Loneliness is the most expensive failure mode in moving abroad. It is the one that sends people home, and going home costs the flights, the shipping, the broken lease and the visa fees already spent.
It is also measured. Every year InterNations surveys people living outside their home country. The 2026 edition collected answers from 7,786 people holding 162 nationalities across 31 destinations, each with a minimum of 50 respondents.
The three numbers that do most of the work
Is making local friends easy? Globally, 39% say yes. Six in ten people struggle with this everywhere. It is not just you, and it is not your age.
Are locals friendly toward foreigners? Globally, 63% say yes.
Do you feel at home? Globally, 61%.
Every country is a distance from those three figures.
Where the numbers are good
Mexico finishes first in the Ease of Settling In Index, and it is not close. 73% say making local friends is easy, nearly double the global 39%. More telling: 34% describe their friends as mostly local residents, against 17% globally. That second number is what separates a real life from an expat bubble.
Panama takes second and tops the survey overall for the third consecutive year, with 90% praising the friendliness of locals against 63% globally. Thailand takes third in settling in, and its residents come out as the friendliest worldwide.
Where they are not
Norway finishes 31st of 31, and it ranks last in every subcategory. 72% say making local friends is hard, against 40% globally. Only 25% are happy with their social life, against 54%. Only 31% feel at home, against 61%.
Read that last figure again. Fewer than one in three people living in Norway feel at home there.
Sweden finishes 30th, same region and same pattern. Germany finishes 28th, and it is the one that catches people out, because Germany looks so practical on paper. Then: 57% find it hard to make local friends, and only 43% rate locals as friendly.
What this means in practice
The country decides more than your personality does. A sociable person in Norway faces a 72% failure rate on making local friends. A shy person in Mexico lands somewhere 73% find it easy. You cannot out-charm a structural difference that large.
Look at the “mostly local friends” figure rather than the friendliness figure. Plenty of places are pleasant to foreigners while keeping them at arm's length permanently.
And choose for year two, not year one. Year one is hard everywhere: you cannot read your mail, the bank wants a document nobody can name, your jokes do not land. What the country decides is whether year two is different.
One honest caveat
The survey is not broken out by age. These results describe everyone who answered, not people over 50 specifically. It is the best available measure of how open a place is to newcomers, and it should be read as that rather than as a forecast for you.
Sources
InterNations Expat Insider 2026. The survey is published annually and is free to read.