Moving to Latvia from the UK

Our residency index: 70/100, comparatively open. It is our own rating of how realistic long-term residency in Latvia is for UK citizens, based on the routes Latvia publishes. Latvia (EU member) offers accessible self-funded routes: a relatively cheap residence-by-investment program (company equity, real estate, bonds, or bank deposit) plus self-employment and EU Blue Card / digital-nomad permits for capable applicants.

The cheapest self-funded routes we track:

• Income: about $2,714 a month (Latvia self-employed residence permit, sufficient-means requirement EUR 2,340/mo (3x minimum wage), per PMLP subsistence regulation effective 2026-04-01; converted at EUR/USD 1.16; as of June 2026)
• Investment: about $58k (Latvia residence-by-investment cheapest route: EUR 50,000 equity into a Latvian company (small-firm criteria; plus EUR 10,000 state duty); converted at EUR/USD 1.16; 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, UK passport holders can visit visa-free for up to 90 days, according to the passport-index dataset. Short-stay entry covers visits; living there takes a residence permit.

Ranked by our match model for a typical couple who both hold UK passports, using the preset answers of our best places to live list. Your own answers would change the order. We pick the cities, up to five, by how often English Wikipedia readers looked them up over the past year.

1. 1

   1. Riga

   69% match

   Est. cost

   €2,995/mo

   Avg temp

   8°C

   Safety index

   69/100

Our estimate for a couple living centrally in Riga is €2,995 a month. For comparison, we estimate €4,315 a month in London. Use these figures to compare places rather than to set a budget.

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

• Moving to Latvia from the US
• Moving to Latvia from Canada
• Moving to Latvia from Australia
• Moving to Latvia from Ireland
• Moving to Latvia 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 UK 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).
• For Latvia, the cost index and the safety score are country-level estimates from World Bank indicators, calibrated to our reference tables; our Latvia country page names each indicator and year. Source: The World Bank (World Development Indicators, Worldwide Governance Indicators), CC BY 4.0.
• Tax tiers: three coarse bands we assign by hand from each country's top marginal personal income tax rate and overall tax reputation.