Move Me To EU

Quality of life. The overall rank shown is an average of six independent global indices: the UN Human Development Index, the OECD Better Life Index, the Numbeo Quality of Life Index, the Social Progress Imperative's Social Progress Index, the Good Country Index, and the Happy Planet Index. Each index weights different factors (income, education, environment, social cohesion, life expectancy, and so on), so an average across all six is a more robust signal than any single source. The average is over the 28 places compared here (US + EU 27).

Cost of living. The Numbeo Cost of Living + Rent Index sets New York City at 100 and combines the relative cost of groceries, dining, transport, utilities, and rent into a single normalized number. Numbeo aggregates crowdsourced prices alongside official sources and publishes a fresh annual index each January; the values shown here are from the 2025 annual snapshot. The EU average shown is a simple country-level average across the 27 member states. As with any single index, individual cities within a country can run meaningfully above or below the national figure.

Road fatalities. Deaths per 100,000 population per year, sourced from the WHO Global Status Report on Road Safety and national road safety agencies. Unlike most crime categories, road deaths are near-universally counted the same way (fatal traffic collisions within a defined reporting period), making cross-border comparison straightforward. US figures reflect the 50-state average; individual states vary from roughly 6 (Massachusetts, New York) to 25+ (Mississippi, South Carolina) but every state is still above nearly every EU country.

Homicide. Intentional homicide is the one crime metric where US and EU data are directly comparable: the definition is essentially the same everywhere and reporting is consistently near-complete. Theft, burglary, and assault each mean different things in different jurisdictions, and reporting rates vary substantially, so absolute cross-border comparisons of those categories would be misleading. Per-100,000 homicide rates come from Eurostat crime statistics and the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting program.

Global Peace Index. The composite GPI score combines three domains: societal safety and security (crime, terrorism, gun access, political instability, refugees), ongoing conflict (domestic and external), and militarization (military spending, arms transfers, nuclear capability). The index is published annually each June by the Institute for Economics and Peace and covers 163 countries; Luxembourg and Malta are not included. The GPI section on this page is informational; it does not feed into the pathway finder's country scoring. Its purpose is to give the broadest possible cross-national context: every EU country covered by the index ranks at least 45 places above the United States.

Effect on pathway finder scores. The finder's Safety score now blends three components: homicide rate (45%), road fatality rate (25%), and a broader institutional baseline covering political stability, trust in institutions, and social cohesion (30%). A new Overall quality of life priority draws on the combined QoL rank shown on this page. Dial it up on the priorities step if life-quality factors beyond any single dimension matter to you.