Where to live in North Macedonia
We track 4 cities in North Macedonia: Kumanovo, Ohrid, Prilep and Skopje. Average temperatures run from 13°C to 14°C. We estimate a couple needs €2,171 to €2,377 a month to live centrally. North Macedonia sits in our low to medium tax tier. For foreigners, long-term residency is comparatively open.
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- Tax tier
- Low to medium
- Moderate personal income tax
- Languages
- Macedonian, Albanian
- Some English
- Safety
- 68/100
- country-level estimate
- Healthcare
- 62/100
- country-level estimate
- Internet
- ~40 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 North Macedonia. Figures for safety, healthcare and cost of living in North Macedonia are country-level estimates from World Bank indicators, each named with its year. We have no social openness figures for North Macedonia, so the quiz scores that factor conservatively and this page leaves it out.
The 4 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
North Macedonia 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. Residency is readily obtained by forming or co-owning a company (or via employment or self-employment) with no labor-market test, and EU/OECD nationals also qualify via property purchase, but there is no fixed published income or capital gate for the open company/self-employment route.
For short visits, 80 of 198 passports can enter visa-free and 118 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).