FiscaWorld

Moving abroad? Start with what you would actually pay

Travel

Money

Finance

Hi Product Hunt, I spent a month researching where to move, and every guide gave me the same five countries. Portugal, Dubai, Bali, Thailand, Cyprus. Nobody explained why, and when I checked the numbers myself, half of them did not hold up. Portugal is the single most recommended destination on the web. The regime that made it famous, the NHR, closed to new arrivals in 2024. What replaced it excludes pensions and targets a list of professions. So a retiree who moves there today pays the ordinary scale, up to 48%. Most guides still explain how to apply for the old one. Malta is the opposite mistake. It shows 35% income tax and 35% corporate tax, so it gets filed under "expensive". In practice a newcomer there is taxed on a remittance basis, and Malta never taxes foreign capital gains at all, even when you bring them in. Ireland has the better-known non-dom regime and helps far less, because what you remit to live on is taxed at up to 52%. None of that is in a rate table. So I built the thing I wanted to read. FiscaWorld is the research you do before moving abroad. Every country gets a FiScore out of 10 based on what a NEWCOMER bears on foreign-source income, not what a local resident pays on local income. Those are different questions, and answering the first one moved Malta from 193rd to 22nd. But the score is only the spine. What is actually in it: - 217 countries ranked, every rate carrying a source and a verification date - 651 written country pages across English, French and German - 164 guides, including seven that answer "which country", by profile: retirees, freelancers, no-income-tax countries, staying inside the EU - 21 inbound regimes documented with their real conditions, because "7% for retirees" means nothing without the fifteen-year limit and the residence test - for every destination, who it does NOT work for That last one is the part I care about. Malta is excellent for capital gains and bad for a remitted salary. Georgia is great until you realise that work physically performed in Georgia is Georgian-source, even with a foreign client paying into a foreign account. Territoriality does not protect a nomad working from the beach, and almost nobody writes that down. Three rules I refuse to bend, because they are what keeps the score honest: - A flat charge never enters the score. Italy's EUR 300,000, Switzerland's CHF 435,000. Converting them to a rate would require assuming a reference income, and the score has to stay reproducible by hand. - A conditional regime never enters it either. Portugal's IFICI, Spain's Beckham law. They are shown on the country page with their requirements, so you can see whether they apply to you. - Missing data never flatters a country. If we do not know a rate, we say so rather than quietly scoring around it. What it is not: advice. It is the reading I wanted before talking to an adviser, not a substitute for one. No account, no paywall, no email gate. Happy to answer anything, including "your number for country X is wrong". That is the most useful comment I can get, and it is how four rates got fixed last week.