Where to live in Norway
We track 3 cities in Norway: Bergen, Oslo and Trondheim. Average temperatures run from 6°C to 7°C. We estimate a couple needs €4,285 to €4,602 a month to live centrally. Norway sits in our high tax tier. For citizens from outside the EU, EEA and Switzerland, long-term residency is possible, with conditions.
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- Tax tier
- High
- High personal income tax
- Languages
- Norwegian, English
- Good English
- Safety
- 75/100
- country-level
- Healthcare
- 75/100
- country-level
- Internet
- ~130 Mbps
- median fixed broadband
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.
Taxes
Norway sits in our high tax tier: high 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, for people from outside the EU, EEA and Switzerland. Realistic long-term residency runs through either a skilled-worker job offer or establishing and actively running your own business (self-employed permit); Norway deliberately has no passive-income, retirement, or golden-visa route, and permanent residence follows after three years of permit-based stay.
Citizens of the EU, EEA and Switzerland have freedom-of-movement or simplified residency rights here.
The cheapest self-funded routes we track for Norway:
- Income: about $3,062 a month (Norway self-employed person permit, business must be likely to yield pre-tax profit of NOK 341,373/yr (about NOK 28,448/mo); converted at 9.29 NOK per USD; as of June 2026)
For short visits, 93 of 198 passports can enter visa-free and 105 need a visa in advance.
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).