StayingAsia
English

What it is like
to live there

Getting in and staying in are one question. Living there is another. This score is built from six things you feel every day, and it is deliberately not combined with the stay score. A country that lets you stay forever can still be a bad place to spend a decade.

Quality of life

21 countries · 21 scored
# Country Life Stay Safety Cost Health Air English Net
01 Japan 78 53 84 70 94 89 28 93
02 Macau 77 30 92 51 90 73 n/a 93
03 Taiwan 76 38 75 69 78 82 n/a 81
04 South Korea 72 42 65 64 92 73 59 82
05 Malaysia 71 49 65 83 52 76 84 72
06 Singapore 71 53 90 7 90 85 100 100
07 Maldives 68 0 54 63 78 92 n/a n/a
08 Hong Kong 65 72 66 23 100 76 66 98
09 China 62 25 57 85 59 45 35 84
10 UAE 59 62 58 51 89 30 45 93
11 Vietnam 59 19 48 87 40 45 50 86
12 Armenia 56 82 39 74 61 51 56 53
13 Indonesia 55 43 67 90 19 44 38 30
14 Sri Lanka 55 48 28 86 57 69 44 27
15 Georgia 53 75 33 80 39 74 67 13
16 Thailand 53 63 24 78 50 72 9 88
17 Philippines 52 73 22 87 11 69 79 62
18 Turkey 51 48 10 76 55 68 45 68
19 Nepal 49 47 37 95 16 28 56 44
20 Cambodia 46 47 39 81 17 71 4 29
21 India 43 5 28 97 25 2 43 35

Each component is 0 to 100, higher is better. Cost means affordability: cheap is a high score. Country names on this page are not links, because a country page exists only where the stay side has verified content underneath. Components marked n/a are excluded from that country total and the remaining weights are renormalised.

Where the two scores disagree

Easy to stay is not the same as good to live in, and countries that score well on one often fail the other.

Easy to stay, less good to live

Armenia stay 82 life 56
Georgia stay 75 life 53
Philippines stay 73 life 52

Good to live, hard to stay

Maldives stay 0 life 68
Macau stay 30 life 77
Vietnam stay 19 life 59

What is in the score

Six components, fixed weights. The weights are a judgment, not a measurement, so they are published and you can re-weight them yourself from the component columns above.

Component Weight Measured by
Safety25Homicide rate, log scaled, 60 percent. Global Peace Index, 40 percent
Affordability25Numbeo cost of living excluding rent, 60 percent. Rent index, 40 percent
Health18Life expectancy at birth. An outcome measure, not an access measure
Air14Annual mean PM2.5
Language10EF English Proficiency Index. Daily life without the local language
Internet8Median fixed broadband download speed, log scaled

The anchors, so you can re-derive any number. Each metric maps linearly to 0 to 100 between two fixed values, chosen from the observed range rather than fitted to this sample so the score means the same thing next year. Homicide 0.1 to 5.0 per 100,000, log scaled. Peace index 1.3 to 3.0. Cost of living index 15 to 100. Rent index 2 to 70. Life expectancy 68 to 85 years. PM2.5 5 to 50. English score 380 to 620. Broadband 40 to 500 Mbps, log scaled.

What is not in it. Tax treatment of foreign income, which is a third score and belongs on the programme records. School quality. Healthcare access beyond outcomes, which matters most to anyone over 60. Political freedom and press freedom. Whether you can get a decent coffee. The score is a floor, not a verdict.

Data coverage. Homicide reporting lags badly in several countries: Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia are last reported in 2011, Georgia, Sri Lanka and the Maldives in 2019. Taiwan does not report to UNODC at all, so its safety score rests on the peace index alone. Singapore, Macau, Taiwan and the Maldives are absent from the English index, so their language weight is dropped and the rest is renormalised. Numbeo is crowd-sourced and its country figures are not population weighted, which pulls them below capital city costs. Air quality is a national annual mean and hides the fact that one city can be four times worse than another.

Extremes

Japan scores highest at 78. India scores lowest at 43. The gap between them is 35 points. Health and clean air drive the top of the table.

Sources

Last updated 2026-10-22