Top 3 Affordable Asian Countries to Retire in 2025
Figure 1. Picture taken from our #1 affordable retirement destination in Asia (disclosed further below–no spoilers!) Photo by Evan Krause on Unsplash.
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Disclaimer: I am not a financial adviser, and this content is for informational and educational purposes only. Please consult a qualified financial adviser for personalized advice tailored to your situation.
Best Countries in Asia to Retire in 2025
How to Choose a Retirement Destination in Asia
In a previous article, we introduced our new data-driven Retirement Relocation Tool (optimized for PC; mobile phone users, please see instructions for best experience), which supports users in finding their perfect retirement destination by filtering through key factors like cost of living (COL) for retirees, healthcare, climate, and many others. In the tool’s dashboard, users can set different filter settings to identify a set of optimal retirement locations based on their particular preferences.
In a different post, we also presented an example of assessing different European retirement destinations, and came up with the top 5 best places to retire in Europe: Portugal, Spain, Croatia, Greece, and Cyprus. This was not a ranking based on my personal preference, but based on the assessment differences in cost of living data and 9 other key variables that make for the best places to retire. All five of these retirement destinations are considered lower-to-mid COL locations for European standards. Assuming you’re living and working in a higher COL location, considering some of these options could accelerate substantially your path to early retirement.
Figure 2. Hạ Long Bay. Photo by Marina Lobato on Unsplash.
In today’s post, we will use again the Retirement Relocation Tool to identify some of Asia’s most popular retirement destinations, and present an overview of the pros and cons these countries present in relation to early retirement abroad.
How Our Retirement Relocation Tool Helps Compare Countries
The Retirement Relocation Tool helps would-be retirees compare the best places to retire across regions by assessing cost of living (COL), safety, healthcare, and more. The tool produces a retirement suitability score based on the average of 9 different variables that are relevant for selecting a retirement destination. It considers factors like safety, healthcare quality, political stability, pollution levels, climate, English proficiency, local culture, natural beauty, and natural disaster risk. These factors were described in detail in the post that introduced the tool and its associated methodology (here).
Figure 3 below shows a screenshot of our tool. The sliders on the left-hand bar allow the user to filter through the variables of interest, potentially dropping out countries that don’t perform well for a given factor. To illustrate how this works, if you were to move the safety slider from 5 to 4, the tool would exclude from the analysis the bottom 20% performing countries across the globe for this variable. If we were to move the slider all the way to 1, the interactive plot on the right would only display the top 20% safest countries. The tool allows as well to consider only certain continents and also whether to exclude from the analysis countries with more than 2 missing variables (NAs). These functionalities can be found directly above the interactive plot.
The tool then plots countries across cost of living (y axis) versus a retirement suitability score that is made up of the average score across the 9 different selected variables. Then, we can identify a set of candidate countries by looking in the bottom-right section of the plot. This area will be contain countries presenting the ideal combination of affordable cost of living for retirees and relatively-high retirement suitability score.
Figure 3. Screenshot of the Retirement Relocation Tool (at the moment available for PC only).
Discover your ideal retirement destination! Use our interactive tool to see where you could retire earlier and more affordably. (Available only for PC)
If you are on your phone, my recommendation would be to continue reading the article in full to get a sense of how it works and the main takeaways, but to return later with your computer to play around with the tool and see how it adapts to your preferences.
Top 3 Budget-Friendly Asian Countries to Retire in 2025
The beauty of using this tool is that everyone can arrive at their own personal ranking based on their own set of retirement variable preferences. For some, safety and healthcare may be most important, while others may value aspects related to climate, openness, or English proficiency. By playing around with the tool you will soon figure out that there is no free lunch when identifying a retirement destination–it is really hard to find a set of countries that consistently ranking high across all variables.
To narrow down on our top retirement destinations in Asia, I will start out by eliminating from the list the bottom 20% of countries (globally) across the safety, political instability, and openness variables. I think there is not much explaining needed here as to why you would want to perhaps avoid these countries when trying to find your ideal retirement location.
Next, I will apply two of the filters that are important to me personally–one critical and one nice to have. We set the slider of Healthcare to 3 (meaning we consider only top 60% of performing countries in this variable), and, similarly, Natural Scenery is set to 2 (only top 40% are kept). I acknowledge that this latter preference may be more subjective, but, personally, if I decide to retire in a foreign country I want to make sure it is a beautiful location to make sure my friends and family visit!
Based on this set of assumptions, the top affordable places to retire in Asia in 2025 are Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia (Figure 4). These Southeast Asian countries stand out for offering reliable healthcare and strong quality of life for expats, making them ideal for retirees on a budget. Other Asian countries that also make this filter are Taiwan and Japan, but with the caveat that the cost of living in these countries is 27% and 31% higher, respectively, than in Thailand. Two other locations could be considered as well for those with deep pockets, namely Hong Kong and Singapore. Both of these countries perform very strongly in terms of retirement suitability score but are roughly 3 times as expensive as Thailand.
Figure 4. Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia make up the top 3 affordable early retirement destinations in Asia. The countries shown in the plot are the ones remaining after performing our specific set of filters that is mentioned above. The x axis depicts the retirement suitability score as the average across 9 different variables, while the y axis represents cost of living data. For an ideal retirement destination, we want to score high on the Retirement Suitability score and low on the cost of living. Japan and Taiwan are also very good candidates, although about 30% more expensive. Hong Kong and Singapore represent the better high-end retirement destinations, presenting a high retirement suitability score, yet a cost of living that is approximately three times higher than our top three countries.
What is the cheapest and safest country to retire in Asia?
From our top destinations, Thailand is the best country in Asia to retire for safety and affordability, standing out among regional peers (Figure 4). Compared to regional alternatives, Thailand’s normalized (0-100) safety score in our dataset is 60.4–more than twice Malaysia’s score (28.3) and over 50% higher than Indonesia’s (39.6). On the cost of living front, while Thailand has a normalized cost of living score of 24.10, both Indonesia (17.10) and Malaysia (20.10) are more affordable–Indonesia and Malaysia are about 29% and 17% than Thailand.
Still, when combining both safety and affordability, Thailand clearly leads among its peers. It offers one of the safest retirement destinations in Asia compared to its cheaper neighbors, and remains significantly more affordable than ultra-safe but higher-cost countries like Japan and Taiwan. This makes it a compelling middle ground for retirees, especially in quieter, budget-friendly areas like Chiang Mai or Hua Hin, where both factors are optimized.
Downsides of Retiring in Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia
Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia stand out for having a decent Retirement Suitability score and for presenting a very reasonable cost of living (COL). However, we acknowledge that the results from our tool are quite sensitive to the different set of assumptions made–other users may very well find a different set of optimal retirement locations based on their unique preferences. We encourage you to play around with the tool to obtain results that are tailored to your specific circumstances.
To illustrate, Thailand would not have been selected in the final ranking if stricter filters for retirement preferences had been applied, for example for Pollution, Political Stability, English Proficiency, or Natural Disaster risk. I think the pollution variable is particularly concerning, given the impact it can exert over the long term on your health and therefore on the quality of your retirement. If any of these variables are critical for you, then perhaps this would not be the best retirement destination for you. In contrast, Thailand scores very high (top 20%) across Healthcare, Openness, and Natural Scenery.
Malaysia’s Achilles’ heel in this assessment is found across the categories of Safety and Climate–if you increased the tool’s slider towards slightly stricter criteria in these categories, Malaysia would not have made it to the final ranking. Of course, the Climate variable is a highly subjective variable, but one to consider anyways; after all, if the majority of people responding survey research find climate to be more challenging than in other countries, you may very well experience the same too. In contrast, and with the exception of Taiwan and Singapore, Malaysia performs very strongly in English Proficiency (top 40%) compared to some of its regional counterparts.
Bali, Indonesia. Photo by Darren Lawrence on Pexels.
Finally, Indonesia would have been dropped from the ranking if slightly stricter criteria had been set for English Proficiency, Climate, Safety, and Natural Disaster risk. In contrast, just like Thailand, Indonesia scores very high in the Openness category (top 20%).
Are you curious to see how other retirement hotspots in Asia like Vietnam, the Philippines, or Turkey perform? Check it out yourself!
Can I retire early in Thailand, Malaysia, and indonesia?
While the short answer is a resounding yes, the long answer is that how much earlier depends greatly on your specific circumstances. In our previous post, we illustrated how a family could, based on their specific scenario, retire a decade sooner in Indonesia, Malaysia or Thailand compared to what their timeline for retirement would look like in the United States. To assess how much earlier you could retire depends importantly on 1) where you are currently based and 2) your savings rate on the road to early retirement. If you play around with our Financial Independence Calculator, you will observe that the lower your savings rate is, the higher impact retiring abroad has on your retirement timeline.
What’s Your Ideal Retirement Destination in Asia?
Do you agree with our list of the best retirement destinations in Asia? Which country would you add, and what factors matter most to you? Please let us know below in the comments!
Discover your ideal retirement destination! Use our interactive tool to see where you could retire earlier and more affordably. (Available only for PC)
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