Is Valencia a good place to live? The honest answer

Valencia was named the world's best city for expats in InterNations' Expat City Ranking in 2022 and again in 2024, after placing third in 2023, and the data behind those placements holds up under scrutiny. This piece is the data side of the question: what the numbers say, where they come from, and where they run out.

For what a normal week here actually feels like, our companion piece on a week of actually living in Valencia covers that ground instead. Here, the focus stays on evidence: cost data, safety statistics, and the trade-offs a single ranking score cannot show.

What the data genuinely supports about living in Valencia

Cost of living is the clearest number. A city-centre coffee sits under EUR2, and a two-bedroom flat in a sought-after neighbourhood remains achievable on an average international remote-work salary, a gap that widens against Madrid, Barcelona or most Northern European capitals once you run the full monthly numbers in our cost of living guide.

Climate and safety are the other two pillars the rankings consistently reward: about 2,700 hours of sunshine a year (AEMET), mild winters, and a consistent place among Europe's safest mid-sized cities in crime-index comparisons. Healthcare access follows the same pattern, strong for residents paying into social security, a real and measurable advantage rather than a marketing line.

What makes these hold together is that they are structural rather than seasonal. The climate is geography, the safety record has been stable across years rather than spiking in one survey, and the cost advantage comes from the city being Spain's third largest rather than a capital. None of the three depends on a policy that could be withdrawn next year, which is why they keep reappearing across different rankings run by different organisations.

How Valencia compares with Madrid and Barcelona on the same measures

Photo: Nan Palmero, CC BY 2.0

Rent is where the gap is widest. Valencia runs roughly 25 to 35 percent cheaper than Madrid and Barcelona on rent and around 10 to 15 percent cheaper on groceries, which is the single largest reason the same salary goes further here. The difference is big enough to change what kind of flat and which neighbourhood are realistic, not just the monthly total.

The trade-off is scale. Madrid and Barcelona have deeper local job markets, more international schools, more direct flights and more of the specialist services a large capital accumulates. If your plan depends on any of those, the cost advantage is not automatically worth it, and that calculation is personal rather than something a ranking can score.

What Valencia adds that neither capital offers in the same form is proximity. The beach, the Albufera and the mountains are all reachable without the city being large enough to make crossing it a project, and the compactness is a genuine daily-life difference rather than a brochure line. Our neighbourhood comparison is the practical version of that trade-off.

Where a single ranking score runs out

A composite score cannot show the cost of sequencing. Getting the NIE, the padrón registration and a bank account open typically takes real newcomers six to ten weeks in practice, not because any one step is hard, but because each depends on the last. Spanish, and Valenciano on official paperwork, is close to essential for anything beyond survival-level interaction, a variable no quality of life index weights.

The local job market is the other blind spot: strong for remote workers, freelancers and retirees bringing outside income, materially harder for anyone chasing a Spanish-language corporate career without existing fluency and local experience. August specifically runs hot and empties out, with many small businesses closing for two to three weeks, worth knowing if you are used to year-round service availability.

Rankings also measure the people who stayed. Anyone who arrived, found it did not work and left is not in the sample, so a high score describes the experience of people the city suited rather than the odds that it will suit you. That is not a reason to discount the result, but it is a reason to test it against your own circumstances rather than treating it as a forecast.

What the rankings cannot see about finding somewhere to live

The cost figures are accurate and the search is still the hard part. Demand in the central and best-connected neighbourhoods runs ahead of supply, viewings fill quickly, and a listing that looks like the market average is often gone before a newcomer working from abroad can act on it. That friction does not show up in a cost-of-living index, which measures price rather than availability.

The practical consequences are worth planning for. Landlords generally want documentation in place, which loops back to the paperwork sequencing above, and arriving without a NIE narrows what you can sign. Our guide to what to check before renting a flat covers the specifics, including the building-level things that decide whether a flat is comfortable in July.

The usual advice, and it survives contact with reality better than most, is to arrive with somewhere temporary booked and search on the ground. A monthly rental for the first stretch costs more per night than a year-long contract and is considerably cheaper than signing the wrong lease in the wrong barrio because the clock was running.

Who the numbers say Valencia actually suits

Cross-referencing salary data, remote-work adoption and the survey's own sub-scores, the profile that consistently comes out ahead is remote workers, young families and retirees who are not depending on the local job market. Our remote worker neighbourhood guide covers where that group tends to settle.

The profile the data says to be cautious about is a fast-track corporate career chaser with low tolerance for administrative friction, or anyone assuming English alone gets them through daily life indefinitely. Neither is disqualifying, but both mean the ranking is measuring something other than the life you would actually have here.

There is a third group the numbers describe less well: people moving for a relationship, a family situation or a specific job, where the city is a given rather than a choice. For them the useful question is not whether Valencia scores well but which neighbourhood, which building and which school fit, and that is a much more answerable question than the headline one.

How to test the answer for yourself before you commit

A one month trial stay in a residential neighbourhood, outside August, is the closest thing to a controlled test the data supports. Staying in the centre or on the beach front measures a holiday rather than a life, so the point is to pick somewhere people actually live and commute from.

Run the real budget rather than the index. Take your own salary, your own housing requirement and your own healthcare situation through our cost calculator, because the averages that drive the rankings flatten exactly the variables that decide whether the move works: family size, whether you need a car, and how much space you need to work from home.

Then test the parts that are hardest to reverse. Sit the paperwork sequence out on paper, check whether your work is genuinely portable, and be honest about the language. Everything else about Valencia is easy to change once you are here; those three are the ones that decide whether the first year is pleasant or exhausting.

If the trade-offs above look manageable rather than disqualifying on paper, the honest next step is checking them against your own numbers: a real look at the monthly cost and a consultation to see how the data maps onto your specific situation.