Leaving the UK? Plan your move, country by country.

Headline “it’s so much cheaper” claims usually compare a provincial town abroad with central London. A fair comparison holds the like for like: a one-bed in a major city against the UK national average, not against the most expensive postcode you can find. On that basis the gap is real but narrower than the clichés suggest — rent moves the most between cities, while utilities and eating out are often closer than people expect.

Two costs get overlooked. The first is the one-off cost of moving itself — shipping a household, deposits paid upfront, a first year of health cover — which can run to five figures for a family before a single monthly bill lands. The second is the cost of moving money: converting a lump sum from sterling to euros at a poor rate quietly eats into everything you saved by leaving.

The NHS does not follow you abroad. Once you stop being ordinarily resident in the UK, you lose routine access to it, and how you replace that cover depends on your route. People who work and pay into the local social-security system are generally covered through it. Pensioners drawing the UK State Pension can often transfer their entitlement using the S1 form, under which the UK continues to fund their state healthcare in the country they move to.

Everyone else usually has to buy private health insurance — and for many visa routes, comprehensive private cover with no co-payments is a condition of the visa itself, not an optional extra. Premiums are driven mainly by age, so the same policy can cost a sixty-five-year-old several times what it costs someone in their thirties. That first-year premium is one of the larger upfront lines in any move budget.

Most countries treat you as tax resident once you spend more than 183 days there in a year — though other tests, such as where your main home or economic interests sit, can pull the line earlier. Become tax resident somewhere and, as a rule, that country taxes your worldwide income, not just what you earn locally. Leaving the UK does not automatically switch off UK tax either; HMRC applies its own statutory residence test.

What stops the same income being taxed twice is a double-taxation treaty between the UK and your destination. These survived Brexit intact — they are bilateral agreements, not EU law — and they set out which country gets to tax each type of income, from employment to pensions to rental income. Under many treaties a UK government-service pension stays taxable only in the UK, while a private pension becomes taxable where you now live.

The last hurdle is bureaucratic rather than financial, and it trips people up because the steps have to be done in order. Most countries issue a foreigner’s tax or identity number — in Spain the NIE — that a bank, a landlord and the tax office all demand before they will deal with you. Registering your address with the local authority, opening a resident bank account and exchanging your UK driving licence each tend to depend on the step before it.

Get the sequence wrong and you hit circular waits — no bank account without an address, no rental without a bank account, no number without an appointment booked weeks out. Get it right and the admin is dull but manageable. Each country guide lays out the order that actually works in practice.