Where to live in the Philippines
We track 4 cities in the Philippines: Cebu City, Davao, Manila and Zamboanga. Each averages 27°C over the year. We estimate a couple needs €2,270 to €2,438 a month to live centrally. The Philippines 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
- Filipino, English
- Some English
- Safety
- 52/100
- country-level
- Healthcare
- 55/100
- country-level
- Internet
- ~100 Mbps
- median fixed broadband
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.
Taxes
The Philippines 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. Long-term residency is realistic chiefly via the SRRV retiree visa (open from age 40 through either a refundable bank deposit or a modest lifetime pension) or the SIRV investor visa, with employer-sponsored work visas as the main non-capital alternative.
The cheapest self-funded routes we track for the Philippines:
- Income: about $800 a month (Philippines SRRV Classic pensioner route, USD 800/mo lifetime pension for a single applicant plus a USD 15,000 PRA bank deposit; as of June 2026)
- Investment: about $30k (Philippines SRRV Classic non-pensioner deposit (age 50+), USD 30,000 refundable PRA bank deposit with no income test; the SIRV investor visa alternative requires USD 75,000; as of June 2026)
For short visits, 159 of 198 passports can enter visa-free and 39 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).