Our method
PensionMaxxer is built to answer one question honestly: for the income you already have, which country gives you the retirement you want? Here is exactly how each figure is produced.
We take your gross annual pension income, convert it into the local currency, then apply that country’s headline national income tax bands and the personal allowance or tax credits a retiree would normally receive. Where a country delivers relief through credits or rebates rather than an allowance — Ireland and South Africa, for example — we convert the credit into its cash-equivalent allowance so the maths stays comparable.
Two countries can pay the same after-tax income and deliver very different lives. We index each country’s general cost of living against the UK at 100, then divide your after-tax income by that index. The percentage in the table is the change in what your money actually buys, not the change in the number in your bank account.
Retirees rarely have a free choice about where a pension is taxed — it depends on the type of pension and the double-tax treaty between the two countries. So we show both: what you keep if the tax stays where you are today, and what you keep if you become tax resident in the destination.
We convert your real spending power into UK-equivalent pounds and place it in one of five bands: tight, modest, comfortable, very comfortable and luxury. The sentence beside each band describes what that budget typically covers in that specific country — housing, transport, healthcare and how often you eat out or travel.
For every combination of passport and destination we store what that passport actually entitles you to: automatic right of residence, freedom of movement, the Common Travel Area, the Trans-Tasman arrangement, or the visitor and retirement visa routes that apply. Hold more than one passport and you’ll see the entitlement for each, because the best route is often the one you forgot you had.
Exchange rates are indicative and updated periodically. They matter for the comparison, not for planning a transfer — a 5% currency move can outweigh a tax difference, which is why the tax and cost-of-living effects are shown separately.
Each data set is on its own update schedule, so you can see how current the figures are.
| Data set | Updated every | Last updated | Next due |
|---|---|---|---|
| Exchange ratesRefreshed automatically each month from a public exchange-rate feed. Indicative mid-market rates. | Monthly | 1 Sept 2026 | 1 Oct 2026 |
| Tax rulesHeadline national income tax bands and pensioner allowances, reviewed by hand against each tax authority. | Every 3 months | 24 Aug 2026 | 24 Nov 2026 |
| Cost of livingRelative cost-of-living indices with the UK set at 100, reviewed each February and August. | Every 6 months (February and August) | 24 Aug 2026 | 1 Feb 2027 |
| Visa informationEntry and retirement-visa routes per passport, reviewed by hand against immigration authorities. | Every 6 months | 24 Aug 2026 | 24 Feb 2027 |
PensionMaxxer stores nothing about you. There are no accounts, no email capture, no tracking cookies, and no record of what you enter — the comparison runs in your own browser using reference data we publish. Close the tab and it’s gone.
To keep the service free and stop automated abuse, comparisons are limited to 20 per day per internet connection. To count them we keep a one-way, daily-rotating fingerprint of the connection: it cannot be turned back into an IP address, it is never stored alongside your figures, and it is deleted within 24 hours.
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