How Emigrator decides
The engine runs the same steps for every household, in the order below. The figures on this page come from the data this version of the site ships: rule set 1.58.0-2026-10-11, 139 published indicators from 150 publishers, each listed on the Sources page.
1. What we ask, and why
Three kinds of answer are kept apart: why you want to move, who is moving — ages, citizenships, income and savings in bands, languages — and what you want from a place. Your reason chooses a starting set of weights and which questions about the household are asked; it never answers one of them for you.
2. Routes per country: verified and draft
We hold 53 immigration routes for 31 countries and 65 cities. 12 of them are verified: we read the primary legislation and checked every rule against it. Every other route is a draft — encoded from official pages and not yet checked by us. A draft describes the state of our work; it never means that you cannot go there.
3. The legal gates
Each route’s rules are tested against your answers. A positive finding needs a verified route, sources within their freshness limit and every requirement met. Where something is missing, unread or out of date, the result stays open instead of turning positive, and a destination is ruled out only where your own answers fail a confirmed requirement. That is what fail-closed means: anything we cannot check counts against a positive finding, never against you.
4. The household budget
For each city we build a month’s budget for your household from its parts: rent for the bedrooms you need, energy, water, communications, groceries, transport, health cover and schooling. Where a publisher states a spread, each part is shown at the 25th, 50th and 75th percentile (P25, P50, P75). Each part is one of three things: published by a named source, estimated by us and marked as ours, or missing and shown as missing. An estimate may move a destination up or down the list; it never excludes one.
5. Must-haves first, then weights
A criterion you mark as critical is a hard filter: a destination whose measured figure fails it is ruled out, and the page names the figure. A figure nobody measured never excludes. The destinations that pass are then ranked by the weights you gave the other criteria.
Near-misses. A destination ruled out only by a must-have you set, and missed by no more than 5 points on a rating out of a hundred, 1 month of the twelve on the temperature range, or 2 years on the citizenship horizon, is marked as a near miss with a link to relax that one must-have. The margins are ours. A destination that also fails a legal requirement or a deficit on published figures is never a near miss.
6. Fit for your reason
Each reason has its own short set of factors — for example what your capital is worth in local earnings, or whether a route lets you work — and together they form one part of the Fit score. A factor we hold no figure for leaves the calculation instead of counting as zero, and the page says so.
7. Confidence and freshness
Every source has a freshness limit in days. A route whose sources are older than their limit is treated as unread until someone checks it again, and each figure carries the date it was read. Confidence is reported lower wherever a route or a city’s figures are not verified.
8. The shortlist and the other two sections
Destinations fall into three sections: the shortlist, not resolved, and ruled out. A destination appears once, under the route that was read most fully; inside a section the legal finding comes first and the Fit score second.
9. Values from site users
Where readers have reported a different figure for a city — a rent, or how safe it feels — you may choose to see it beside the published one or to let it count. Published values are never overwritten, and a users’ value never moves a destination from one section to another.
10. What AI does here, and what it does not
No AI model decides anything on this site. Rules, budgets and scores are computed by ordinary, repeatable code from the data listed on the Sources page. How AI was used to help write and translate the text is set out on its own page.
11. What we store
Nothing about you. Your answers live only in the link in your address bar; there is no account and no database of households. The one cookie remembers the language you chose, and a light or dark theme you pick stays in your own browser.