The decision that cannot be undone is not where you retire. It is where you become unable to move.
Every figure on this site assumes you can still get on a plane. Long-term care is the point at which that assumption stops holding, and it is the one part of the decision that almost no relocation guide will state plainly: the international policies sold to retirees do not pay for it, and they say so in their own documents. What follows is those documents, quoted, with page numbers — and then, country by country, whether a public register even exists for you to check a facility against.
Every quote below was opened and read in the publisher’s own PDF on the date shown. Free to quote under CC-BY-4.0 with credit. Descriptive only — we are not insurance brokers and nothing here is advice to buy or avoid a policy.
What the contracts actually exclude
Two of the three insurers this site links to are quoted below, from the documents they publish themselves. Both exclude custodial and nursing care. We link to these companies and we still print this, because the alternative — leaving it out where it would cost us a click — is the thing that would make every other number here worth less.
SafetyWing — Nomad Insuranceexclusion
While confined primarily to receive custodial care, educational or rehabilitative care, or any medical treatment in any establishment for the care of the aged, except rehabilitative care received upon direct transfer from an acute care hospital.
Custodial care is excluded outright, and so is any treatment received inside a facility for the care of the aged. The single carve-out is rehabilitation transferred directly out of an acute hospital — which is the short recovery case, not the long stay.
and is not primarily a rehabilitation facility, long-term care facility, extended care facility, nursing, rest, custodial care or convalescent home, a place for the aged, drug addicts, alcoholics or runaways; or similar establishment.
The definitional route is the durable one. Because a nursing or long-term care facility is not a Hospital under the contract, every benefit written as payable in hospital is unavailable there — independently of whatever the exclusion list happens to say in a later edition.
Extended care facility does not include a facility primarily for rest, the aged, substance abuse treatment, custodial care, nursing care or for care of mental health disorders or the mentally incompetent.
Even the term that sounds like it should cover a nursing home is defined to exclude one. A reader scanning for the word 'extended care' in the benefit schedule would reasonably conclude the opposite, which is why this definition matters more than the benefit table above it.
Treatment in nature cure clinics, health spas, nursing homes, or other facilities which are not hospitals or recognised medical treatment providers. Specifically, we would not cover the costs of nursing care (such as accommodations, meals and living expenses) or of any other form of treatment in a residential or elderly care facility even if the treatment is medically necessary and/or provided by a recognized medical practitioner.
This is the clearest sentence in either document. International private medical insurance is the category that still writes new business past 65 — and it states in its own rules that a residential or elderly care facility is out, explicitly including the case where the treatment is medically necessary and delivered by a recognised practitioner.
admissions and stays for social or domestic reasons e.g. washing, dressing and bathing
Washing, dressing and bathing are the activities of daily living — the standard clinical measure of whether someone needs long-term care at all. The contract names them and places them outside cover, including when they happen inside a hospital.
Cited without a verbatim quote — this is a scope limit rather than a numbered clause, and we do not put words in a publisher’s mouth to fill a gap.
Medicare generally does not pay for health care received outside the United States. This is listed here without a verbatim quote because it is a scope limit rather than a numbered exclusion, and the point for this page is narrow: an American who assumed Medicare would follow them is starting from zero abroad, before the two contracts above are even read.
Where two routes exist, the definition is the more durable citation. An insurer can reword an exclusion list in the next edition; changing what the word Hospital means in a contract rewrites the whole benefit schedule with it, so it rarely happens.
Countries that let you check a facility before you commit
A price you cannot verify is worth less than a register you can. This is the column we went looking for: does the country run a public list of licensed care facilities, and can a foreigner search it without a local ID? 14 of 17 countries have been opened and read so far. The rest are named below rather than quietly dropped.
Older Persons Standards Authority (OPSA)Malta runs two separate bodies and they are easy to confuse: the Social Care Standards Authority covers social welfare services generally, while OPSA is the one that licenses services for older persons. The register below is OPSA's.read 2026-08-06
Public register
Register of Licensed Service Providers — public, searchable, no loginAround 96 entries when checked, listed with a reference number, title, service name and a date. Reference prefixes separate the service types: 01 residential care homes, 02 long-term care wards at St Vincent de Paul, 04 dementia activity centres, 06 night shelters, 07 social work. We do not restate the date column here because its header does not say whether it is the issue or the expiry date, and several of the dates fall in the past — reading it either way would be a guess.read 2026-08-06
Statutory basis
Opened — not established from sources we opened
Does a public system pay?
Opened — public payment not established from sources we opened
Carta Social — public directory of social responses, searchable by service type and locationAn official República Portuguesa site with an English interface, searchable by area of intervention, kind of social response and location. The facility type to search for is ERPI — Estrutura Residencial para Pessoas Idosas, the statutory term for a residential structure for older people. The site is JavaScript-rendered, so it must be opened in a browser rather than fetched.read 2026-08-06
Statutory basis
Opened — not established from sources we opened
Does a public system pay?
Opened — public payment not established from sources we opened
Ministerio de Salud Pública (MSP)The dataset is published by the Ministry of Public Health on the national open data catalogue.read 2026-08-06
Public register
ELEPEM establishments, published as an open dataset — downloadable, not merely browsableELEPEM is the statutory term for an establishment for older persons. Uruguay splits the list in two — establishments certified by the MSP, and establishments authorised by the MSP — and the distinction is itself decision-relevant, because the two words are not interchangeable and a facility may appear on one list and not the other. This is the only country checked so far that releases the register as data rather than as a web page.read 2026-08-06
Statutory basis
Opened — not established from sources we opened
Does a public system pay?
Opened — public payment not established from sources we opened
Jabatan Kebajikan Masyarakat (JKM) — registers care centres under Act 506Opened JKM's own 2020 registration guide on the wargaemas.jkm.gov.my domain. Applications go to the Director-General through the Pejabat Kebajikan Masyarakat Daerah (PKMD) where the centre will operate. The guide names JKM as the regulating agency for this instrument. Homes that are primarily nursing facilities may also sit under the Private Healthcare Facilities and Services Act 1998 / Ministry of Health — a second statute we have not opened as a full cell here, so the split is named rather than erased.read 2026-08-14
Public register
Opened — no public register found
Statutory basis
Care Centres Act 1993 (Act 506) — every care centre must be registeredSame JKM PDF. Section 4 requires every pusat jagaan to be registered; section 5(1) makes it an offence to run or take part in managing an unregistered centre. The guide also cites the Care Centres Regulations 1994 and later amending instruments. This is the social-welfare care-centre track — not a priced nursing-home table.read 2026-08-14
Does a public system pay?
Opened — public payment not established from sources we opened
No national searchable public register of licensed elderly-care centres could be opened from abroad. The JKM guide is a registration procedure, not a list you can search by name. Facility counts circulating on private directories are not restated here.
Department of Health Service Support (MOPH) — elderly / dependent-care establishmentsOpened the Digital Government Development Agency guide on thailand.go.th for registering a healthcare enterprise that cares for elderly or dependent persons. It names the Department of Health Service Support as the body that accredits the health-service certificate, and routes applications only through www.esta.hss.moph.go.th (result within 26 days, with limited extensions). The esta portal itself is JavaScript-heavy and did not return a readable document when fetched — so this cell files the official guide, not a scraped copy of the portal UI.read 2026-08-14
Public register
Opened — no public register found
Statutory basis
Health Business Establishment Act B.E. 2559 (2016) — licence required to operateOpened the Department of Health Service Support PDF of พระราชบัญญัติสถานประกอบการเพื่อสุขภาพ พ.ศ. ๒๕๕๙. Section 12 requires a licence from the grantor to operate a health business establishment; the Minister may split licence types by category or size under ministerial regulations. The thailand.go.th elderly-care guide treats elderly / dependent-person enterprises as sitting under this 2016 Act.read 2026-08-14
Does a public system pay?
Opened — public payment not established from sources we opened
The esta portal menu offers a licensed-name check, but we could not open a stable public searchable register as a readable page. Naming the licensing Act and the DHSS channel is not the same as verifying a particular home from abroad, and only the first of those is published here.
Social Welfare Services, Deputy Ministry of Social Welfare — and silence is a refusalA Home for the Elderly and People with Disabilities is defined as any premises accommodating more than five people over the age of eighteen who need care because of disability, advanced age or other circumstances. Applications go to the District Social Welfare Office — Nicosia, Limassol, Larnaca, Paphos or Ammochostos — or through the Point of Single Contact. An on-site inspection is carried out by authorised officers before a decision, and the applicant is informed within four months. Then the sentence worth carrying across: the authorisation shall not be deemed to have been granted if the Social Welfare Services has not replied within the period specified. In Cyprus, silence is not consent.read 2026-08-07
Public register
Opened — no public register found
Statutory basis
The Homes for the Elderly and Disabled Persons Law of 1991 (222/1991), with Regulations R.A.A 213/2000 and R.A.A 141/2011Two obligations printed on the same page decide what a visitor can and cannot learn standing in the lobby. The Certificate of Registration is posted in a conspicuous place of the establishment, so you will see one. And the Certificate of Registration does not need to be renewed: it stays valid for as long as the home keeps meeting its obligations. A certificate on the wall therefore establishes that the home was registered once — it carries no date of last review. What fills that gap is inspection, which the same page says District Social Welfare Officers carry out regularly.read 2026-08-07
Does a public system pay?
Opened — public payment not established from sources we opened
No public list of registered homes could be opened. Cyprus publishes the licensing procedure in unusual detail — the definition, the documents, the fact that there are no fees, the four-month clock, the appeal route to the Administrative Court — but not the output of it. So the rules can be checked here and a particular home cannot.
The Ministerio de Salud accredits care establishments — CONAPAM is the council, not the licensorArticle 18 of Ley N° 7935 lists the actions of the Ministerio de Salud, and subsection (d) is the operative one: to grant the accreditation under which establishments and care programmes for older persons operate — "Otorgar la acreditación para que funcionen los establecimientos y los programas de atención a las personas adultas mayores". CONAPAM, the Consejo Nacional de la Persona Adulta Mayor, is the body this same law creates, and it is CONAPAM's own website that publishes the PDF, which is why it is easy to assume CONAPAM issues the permit. On the wording of Article 18 it does not.read 2026-08-07
Opened — public payment not established from sources we opened
No public list of accredited establishments could be opened. Naming the body that grants an accreditation is not the same as being able to check whether a particular home holds one, and only the first of those two things is published here.
Ministry of Social Cohesion and Family — where a licence can be issued by silenceLicensing a for-profit Μονάδα Φροντίδας Ηλικιωμένων — a unit for the care of the elderly — is procedure 599736 in the National Registry of Administrative Procedures, held by the ΥΠΟΥΡΓΕΙΟ ΚΟΙΝΩΝΙΚΗΣ ΣΥΝΟΧΗΣ ΚΑΙ ΟΙΚΟΓΕΝΕΙΑΣ, Directorate for Policies for Persons with Disabilities. The deadline for implementation is two months. The page then states what happens when that deadline passes: σιωπηρή έγκριση, silent approval — if the period lapses without an answer, the application is considered to have been tacitly accepted and the licence to have been issued, under article 14 §4 of law 3844/2010. That is the exact opposite of the rule Cyprus prints on the equivalent page, and the two countries are eleven hundred kilometres apart.read 2026-08-07
Public register
Opened — no public register found
Statutory basis
Ν. 2345/1995 (ΦΕΚ 213 Α) — the statute on units for the care of the elderlyThe procedure page links straight to the gazette issue at the National Printing House. The statute has been amended repeatedly — by ν. 4756/2020, ν. 4052/2012 and ν. 3852/2010 among others — and the live instrument is more recent still: ΚΥΑ 766/2025 (ΦΕΚ 958 Β) grants a further period for the licensing of units for the care of the elderly, for-profit and not-for-profit alike, including those run by first-tier local authorities.read 2026-08-07
Does a public system pay?
Opened — public payment not established from sources we opened
No public list of licensed units could be opened. Greece publishes the procedure, the fees and the whole chain of legislation, but not the output — which unit holds a licence today. The silent-approval rule is why that gap is worth naming rather than glossing: a unit can hold a licence that no official ever affirmatively granted.
INAPAM — inspects and supervises public and private centres for older personsOpened INAPAM's 2025 supervision report on bienestar.gob.mx. The institute is the federal body that runs inspection visits to instituciones / Centros Gerontológicos — casas hogar, albergues, day residences and other centres serving older persons — against NOM-031-SSA3-2012 and related rules. Supervision is not the same as issuing an operating licence; when recommendations are ignored, INAPAM notifies other competent authorities (LDPAM Art 28 XIV as restated in the report).read 2026-08-14
Public register
Opened — no public register found
Statutory basis
Ley de los Derechos de las Personas Adultas Mayores — Art 48 (centres must follow NOMs / regulations)Same INAPAM report quotes Article 48: public and private casas hogar, albergues, day residences and other centres for older persons must align their operation with Normas Oficiales Mexicanas and related regulations. Article 28 XIII (quoted there) is the inspection power. We file the statute as restated by the supervising institute on an official domain; a separate diputados PDF of LDPAM was not retrieved this round.read 2026-08-14
Does a public system pay?
Opened — public payment not established from sources we opened
INAPAM's Registro Único is described in the same report as a national directory used to select centres for supervision — a policy tool, not confirmed here as a public searchable list a foreigner can open by name. Registry stays null until that downloadable directory is opened with our own eyes.
Ministry of Social Integration, Social Security and National Solidarity — Social Security DivisionThe ministry publishes two separate lists on its own domain — charitable institutions, and private residential care homes. This is the charitable one: 22 entries at the date checked, running from religious homes and ashrams to orphanages with an elderly wing. Publisher and licensor are the same body here, with no arm's-length inspectorate in between, which is worth knowing when reading a list that contains no adverse findings.read 2026-08-07
Public register
57 private residential care homes on the ministry's own list, updated 27 May 2025Every entry carries the name of the institution, its address, the name of the officer in charge and a telephone number, usually an email as well — enough to ring a home before flying to look at it. The counts have moved, and both figures are the government's own: the 2023 press communiqué announced 23 charitable institutions and 53 private homes, while the lists as updated on 27 May 2025 run to 22 and 57. These are PDFs, not a searchable register, so a name has to be read down a page rather than typed into a box. They are still the licensed list, published by the licensor, with the date on the last line.read 2026-08-07
Statutory basis
Residential Care Homes Act — the instrument these homes are licensed underNamed in the title of the government's own press communiqué of 26 October 2023: a list of 23 charitable institutions and 53 private residential care homes licensed under the Residential Care Homes Act. We have not opened the text of the Act itself, so what is published here is the name of the licensing instrument and the fact that the ministry treats it as the basis of these lists — nothing about its contents.read 2026-08-07
Does a public system pay?
Opened — public payment not established from sources we opened
DSWD Standards Bureau (and Field Office Standards Sections) — registers, licences and accredits SWDAsOpened a DSWD Field Office page that states the Department, through the Standards Bureau and Field Office Standards Sections, regulates Social Welfare and Development Agencies (SWDAs). Private SWDAs need registration and a Licence to Operate; public SWDAs are exempt from registration/licensing but their programmes still require accreditation. The national Standards Bureau also publishes the RLA forms and assessment tools on standards.dswd.gov.ph.read 2026-08-14
Public register
Opened — no public register found
Statutory basis
DSWD registration, licensing and accreditation (RLA) framework for SWDAsOpened the Standards Bureau issuances page: Registration and Licensing of Social Welfare and Development Agencies (SWDAs), and Accreditation of their SWD programmes and services — with application forms, documentary annexes and residential / centre-based accreditation assessment tools. This is the regulatory spine for social-welfare residential care, including agencies that serve older persons; it is not a priced nursing-home list.read 2026-08-14
Does a public system pay?
Opened — public payment not established from sources we opened
No public searchable national list of licensed private elderly-care homes could be opened. HELPS (helps.dswd.gov.ph) is described elsewhere as the online filing channel; the FAQ URL we tried returned 404 on the day checked, so it is not cited as a live register. Naming the Standards Bureau is not the same as checking a particular home from abroad.
Autonomous Communities — social services pillar under the national dependency frameworkOpened Ley 39/2006 on the BOE. The preamble assigns the fundamental role in dependency care to social services developed mainly by the Comunidades Autónomas, with the Consejo Territorial as the inter-administration forum. Residential care (centros residenciales) is a catalogue service in the Act; licensing lists themselves are regional, not a single national desk on this page.read 2026-08-14
Public register
Opened — no public register found
Statutory basis
Ley 39/2006 — Promoción de la Autonomía Personal y Atención a las personas en situación de dependenciaOfficial State Gazette consolidation (BOE-A-2006-21990). The Act creates the Sistema para la Autonomía y Atención a la Dependencia and includes residential centres among the services that can be provided according to dependency type and intensity — permanent or temporary stays. It is the national framework statute; it is not seventeen regional facility registers.read 2026-08-14
Does a public system pay?
Opened — public payment not established from sources we opened
No single national searchable register of residential care homes could be opened. Competence over lists sits with the Autonomous Communities. Publishing seventeen regional registers is a different job from opening the framework law, and only the framework is published here.
Dubai Health Authority — Health Regulation Sector (medical long-term care facilities)Opened DHA Standards for Long-Term Care Services (DHA/HRS/HPSD/ST-67, issue 03/07/2025). Applies to health facilities providing LTC in the Emirate of Dubai. Facilities must follow DHA licensure procedures on dha.gov.ae; adding LTC services goes through the Sheryan platform. Approved facility types include Nursing Homes. The Community Development Authority also licenses social-care facilities in Dubai — that CDA page timed out when fetched, so the social-care track is named, not filed as a second opened cell.read 2026-08-14
Public register
Opened — no public register found
Statutory basis
DHA Standards for Long-Term Care Services — registration and licensure procedures (Standard One)Same PDF. Standard One requires UAE/Dubai compliance, DHA licensure, Sheryan permission to add LTC services, and public display of the facility licence. Nursing Home Facilities are an approved LTCF type. This is the medical/clinical LTC standard — not a priced care-home table and not a federal UAE-wide register.read 2026-08-14
Does a public system pay?
Opened — public payment not established from sources we opened
No public searchable register of licensed long-term care homes in Dubai could be opened. Naming DHA licensure and Sheryan is not the same as checking a particular home from abroad.
Provincial Sở Lao động — Thương binh và Xã hội, and district Phòng — issue the operating licence under Art 28Opened the Government Portal's signed PDF of Decree 103/2017/NĐ-CP (datafiles.chinhphu.vn; the listing page is vanban.chinhphu.vn docid 191096). Article 28 splits licensing: Sở Lao động — Thương binh và Xã hội for provincial-level and central-agency facilities with a local seat; Phòng Lao động — Thương binh và Xã hội for other locally founded facilities. The same article names the licensor as the body that suspends or withdraws the licence. The 2017 office titles are what the PDF prints — Vietnam's later ministry transfer moved social-assistance functions in ways that may rename the desk that still holds those files — so this cell files the decree's licensing split, not a clickable national directory of who answers the phone tomorrow.read 2026-08-14
Public register
Opened — no public register found
Statutory basis
Nghị định 103/2017/NĐ-CP — social-assistance establishments; Art 5.1 names elderly-care homesSame signed PDF. Article 5 lists seven establishment types; the first is cơ sở bảo trợ xã hội chăm sóc người cao tuổi — a social-protection establishment caring for older persons. Article 6.4 also admits đối tượng tự nguyện — people who pay, or whose relatives pay, for assistance without falling into the statutory protection categories. A draft decree to replace 103/2017 was discussed under Bộ Y tế in early 2026; this cell files the instrument still published as the live signed text, not the draft.read 2026-08-14
Does a public system pay?
Opened — public payment not established from sources we opened
No national public register of licensed elderly-care facilities could be opened. Article 31 requires a newly licensed facility to publish its licence facts in three consecutive issues of a local newspaper — name, address, facility type, tasks, service area — which is a local notice, not a searchable national list. Naming the provincial licensor under Article 28 is not the same as being able to check whether a particular home holds a live licence from abroad, and only the first of those two things is published here. Stay paperwork and BHYT contract gates for foreigners live on ThonExpat; this layer stays on elder-care regulation.
Not yet researched — 3 countries
We publish this list rather than hide it. Each of these is not yet researched: a country we cover elsewhere on the site but where we have not yet opened an official source on care regulation with our own eyes, so we print nothing.
PanamaSearch still points at Ley 36 de 2016 and MIDES. Official MIDES and Gaceta pages returned bot-rejection or empty PDFs when fetched this round, so Panama stays unchecked — a gap in access, not a finding that no law exists. No licensed-facility register has been opened.
ItalyAccreditation of residential facilities sits with the Regions. The Ministry of Health describes a national FAR information system (DM 17 December 2008) for monitoring residential / semi-residential care — aggregate statistics, not a public name-searchable register of homes. Salute.gov.it pages returned a JavaScript challenge when fetched, so Italy stays unchecked until those pages (or a regional register) are opened by hand.
Indonesia (Bali)Search still points at LKSLU — social welfare institutions for older persons — being registered with the local Dinas Sosial rather than nationally. No primary Kemensos / Dinas Sosial instrument was opened with our own eyes this round, so Bali stays unchecked. If that local pattern is right there is no single Indonesian national list to check a facility against — that finding waits for a primary page, not for a guess.
Why there is no cost table on this page
No official monthly cost figure for elder care could be sourced in any of the countries this site covers.
We looked for a government body, national statistics office or industry association publishing a monthly or annual cost for residential care, nursing care, dementia care or home care. In the countries covered here we found none that meets the bar the rest of this site is held to — a named publisher, a stable URL, and a date. Private aggregators publish such tables, and their ranges are wide enough to be compatible with almost any outcome. Rather than restate an unsourced range and inherit its error, this layer publishes the gap.
Every other number on this site carries a publisher and a check date. A cost table that could not carry one would be the single weakest thing here, and it would sit next to the strongest — the contract clauses above, which are quoted from the insurer's own PDF with a page number. Putting them side by side would lend the credibility of the second to the first.
What replaces it is the register column below: whether the country runs a public list of licensed facilities you can search yourself, before you commit. A price you cannot verify is worth less than a register you can.
Searched 2026-08-06. If you can point us at an official publisher we missed, the changelog records every correction with a date, and we would rather fill this in than be right about it being empty.
Where this fits
Access to insurance closes by birthday, and that happens years before care does — the age ceilings by band are on every country page. For definitions of the terms used here, see the glossary; for how we grade a source, the method page. This layer was last reviewed 2026-08-14 and feeds the same refresh queue as everything else.