Portugal Ranks Eighth in the World for Expats in 2026, but a Smaller Survey Flatters the Rebound
The InterNations Expat Insider 2026 survey ranks Portugal eighth in the world, and fourth for personal finances — its best showing in years. But the field shrank to 31 countries from 53, and the score that flatters Portugal most measures the expat experience, not what locals can afford.
Portugal has landed eighth in the world in this year's most closely watched survey of where it is best to live as a foreigner. The InterNations Expat Insider 2026 report, whose findings were carried by Euronews on 27 July, places Portugal in the global top ten and makes it one of only three European countries there — alongside Spain, in sixth, and Luxembourg, in tenth. For a country that has spent the past decade reinventing itself as a destination for retirees, remote workers and digital nomads, it is a flattering headline.
The detail is kinder still in the areas that matter most to newcomers. Portugal ranked fourth of all countries surveyed for Personal Finance and seventh for Ease of Settling In — the two categories that tend to decide whether a move abroad sticks. The survey drew on responses from roughly 8,000 expatriates of 162 nationalities, with a minimum of fifty respondents required to rank a country. Portugal finished ahead of Singapore and Malaysia and behind a leading pack of Panama, Mexico, Thailand, the United Arab Emirates and Brazil. At the other end, Norway came last of the thirty-one countries ranked, with Germany, Turkey and the United Kingdom filling out the bottom four.
That last figure is the one to hold on to. This year's league table ran to just 31 countries, down from 53 in the 2024 edition, when Portugal sat a distant fifteenth. A smaller field mechanically lifts every survivor's position, so part of the jump from fifteenth to eighth is arithmetic rather than a real change in how expats feel. Portugal's trajectory has in any case been volatile — fourth in 2022, tenth in 2023, fifteenth in 2024 — which argues for treating any single year's ranking as a mood reading rather than a verdict.
The Personal Finance score deserves particular care. It measures how satisfied surveyed expats are with their own financial situation, not how affordable Portugal is in absolute terms. Many of the foreigners who answer these surveys arrive on incomes earned elsewhere, against which Lisbon or the Algarve can still look like good value. That is a very different experience from the one Portuguese households report. The country recently posted the EU's second-highest housing-price surge and its sixth-lowest purchasing power — a combination that does not describe a cheap place to live on a local wage.
The gap shows up in everyday life. More than a third of Portugal's residents still cannot afford a week away each year, well above the EU average — a reminder that the same market an expat rates highly for value can feel punishing to the people already living in it. Rankings like this one capture the view from arrival, not the view from a Portuguese payslip.
None of which cancels the good news. What the survey rewards — an easy welcome, a settled community, a sense that your money stretches — is real, and it is why so many readers of this publication chose Portugal in the first place. The practical business of moving here remains, by international standards, unusually smooth. The eighth-place finish is worth enjoying. It is just worth reading as a snapshot of the expat experience, in a shrinking frame, rather than a scorecard for the country as a whole.
