About LeavingAmerica.co
LeavingAmerica.co is a free research and planning platform for Americans considering life abroad. Whether you are a remote worker running the numbers, someone planning early retirement overseas, or simply curious whether moving makes financial sense, I built this to give you the data to find out.
Updated: July 2026
Why I Built This
Most discussions about moving abroad rely on anecdotes, personal blogs, or outdated cost-of-living comparisons. LeavingAmerica.co was built to replace guesswork with public economic data. The purchasing power gap between US cities and most of the world is significant, and I wanted to make that gap visible and measurable.
Over time it grew from a single salary calculator into a full suite of tools, because the decision to move abroad involves more than just your paycheck. It involves where your personality and priorities actually fit, whether your savings can support early retirement, how long those savings actually last, and what the US tax system still expects from you no matter where you live.
What's Here
Five free tools for Americans exploring life abroad:
Salary Arbitrage Calculator answers how far your current US income goes in 82 countries, using live purchasing power parity data from the World Bank and regional price data from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. Enter your city and income to see your equivalent lifestyle cost in each destination.
Country Match is a 10-question quiz that scores all 82 countries against your specific priorities: budget, climate preferences, healthcare needs, language comfort, remote work setup, and more. Instead of a generic ranking, you get a personalized list with an explanation of why each country fits or falls short for you specifically.
Retire Abroad Calculator is built for Americans pursuing financial independence or early retirement. It uses FIRE principles combined with local cost of living data to show how far your savings go in each country and how many years earlier you could retire by moving abroad.
Runway Calculator shows how many months or years your current savings actually last in each country, adjusted for household size and lifestyle, so you can see your real timeline before you commit to anything.
Expat Tax Guide covers the US tax obligations that apply to Americans regardless of where they live: FEIE, FBAR, worldwide vs. territorial vs. zero-tax systems, and state-level obligations. It is not tax advice, but it gives you the framework to have an informed conversation with a qualified expat tax professional.
The Data
Every number on this site comes from a publicly available, independently maintained source. I don't invent estimates or rely on user-submitted data. Sources include the World Bank, the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, Numbeo, the World Happiness Report, the EF English Proficiency Index, the Passport Index dataset, Citizen Remote, and the REST Countries API.
Data is reviewed and updated quarterly using the latest publicly available figures from each source.
For a detailed breakdown of calculations and score weights, see the Methodology page.
Who Built This
I'm Marcin Janiak, the founder of LeavingAmerica.co. I'm not a tax advisor, an immigration lawyer, or a financial planner. I'm a marketer and web developer who has worked in digital marketing since 2012, building websites, online stores, and data-driven tools.
My interest in the US isn't recent. I first visited Florida at 16 and kept coming back for years, working along the way in hotel laundry rooms, cleaning offices and pools, and building PCs, alongside actual travel around the country.
I started building LeavingAmerica.co in January 2026, alone, after noticing how many Americans were searching for real numbers on the cost of living, taxes, and retirement abroad, and how scattered that information was. The site went live at the end of June 2026. Every figure on this site comes from public sources: the World Bank, Numbeo, the US Census Bureau, and others, listed in full on the Methodology page.
What I Am Not
I'm not a financial advisor, tax consultant, immigration lawyer, or relocation agent. Nothing here is personalized advice. It's public data, calculated the same way for every reader. Every figure comes from a named source (World Bank, Numbeo, the US Census Bureau, and others), and the full calculation method is on the Methodology page.
Contact
Questions, feedback, or data corrections? Reach out at:
[email protected]