Confirm the day count
The builder and the 183-day tracker let you confirm exactly when a base makes you tax-resident, so the pension question has a single, definite home.
Confirm the day count→
A worked example
A British couple retiring to Portugal on passive income
Sample data, verification pending.
UK passport, a private pension and some investment income, no more salary. Portugal, on a passive-income route, roughly 210 days a year. The cost of living works, the weather works.
The tax question is where it gets specific. Past 183 days you are Portuguese tax-resident, so the pension's tax home shifts, and with the old NHR regime closed and its IFICI successor narrower, the rate you assumed may not be the rate you get. The passive-income visa also wants proof of steady income above its threshold before it lets you in. None of this is a reason not to go; all of it is a reason to design it before you sign a lease.
Figures shown are sample data, and pension tax in particular turns on a treaty, so this is the moment for a specialist, cheaply, because the question is already framed.
See what could actually work for you.
A portfolio of designed setups, not a country ranking. Structured planning and decision support you take into a professional consultation, explicitly not legal or tax advice.