Where to live in Ecuador
We track 3 cities in Ecuador: Cuenca, Guayaquil and Quito. Average temperatures run from 12°C to 25°C. We estimate a couple needs €2,567 to €2,705 a month to live centrally. Ecuador sits in our low to medium tax tier. For citizens from outside Mercosur and its associate states, long-term residency is comparatively open.
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- Tax tier
- Low to medium
- Moderate personal income tax
- Languages
- Spanish
- Limited English
- Safety
- 36/100
- country-level estimate
- Healthcare
- 62/100
- country-level estimate
- Internet
- ~90 Mbps
- median fixed broadband
Estimated from World Bank indicators and calibrated to the scales of our reference tables: safety from the country-level homicide rate per 100,000 people (VC.IHR.PSRC.P5, 2023) and Worldwide Governance Indicators Political Stability and Absence of Violence estimate (GOV_WGI_PV.EST, 2025), healthcare from the life expectancy at birth (SP.DYN.LE00.IN, 2024) and current health spending per person in US dollars (SH.XPD.CHEX.PC.CD, 2023) and cost of living from the price level of GDP relative to the United States, from GDP per person in US dollars and at purchasing power parity (NY.GDP.PCAP.CD/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD, 2025). Source: The World Bank (World Development Indicators, Worldwide Governance Indicators), CC BY 4.0.
Limited data for Ecuador. Figures for safety, healthcare and cost of living in Ecuador are country-level estimates from World Bank indicators, each named with its year. We have no social openness figures for Ecuador, so the quiz scores that factor conservatively and this page leaves it out.
The 3 cities we track
Source: City size from GeoNames, temperature from the Open-Meteo archive (2019 to 2023 averages), rainfall from TerraClimate (1991 to 2020 normals), coast distance from Natural Earth. Cost is our model estimate for a couple living centrally, from the World Bank price level.
Taxes
Ecuador sits in our low to medium tax tier: moderate personal income tax. The tier applies to every city here, and couples who cap tax below it will not see these cities in their results.
Source: OurNextCity tax tiers, assigned by hand from each country's top marginal personal income tax rate and overall tax reputation, with no fixed rate cut-offs. Coarse by design; not tax advice.
Residency and visas
Comparatively open, for people from outside Mercosur and its associate states. Ecuador offers several self-funded residency routes (professional, rentista/pensionado passive-income, and investor), all natively denominated in US dollars since the USD is the national currency so no currency conversion applies, with a fast path to permanent residency (~21 months) and citizenship (3 years).
Citizens of Mercosur and its associate states have freedom-of-movement or simplified residency rights here.
The cheapest self-funded routes we track for Ecuador:
- Income: about $482 a month (Ecuador Professional visa, USD 482/mo (1x SBU) income from any lawful source, no sponsor required but needs a SENESCYT-registered university degree; the no-degree Rentista/Pensionado passive-income route needs USD 1,446/mo (3x SBU); as of June 2026)
- Investment: about $48k (Ecuador Investor (Inversionista) visa, USD 48,200 (100x SBU) one-time in real estate, a 730-day bank CD, or registered company shares; as of June 2026)
For short visits, 152 of 198 passports can enter visa-free and 46 can get an e-visa or visa on arrival.
Source: OurNextCity residency dataset, hand-reviewed approximations researched against published immigration rules, figures as of June 2026. Not legal advice: check the official source before you apply. Short-stay entry from the passport-index dataset (ilyankou, MIT).