Moving to China from the US

Our residency index: 20/100, hard to obtain. It is our own rating of how realistic long-term residency in China is for US citizens, based on the routes China publishes. Long-term residency runs through an employer-sponsored work residence permit (annually renewable) or, for permanent residence, a multi-year high-salary employment track or an active business investment; there is no retirement, passive-income, or self-sufficiency route.

The cheapest self-funded routes we track:

• Investment: about $500k (China permanent residence investment route, lowest tier (western region / national poverty-alleviation counties / encouraged industries): USD 500,000 contributed to a Chinese company's registered capital and held for 3 years; regulation is denominated in USD (USD 1M central region, USD 2M elsewhere); as of June 2026)

Check the official requirements before you apply: amounts, conditions and exchange rates change, and what a couple needs can differ from a single applicant's threshold.

For short visits, US passport holders need an e-visa or eTA before a visit, according to the passport-index dataset. Short-stay entry covers visits; living there takes a residence permit.

We do not rank cities in China here. Our residency index rates long-term residency there as hard to obtain for most foreigners (under 40 out of 100), so our ranked lists leave it out. In the quiz, cities where residency looks out of reach for a couple move to a separate list.

See the cities we track in China

China is in our low to medium tax tier (moderate personal income tax); the US is in our low to medium tax tier (moderate personal income tax). Tiers describe each country's own income tax. They do not cover tax you may still owe in the US after you leave, or the treaty between the two countries, so check both with a tax adviser before you move.

• Moving to China from the UK
• Moving to China from Canada
• Moving to China from Australia
• Moving to China from Ireland
• Moving to China from New Zealand

Every country and origin we cover

Every figure here comes from the datasets behind our city and country pages:

• Short-stay entry: the passport-index dataset (ilyankou, MIT license), which records the entry rule for short visits on each passport.
• Residency index, routes and thresholds: the OurNextCity residency dataset, hand-reviewed against published immigration rules, figures as of June 2026. It is a summary, not legal advice.
• City ranking: our match model, the one behind the quiz, run with a typical couple's preset answers and both partners holding US passports. It ranks up to five of the country's best-known cities: of the cities in our quiz (100,000 people or more, capitals and a few towns movers seek out, such as Faro), the five most read about on English Wikipedia over the past year. It folds suburbs into their main city and leaves out countries with a residency index under 40 and areas under a US State Department Level 4 advisory, as our best-cities lists do.
• Costs: our cost model, a country-level cost-of-living index scaled for city size, from our city dataset (last rebuilt June 2026).
• Tax tiers: three coarse bands we assign by hand from each country's top marginal personal income tax rate and overall tax reputation.