5 Best Countries to Retire in Europe in 2025

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Best Places to Retire in Europe in 2025: Top 5 Countries Ranked

How to Choose the Best Retirement Destination in Europe

In a previous post, we introduced our interactive Retirement Relocation Tool, which helps users find their ideal retirement destination by filtering key factors like cost of living, healthcare, climate, and many others. The tool is presented as a dashboard, where users can set different filter settings to identify optimal retirement locations depending on their particular preferences. For some would-be-retirees, safety and the quality of the healthcare system may be a top priority, while for others it may be finding a country with astounding natural scenery and a great climate. Others yet may value the openness of local population or their degree of English proficiency. Whatever it is you value, this tool has you covered!

In today’s post, we will use the tool to examine some of Europe’s most popular retirement destinations. We’ll start out by describing briefly how the tool works before presenting our top ranking. We will then examine the pros and cons of these countries for retirement across the different variables.

How Our Retirement Relocation Tool Helps You Find the Best European Destinations

Our interactive Retirement Relocation Tool helps retirees compare the best places to retire in Europe by evaluating cost of living, healthcare, safety, and more. The retirement suitability score is an average of 9 different variables that are relevant to selecting a country to retire to. Key retirement factors include safety, healthcare quality, political stability, pollution levels, climate, English proficiency, local culture, natural beauty, and disaster risk. These factors are further described in the detailed post introducing the methodology (here).

Figure 2 below shows a screenshot of our interactive Retirement Relocation Tool, which allows users to filter European retirement destinations based on cost of living, healthcare, safety, climate, and more. The sliders next to the variables allow the user to drop countries that don’t perform well for a given factor, e.g., moving the safety slider from 5 to 4 would drop the bottom 20% performing countries for this variable. If we move it all the way to 1, the plot would show only 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.

Fig. 2. Screenshot of the Retirement Relocation Tool (at the moment available for PC only).

Try Our Retirement Relocation Tool – Find Your Ideal Destination Now!

Top 5 European Countries for Retirement in 2025 – Ranked by Cost, Healthcare, Climate, and more.

To arrive at today’s ranking, we drop all countries performing in the bottom 20% globally for any of the nine variables. As mentioned above, the tool allows individual users to determine their own preferences. However, for the purposes of today’s ranking, we decide to exclude any country that performs very poorly for any of the variables considered. The best European countries to retire in 2025, based on affordability, quality of life, and healthcare, are Portugal, Spain, Croatia, Greece, and Cyprus.

These countries stand out for having a good Retirement Suitability score and for presenting a reasonable cost of living (COL). There are European countries with more preferable COL, but the tradeoff is that they don’t perform consistently so well across the 9 retirement variables considered (e.g., Poland). On the other hand, we have countries which have high scores of Retirement Suitability, yet are relatively expensive (e.g., Netherlands or Luxembourg). Of course, if the user introduces more strict criteria, e.g., on Climate or Openness, these countries perhaps would not make the cut either.

Fig. 3. Portugal, Spain, Croatia, Greece, and Cyprus make up the top 5 European countries for retirement. The countries shown in the plot are the ones left after filtering out the bottom 20% performing countries across all 9 variables making up the Retirement Suitability score. The x axis depicts retirement suitability score as the average across 9 different variables, while the y axis assesses cost of living. For an ideal retirement destination, we want to score high on the Retirement Suitability score and low on the cost of living.

As observed in the heatmap of Figure 4 below, Portugal stands out in relation to other European countries for its climate, openness, and natural scenery, although it performs consistently well across almost every variable. Spain excels in climate, openness, and natural beauty, and is also renowned for its high-quality healthcare system, one of the best in Europe. As a downside, the levels of English proficiency are lower than in other (mostly) northern European countries. Croatia performs particularly well in safety, while also scoring well across most of the retirement variables, with the exception of healthcare system and English proficiency. Greece is an attractive retirement destination with a warm climate, rich culture, and stunning landscapes, though safety, healthcare, and pollution remain challenges. Finally, tax-friendly Cyprus is a European retirement destination with beautiful Mediterranean weather and an expat-friendly culture, though healthcare and pollution concerns exist.

Fig. 4. Heatmap of 9 retirement-related variables for all European countries (x axis). Values have been normalized (0-1), green color is for top performers, and dark red for worst performers. Blue arrows on the left help identify the differences across retirement variables for the top 5 countries in Europe for retirement we discuss in this post: Portugal, Spain, Croatia, Greece, and Cyprus.

What’s Your Ideal Retirement Destination? Share Your Thoughts!

Do you agree with our list of the best retirement destinations in Europe? Which country would you add, and what factors matter most to you? Please let us know below in the comments!

Try Our Retirement Relocation Tool – Find Your Ideal Destination Now!

Fig.5. Lisbon, Portugal. Portugal is a popular destination for retirees and scores very highly on our Retirement Relocation Tool. Photo by Vita Marija Murenaite on Unsplash.

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