Every year InterNations asks people who have moved abroad what life is actually like where they landed. The 2026 edition drew on 7,786 expats of 162 nationalities living across 31 countries, and rather than asking whether they were happy, it asked them to rate 53 separate things on a scale of one to seven.
Fifty three specifics. Not a mood, not a slogan. How quickly could you open a bank account. Could you get online the same week. Was the healthcare any good. Did you feel safe walking around. Was housing easy to find, and could you afford it.
The UAE came first in the world for what the study calls Expat Essentials, and fourth in the world overall.
First in the world at the part that actually matters
Expat Essentials covers admin, housing, digital life and language. Getting set up, in other words. Finding a home, getting your paperwork done, getting your phone working, being able to function from the first week.
It is the least glamorous of the five indices and easily the most useful. Anyone who has moved countries knows this is the part that decides whether your first year is a pleasure or a slog. You do not remember the skyline from your first month. You remember that the bank account took an afternoon, that the visa arrived when they said it would, and that you found a home you liked before your patience ran out.
To come first in the world at exactly that, judged by thousands of people who had just been through it somewhere, is a genuinely good result. It is also the kind that only comes from years of getting the unglamorous things right.
What it looks like from inside
Live here a while and these things stop registering, which is its own kind of compliment.
You walk home late and do not think about it. A clinic is ten minutes away, and so is a school, a supermarket that stocks the thing you grew up with, and someone who will fix your air conditioning on a Friday. Your parents come to visit and the visa takes a morning. Your children learn to ride bikes in the courtyard downstairs. You can plan three years ahead, which people underrate until they have lived somewhere they could not. Some plan a good deal further than that, which is what the Golden Visa exists for.
It adds up to something quite rare, which is a week that simply works.
The same list, smaller
We build apartment buildings, so we spend our time on a shorter version of the same questionnaire. How far is the clinic, really, measured in minutes at eight in the morning rather than in kilometres. Is the lobby generous enough that people stop and talk in it. Does the pool come alive in August, when everyone swims after nine in the evening. Is the gym on the way in, where people will actually use it.
None of those photograph especially well. They are also what turns an address into a home, which is why we pay as much attention to buildings we handed over years ago as to the ones still being drawn.
We build in Jumeirah Village Circle, in Arjan and in Dubai Science Park, three communities that have gone from empty plots to places with school runs and regulars at the corner shop. Watching that happen is the best part of the job.
A good place to be
We are hardly neutral about this city, and we would not pretend otherwise. But this was not our verdict. It came from nearly eight thousand people around the world who were asked to grade the ordinary business of living, in the countries where they had chosen to build a life.
They put this one first for getting started, and fourth in the world overall. Anyone who lives here already knew the first part. It is rather nice to see it counted.
Figures from the InterNations Expat Insider 2026 survey.