The cheapest countries to retire abroad
Ranked by what a month actually costs — not by what a brochure claims.

Ranked on monthly cost, couple. The second column is the counterweight: the thing this ranking deliberately does not look at.

#	Destination	Monthly cost, couple	Where residency leads	vs overall
1	Vietnam	$1,400	Near-unattainable	+16
2	Philippines	$1,500	Permanent	+2
3	Mexico	$1,700	4 yrs	+8
4	Indonesia (Bali)	$1,700	KITAP 3–4 yrs	+9
5	Thailand	$1,800	Difficult	-3
6	Malaysia	$1,900	No PR route	-1
7	Costa Rica	$2,000	3 yrs	+3
8	Mauritius	$2,000	5 yrs + $200k	+4
9	Panama	$2,100	Immediate	-8
10	Greece	$2,200	5 yrs	-4
11	Cyprus	$2,200	On grant — long queue	-2
12	Uruguay	$2,300	Direct — <1 yr	-9
13	Italy	$2,400	5 yrs	-5
14	Spain	$2,500	5 yrs	0
15	Malta	$2,600	5 yrs	-8
16	Portugal	$2,600	5 yrs	-1
17	UAE (Dubai)	$3,500	Golden Visa	-1

Every figure comes from the same fact store as the country pages, carries its own verification month and its own re-check window, and disappears rather than ages. The “vs overall” column is places gained or lost against our all-criteria ranking — the bigger the number, the more this one dimension is disagreeing with everything else we measure.

Cheap on paper, expensive in the end

Comparing this order against our overall ranking shows which places are cheap because they are good value, and which are cheap because something else is missing.

What a monthly figure cannot tell you

The number is a household run rate for a retired couple: rent on a decent two-bedroom in the city expats actually live in, food, utilities, transport and ordinary discretionary spending. It excludes the two costs that move most between these countries — private health cover priced at your age rather than at forty, and the one-off cost of getting legally established, which ranges from a few hundred dollars of e-visa fees to five figures of deposits and agent work.

It also excludes the slowest and largest cost of all: currency. A place that is 30% cheaper today at a rate that has drifted 3% a year against your pension for a decade is not 30% cheaper over the twenty years you are planning for. That drift sits in the per-country detail rather than in this column, because it is a judgement about a currency rather than a price on a shelf.

Read this ranking as a shortlist generator, not as an answer. It tells you which countries deserve the hour it takes to read their visa and tax position properly.

The same 17 destinations, cut five other ways

No two of these orders agree. We measured every pair of them against each other and the closest two still disagree on nearly a quarter of all country pairings, which is why each one is a page rather than a filter on this one. Read across at least three before you shortlist anything.