Methodology
How SortaRich ranks — and what we don't do.
Every score on this site is personalized to your priorities and anchored to your home city. Our data comes from established institutional sources, and where our confidence is limited, we say so.
1. How rankings work
SortaRich ranks destinations against your situation, not against a generic global average. Two stages:
- Essentials filter. Anything you marked as essential in the quiz — visa eligibility, safety floor, walkability requirement, and so on — drops destinations that fail.
- Fit ranking. Surviving destinations are ranked by how well they fit the preferences you weighted most heavily.
- Anchored to your home city. All cost figures are purchasing-power-adjusted to where you live now — not a generic global average.
- Confidence-decorated. Each destination card shows how much of its profile is high-confidence local data versus inferred from coarser signals.
2. Where the data comes from
Our standard is simple: every figure traces back to an accountable source. Government statistics agencies, international institutions, and recognized academic and rights-monitoring research bodies — the kinds of organizations that publish their methodology and stand behind it.
We deliberately avoid using crowd-sourced opinion sites as a primary signal. Anonymous reviews can be useful for color, but they should not be the headline figure on a relocation decision. Where institutional data is thin for a particular destination, we say so via the confidence indicator instead of papering over the gap.
3. Data confidence
Every city and country page shows a confidence indicator with four tiers. The tier reflects how much of the destination's profile comes from rich local data versus country-level fallbacks.
Rich local data across cost, safety, healthcare, schools. Most major cities in countries with strong statistical infrastructure.
Local data on most dimensions; one or two country-level fallbacks. Most secondary cities and most of LATAM/SEA.
Mix of local and country-level data. Smaller cities or countries with thinner subnational coverage.
Mostly country-level. Reliable for ballpark, not for tactical decisions. Treat as exploratory.
4. What we explicitly do not do
We don't use crowd-sourced opinion sites as a primary signal
Anonymous small-sample reviews are not data. We rely on institutional sources for our headline figures.
We don't accept payment for ranking position
No advertiser, partner, or affiliate has ever influenced a country's rank. The engine has no concept of "advertiser" — it is a function of your quiz, your home city, and public data only.
We don't hide behind a single "9.2/10" black-box score
Your ranking is personalized to the priorities you set. The same destination can rank very differently for two users with different needs — because the rank is about the fit, not about the destination in isolation.
We don't pretend country-level data is city-level
When a city's profile is mostly extrapolated from country averages, the confidence indicator says so. We don't paint a country-level number across dozens of cities and call it "city-level data."
5. Methodology FAQ
How does SortaRich rank countries?
SortaRich uses a personalized two-stage ranking. Stage one filters out destinations that fail your essential criteria from the quiz (visa eligibility, safety floor, walkability requirement, and so on). Stage two ranks the survivors by how well they fit the preferences you weighted most heavily. Your ranking is anchored to your home city using purchasing-power parity — the same monthly budget buys differently in Toronto versus Singapore versus Lisbon, and we account for that.
What kinds of data sources does SortaRich use?
SortaRich uses authoritative, accountable, public-record data sources — international institutions, government statistics agencies, and recognized academic and rights-monitoring research bodies. Every figure on the site can ultimately be traced back to a source with institutional accountability behind its name. We deliberately avoid using crowd-sourced opinion sites as a primary signal, because anonymous small-sample reviews carry no accountability and no methodology you can audit.
Why is data confidence different from data accuracy?
Data confidence is different from data accuracy because confidence measures how much of a destination's profile comes from city-level source-backed data versus country-level fallbacks or modeled estimates. A city with rich local data scores high; a city where we are mostly inferring from country-level signals scores lower. Accuracy is a separate question — even our highest-confidence data carries institutional measurement error. Confidence tells you how much we are reading the destination directly versus reasoning about it from coarser signals.
Is the city-level data really city-level?
Sometimes yes, sometimes no — and we tell you which. Each destination card carries a confidence indicator that reflects how much of its profile is genuinely city-level versus extrapolated from country averages. We do not pretend country-level data is city-level; many sites silently do this and call it "data for hundreds of cities." We mark the difference.
How often is the underlying data refreshed?
The underlying data is refreshed at the cadence of each source — some indicators refresh annually, others on shorter cycles. We track the latest available version of every signal we use, and per-page "Data updated" timestamps reflect when that signal was last reviewed.
Does SortaRich accept payment for ranking position?
No. SortaRich does not accept payment for inclusion or ranking position. Affiliate revenue from optional paid services (insurance, banking partnerships) does not influence the ranking engine in any way — the engine has no concept of an affiliate signal. Your ranking is purely a function of your quiz answers, your home city, and the underlying institutional data.
See the methodology applied to your situation.
See where you're sorta rich →Last reviewed: 2026-05-03.
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