Where to live in the Maldives
We track one city in the Maldives: Male. It averages 28°C over the year. We estimate a couple needs €3,027 a month to live centrally. The Maldives sits in our low to medium tax tier. For foreigners, long-term residency is possible, with conditions.
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- Tax tier
- Low to medium
- Moderate personal income tax
- Languages
- Dhivehi, English
- Some English
- Safety
- 75/100
- country-level
- Healthcare
- 60/100
- country-level
- Internet
- ~60 Mbps
- median fixed broadband
The city we track
| City | Size | Setting | Avg temp | Rain a year | Est. cost a month |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Male | smaller | coastal | 28°C | 1,775 mm | €3,027 |
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.
Taxes
The Maldives 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
Possible, with conditions. Long-term residency is essentially investment-only: a five-year renewable residence permit via government-approved real estate, a bank deposit, or business investment (the new Pearl Residence programme and the existing corporate-investor route), while non-investors depend on employer-sponsored work permits or marriage to a Maldivian.
The cheapest self-funded routes we track for the Maldives:
- Investment: about $250k (Maldives residence-by-investment entry tier (Pearl Residence / corporate-investor route), USD 250,000 in government-approved real estate or a 5-year USD 250,000 local-bank deposit; figures are natively USD-denominated; as of June 2026)
For short visits, 4 of 198 passports can enter visa-free and 194 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).