Are these figures live?

They are recomputed from the datasets on every build — healthcare last updated 2026-09-07, housing 2026-09-01 — and come from the same engines as the site's free tools, so this page and the tool can never disagree.

Why are some countries missing?

A country is left out when the dataset has no figure for it, never given a zero. A zero would sort to the top of a cheapest-first list and rank a country first for having no data — which is exactly backwards.

Where is the weather actually pleasant to work from?

Los Angeles, United States leads on comfortable days/yr at 235 days; Auckland, New Zealand is last of the 15 shown at 118 days.

Cost-of-living rankings quietly ignore the weather, which makes them a poor guide to where you would actually want to spend a year. This ranks on climate alone, measured from ten years of ERA5 reanalysis: a comfortable day is one whose maximum sits between 18 and 27 °C with under a millimetre of rain.

That definition is a preference, not a fact, and it is temperate-biased on purpose. Somewhere hot and dry scores badly here even though plenty of people move there deliberately — the average high is shown beside every row so you can judge for yourself rather than take the ranking's word for it.

These are cities, not countries. A country does not have one climate, and averaging a desert with a glacier would describe nowhere at all.

#	Country	Comfortable days/yr	Note
1	🇺🇸 Los Angeles, United States	235 days	21.1°C avg high
2	🇿🇦 Cape Town, South Africa	182 days	22.4°C avg high
3	🇺🇸 San Francisco, United States	177 days	19.1°C avg high
4	🇿🇦 Johannesburg, South Africa	166 days	24.7°C avg high
5	🇲🇽 Mexico City, Mexico	152 days	24.1°C avg high
6	🇨🇴 Bogotá, Colombia	149 days	18.9°C avg high
7	🇦🇺 Sydney, Australia	145 days	22.2°C avg high
8	🇵🇹 Porto, Portugal	142 days	19°C avg high
9	🇨🇱 Santiago, Chile	138 days	23.1°C avg high
10	🇧🇷 São Paulo, Brazil	132 days	25°C avg high
11	🇪🇸 Valencia, Spain	131 days	23.7°C avg high
12	🇵🇹 Lisbon, Portugal	130 days	21.1°C avg high
13	🇨🇴 Medellín, Colombia	125 days	21.5°C avg high
14	🇦🇷 Buenos Aires, Argentina	123 days	21.4°C avg high
15	🇳🇿 Auckland, New Zealand	118 days	18.9°C avg high

How this is worked out: Comfortable days counted from daily ERA5 reanalysis, 2015–2024: maximum temperature between 18 and 27 °C and precipitation under 1 mm. Averaged across the ten years, summed over twelve months. Estimates for comparison, not advice.

Check your own numbers

A ranking is a starting point, not an answer — your income, household and destination change the order. The Livability ranking runs the same engine against your own figures, and every country above links to its own page.

Check your own numbers

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