Where Should You Actually Live in Asia? Korea vs Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam

There is no best country in Asia, only a set of trade-offs that resolve differently depending on what you are optimising. Living costs vary roughly threefold across these six, from Ho Chi Minh City at a cost index of 29.6 to Singapore at 90.8. Top tax rates run from Singapore's 24% to Japan's roughly 55%. Two of the six have no digital nomad visa at all, and one caps permanent residence at 100 permits per nationality per year. Below is the whole scoreboard with each figure sourced — including the cells where we could not find a defensible number and left the space empty rather than guess.

Where we're coming from: SharedHomies runs share houses in Seoul. We make money when people choose Korea. So every number below is cited to a primary source with the date we pulled it, and we have printed the places Korea loses. If Korea is wrong for you, we would rather you learn that here than after you land.

Seoul, Tokyo, Taipei, Singapore, Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City. Photographs by Robson Hatsukami Morgan, Louie Martinez, Thomas Tucker, Zhu Hongzhi, Andreas Brücker, Tron Le on Unsplash.

What does the whole comparison look like at once?

Read the empty cells as empty. Thailand and Vietnam do not appear in the university row because this comparison is aimed at people weighing degrees in the northern four, and we did not research their institutions properly — an absent number is not a low score. Taiwan and Singapore have no EF score for reasons explained below, and neither reason is bad English.

Which country wins on cost, and by how much?

Vietnam, and the margin is not subtle. Ho Chi Minh City's 29.6 against Seoul's 64.5 is not a lifestyle adjustment, it is a different financial life. Bangkok at 43.5 sits between them.

The three northern cities cluster more tightly than most people expect, and in an order that surprises: Tokyo 54.3, Taipei 54.5, Seoul 64.5. Seoul is the most expensive of the three, and the most expensive of all six on groceries at 73.9. Anyone telling you Korea undercuts Japan on daily costs is wrong.

Where Seoul does win is rent — a 22.5 index against Tokyo's 26.1. So the accurate sentence is that Seoul costs more to shop in and less to live in than Tokyo, which is more useful than either simplification.

Singapore at 90.8, with a rent index of 68.3, is in a category by itself.

Which country wins on tax?

Singapore, outright and without qualification: a 24% top marginal rate on a territorial system where foreign income is generally untaxed if it is not received there. Nothing in this comparison closes that gap.

Korea's 49.5% and Japan's roughly 55% are the two worst headline rates of the six. Korea has two mitigations worth knowing. The first is the flat-rate election for foreign workers — currently 19%, with the 2026 tax revision bill proposing a rise to 21% alongside an extension to 31 December 2029. The second is the five-of-ten-years rule, under which foreign-source income stays outside the Korean charge except where paid in or remitted to Korea. Both are covered properly in Korea's tax rules for long-term foreign residents, along with the ₩500 million overseas-account reporting rule and the exemption most foreign residents do not know they have.

Which country wins if you are moving for a specific reason?

This is where the comparison stops being a table and starts being a decision. Each of these has its own detailed breakdown.

A few findings from those pieces are worth surfacing here because they change decisions and are widely unknown:

Singapore excludes intra-corporate transferees' families from dependant's passes unless a free trade agreement specifically covers them, while families of ordinary Employment Pass holders remain eligible. Same person, same office, different family outcome depending on how the move is papered.

Korea's D-10 job-seeker visa runs up to two years against Japan's one, and recent graduates of Korean universities are generally exempt from its points test in the first year.

Korea's teaching salaries are the lowest of the major markets — and the package, with free housing, statutory severance and a pension refund of ₩2.5–5 million, is the best. Both facts are true and most articles only print one.

Where is Korea genuinely better, and where is it genuinely worse?

Since we have an obvious interest here, both lists in full.

Korea wins on: length of stay for remote workers, at three years on the F-1-D. The five-year window before worldwide income becomes taxable. Post-graduation work rights, at 24 months against Japan's 12. Spouse work rights for dependants, which are broader than Japan's 28-hour cap and far broader than Singapore's position for transferees. English usability relative to Japan, at 48th against 96th. Rent relative to Tokyo. And materially lower earthquake exposure than Japan or Taiwan, because the peninsula does not sit on a plate boundary — roughly one magnitude-6 event every 62 years.

Korea loses on: tax, badly, to Singapore and to Taiwan. Cost of living, badly, to Vietnam and Thailand, and by a clear margin to Tokyo and Taipei on groceries. University brand recognition abroad, where a Tokyo or Singapore degree travels better than a comparably-ranked Korean one. The size and maturity of the international student community, where Japan hosts 435,200 to Korea's 314,397. And teaching salaries in headline terms, where Korea is last of four.

If your priority appears in the second list, the honest recommendation is not Korea.

How reliable is any of this?

Unevenly, and we would rather mark the seams than hide them.

Two cautions from the research worth passing on. Korean government portals were still publishing superseded F-1-D pilot rules months after the permanent scheme began, so a .go.kr page is not automatically current — check its posting date. And QS ships its "2027" edition in June 2026, while QS World and QS Asia are different tables, which is how a university ranked 11th in Asia ends up described as 11th in the world.

On disaster exposure specifically: we could source Japan's typhoon frequency and Korea's earthquake statistics, but not comparable WorldRiskIndex scores for Korea or Taiwan — and Taiwan may be absent from that index entirely as a non-UN member. So that row is incomplete, and we have left it that way rather than fill it with something that looks authoritative and is not.

What should you do with all this?

Pick the one constraint that actually binds you, and optimise for that rather than for an average. The people who end up unhappy are usually the ones who chose on a composite impression rather than on the single thing that turned out to matter — the tax bill, the spouse who could not work, the deposit they could not raise, the degree nobody at home recognised.

Then verify your one constraint at the source before you commit. Not from an article. Not from this one either.

Where do you actually live once you have chosen Korea?

The gap between deciding and arriving is where most of the friction sits. You will need an ARC to open a bank account or sign most contracts, and you will need somewhere to live before you have one. A standard Korean lease wants a lump-sum deposit in the tens of millions of won and often a domestic guarantor, which is the wall most newcomers hit first — our guide to monthly rentals in Seoul explains what the alternatives cost, and jeonse, wolse and key money explains why the deposit is structured the way it is.

We run furnished share houses across Seoul on 30-day minimum stays, with a deposit of one month's rent and no key money. Tell us what you need and we will tell you honestly whether we have it.

Sources

Checked 10 September 2026. Every figure carries its own retrieval date in our research file; visa and tax rules across this region changed repeatedly during 2026.

• Numbeo Asia cost of living, 2026 mid-year — the city index table
• PwC Worldwide Tax Summaries, personal income tax rates — top marginal rates
• 법무부 (Ministry of Justice, Korea), 디지털 노마드(워케이션) 비자 정식 도입, 8 July 2026
• QS World University Rankings 2027, released 18 June 2026
• EF English Proficiency Index 2025
• 소득세법 제3조 — the five-of-ten-years rule
• Study International, countries with the most international students in 2026
• VolcanoDiscovery, earthquake statistics for South Korea