Frequently asked questions

The free 10-minute lifestyle quiz that captures your priorities, climate tolerance, budget, and dealbreakers. The output is a profile that personalizes every recommendation we give you.

Tell us cities you have lived in and which seasons or aspects bothered you (e.g. "dark Decembers in London", "humid Augusts in Boston"). We map your personal comfort zone across 7 climate dimensions and find places that fix the specific friction you felt while keeping what you loved. No other tool does this.

A deep climate breakdown on every city page, free for all users. Shows feels-like temperature, urban heat retention, humidity, dew point, rainfall, snowfall, wind, sunshine hours, clear-sky days, and UV — month by month, with how each affects daily life.

Tells you whether each lifestyle activity (dinner outside, walking, running, errands) is viable in a given month and how viable. When it is not viable, it shows the specific friction drivers — cold, rain, wind, humidity, or air quality. Free for all users.

Cost breakdown for living in a city — rent, groceries, transport, dining, utilities. The free version shows numbers for a solo balanced lifestyle. Relocation Pro tunes the breakdown to your actual household size and lifestyle tier (minimalist, balanced, comfort), and compares it to your current city.

A ranking tool that lets you sort 29,000 cities by your priorities. Free users can rank by up to 7 of your priorities at once. Relocation Pro raises that to 100 factors so you can compose much richer queries.

Visual map of 29,000 cities filterable by 90+ features. Free users can apply 1 active filter at a time. Relocation Pro lets you stack up to 40 filters simultaneously to find cities matching every requirement at once.

Switches the explore map from absolute scores to differences vs your current city. Every city is colored by what you would gain or lose by moving there — at a glance, no city-by-city comparison needed. Part of Relocation Pro.

AI-written narratives describing what a real Saturday — morning, midday, and evening — would actually look like for you in each of your top 10 cities. Grounded in that city's climate, neighborhoods, food, and pace of life. Part of Relocation Pro.

For every city in your top 10, an explanation of why it wins or loses for YOU specifically — which dimensions it scores high on, which dealbreakers it brushes against, and what you would give up to live there. Part of Relocation Pro.

Personalized guidance on which months are great for moving in, errands, and getting settled — and which to avoid because of weather extremes (heat waves, cold snaps, rainy season, peak humidity). Part of Relocation Pro.

Saved views of the explore map — a specific filter combination, zoom level, and overlay you want to revisit. Relocation Pro removes the limit on how many you can save.

UTCI (Universal Thermal Climate Index) is the gold standard for what temperature actually feels like to the human body. Unlike raw air temperature, UTCI accounts for humidity, wind, solar radiation, and radiant heat — everything that affects whether you are comfortable outdoors.

A 30°C day in dry Lisbon feels very different from 30°C in humid Bangkok, and UTCI captures that. We compute UTCI from ERA5 hourly data (2015–2024) for 29,000+ cities.

Cities tend to be warmer than the rural areas around them because asphalt, concrete, and buildings absorb heat during the day and release it at night. The effect is strongest in summer and at night, and can add 2–8°C to perceived heat. We measure it from satellite land-surface temperature data so two cities at the same latitude can have very different lived heat.

The temperature at which air becomes saturated with moisture. Dew point is the most honest measure of "muggy" or "sticky" weather — relative humidity changes with temperature, but dew point does not. Above 18°C dew point feels muggy; above 21°C feels oppressive. Below 10°C feels dry.

How much moisture is in the air relative to how much it could hold at that temperature, expressed as a percentage. Useful as a familiar metric, but dew point is more reliable for comparing comfort across climates.

How strong the sun's UV radiation is at ground level, on a scale roughly 0–11+. Drives sunburn risk, vitamin D production, and long-term skin damage. Tropical and high-altitude cities can hit 11+ year-round; northern winters can stay under 2 for months.

Hours per day with the sun unobstructed by cloud cover, averaged across the year and broken down by month. A strong predictor of mood, energy, and how much outdoor life is realistic in a given season.

Days per year with mostly cloudless skies. Different from sunshine hours: a city can be sunny for short stretches but mostly overcast (typical of maritime climates) or have huge sky-clarity stretches with intense seasonal contrast (typical of continental climates).

ECMWF's flagship global climate reanalysis: hourly weather data on a 0.25° grid, going back to 1940. We use the 2015–2024 window to compute climate metrics — temperature, humidity, wind, radiation — for every city. The state of the art for global climate baselines.

Climate Hazards Group Infrared Precipitation with Stations. Combines satellite observations and ground rain gauges into a high-resolution rainfall dataset. We use it to bias-correct ERA5 precipitation, which underestimates extremes in tropical and mountainous regions.

NASA's Prediction Of Worldwide Energy Resources. Provides solar radiation, surface temperature, and meteorology derived from satellite observations. We cross-check ERA5 against POWER for solar and temperature metrics, especially in regions with sparse ground stations.

A global PM2.5 (fine particulate air pollution) dataset produced by Washington University in St. Louis from satellite aerosol measurements. Provides annual exposure estimates everywhere on Earth — including places with no ground monitoring.

A global open network of air quality station readings — PM2.5, PM10, NO2, ozone — aggregated from government and research sources. Where stations exist, OpenAQ ground truth supplements satellite estimates.

Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (the EU's atmospheric Copernicus program). Provides forecasts and reanalyses of air quality, dust, smoke, and pollen. We use CAMS to fill gaps in PM2.5 and add NO2 and ozone exposure.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Source for healthcare, education, and economic indicators across its 38 member countries — life expectancy, doctors per capita, hospital beds, and more.

The statistical office of the European Union. Source for harmonized health, demographic, and economic data across EU member states — we use it where it offers better coverage or finer granularity than OECD.

World Health Organization. Source for global health indicators including healthcare system performance, life expectancy, and disease burden — used to fill gaps outside OECD/Eurostat coverage.

A community-built, freely-licensed map of the world. We use it to derive mobility, walkability, transit access, green space, water access, and points-of-interest density for every city.

A global geographical database covering 11+ million place names with population, coordinates, country, language, and timezone. Our backbone for city identity, hierarchy, and metadata.

Global Human Settlement Layer — a satellite-derived dataset from the European Commission Joint Research Centre. Tells us where humans actually live with high spatial resolution, which we use for population, density, and urban-extent calculations.

For qualitative city features (vibe, food scene, nightlife, expat ease) where structured data does not exist, we use large language models to extract structured signals from open text sources, then validate against ground truth. Every AI-derived field is flagged as such on the city page.