Where to live in North Korea
We track 3 cities in North Korea: Hamhŭng, Namp’o and Pyongyang. Each averages 11°C over the year. For foreigners, long-term residency is hard to obtain.
12 questions, about 4 minutes, no account needed. Taking the quiz is free, and so is seeing your #1 city. Full results for both of you are a one-time US$12 (€12 in Europe).
- Safety
- 60/100
- country-level estimate
- Healthcare
- 59/100
- country-level estimate
- Democracy
- 1.9/10
- estimated
Estimated from World Bank indicators and calibrated to the scales of our reference tables: safety from the Worldwide Governance Indicators Political Stability and Absence of Violence estimate (GOV_WGI_PV.EST, 2025) and life expectancy at birth (SP.DYN.LE00.IN, 2024), healthcare from the life expectancy at birth (SP.DYN.LE00.IN, 2024) and democracy score from the Worldwide Governance Indicators Voice and Accountability estimate (GOV_WGI_VA.EST, 2025). Source: The World Bank (World Development Indicators, Worldwide Governance Indicators), CC BY 4.0.
Limited data for North Korea. Figures for safety, healthcare and political stability in North Korea are country-level estimates from World Bank indicators, each named with its year. We have no tax, cost of living, English, social openness or internet speed figures for North Korea, so the quiz scores those factors conservatively and this page leaves them 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.
Residency and visas
Hard to obtain. North Korea has no published long-term-residency, investor, or sufficient-means route for foreigners; the only de facto ways to stay are discretionary, state-gated postings as a diplomat, UN/aid worker, or partner in a state joint venture, decided case by case.
For short visits, 198 need a visa in advance.
Source: OurNextCity residency dataset, hand-reviewed approximations researched against published immigration rules. Not legal advice: check the official source before you apply. Short-stay entry from the passport-index dataset (ilyankou, MIT).