Lowest-tax countries to retire abroad
Headline rates ranked — and every clock we can find attached to them.

Ranked on headline rate on your pension. The second column is the counterweight: the thing this ranking deliberately does not look at.

#	Destination	Headline rate on your pension	How long the deal lasts	vs overall
1	Panama	0%	no clock	0
2	Philippines	0%	no clock	+2
3	Costa Rica	0%	no clock	+7
4	UAE (Dubai)	0%	no clock	+12
5	Thailand	0%	12 yrs left	-3
6	Uruguay	0%	11 yrs left	-3
7	Malaysia	0%	10 yrs left	-2
8	Cyprus	0–5%	17 yrs left	+1
9	Greece	7%	15 yrs left	-3
10	Italy	7%	10 yrs left	-2
11	Mauritius	0–20%	no clock	+1
12	Malta	15%	15 yrs left	-5
13	Mexico	1.92–35%	no clock	-2
14	Indonesia (Bali)	5–35%	no clock	-1
15	Portugal	13–48%	no clock	0
16	Spain	19–47%	no clock	-2
17	Vietnam	Under review — the circular that exempted foreign pensions was repealed	no clock	0

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.

The cheapest rate and the best outcome are rarely the same country

Placing the tax order against our overall ranking separates the durable regimes from the promotions.

A headline rate is not a tax bill

Where a country quotes a band rather than a single figure, we print the band and rank it at its midpoint. Ranking a band at its lowest number would put a nought-to-twenty country above a flat seven, which is the arithmetic a brochure would like you to do. Two countries quoting the same rate are separated by how long that rate is guaranteed for, so a permanent nil rate outranks a promotional one.

The rate here applies to foreign pension income for someone who has become tax resident. Almost nothing else you own is covered by it. Investment income, capital gains, rental income from the house you kept at home, and your estate are each governed by separate rules that frequently move in the opposite direction to the headline — a country with a nil rate on pensions can tax gains hard, and several do.

Your home country gets a vote too. What you actually pay is the interaction of the local rate, the double-tax treaty if one exists, and whichever rules your own tax authority applies to citizens abroad. For some passports the treaty makes the local rate nearly irrelevant; for others, particularly American ones, you keep filing at home whatever this column says. That interaction is per-person arithmetic rather than a country fact, which is why it lives in the net-income model rather than in this table.

Then there is the clock. A ten-year flat-rate regime covers a decent share of the years a sixty-five-year-old is planning for and about a fifth of the years a forty-five-year-old is. Where a rate below is a programme rather than a permanent rule, the expiry is printed in the row. Plan for the year after it ends, because a great many people who moved for a rate have since had to move again.

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.