Part of the honest US→Netherlands report. That report reads the average; this page is about your home in the ranking.
Staying is a scored option
Most relocation tools have a built-in answer: move. They compare destinations to each other and never to the thing you already have. That quietly loads the dice—if the only options on the table are elsewhere, elsewhere always wins. The more honest comparison puts your current home in the ranking, scored on the same axes as every alternative, so the question becomes the real one: does anywhere actually beat where you are, for what you actually weight?
Enter your current location and it’s ranked alongside the rest. If nothing clears it, the engine is built to say so—honest enough to tell you to stay. A “stay” result isn’t a failed search; it’s a finding.
The budget gate is honest both ways
A move has to be reachable, not just attractive. The engine gates destinations on attainability—the visa route, the entry friction, the cost and time to permanence—before it lets a high livability score seduce you. A place that scores beautifully but that your household can’t actually get to, or afford to land in, doesn’t get to win on paper. Staying carries none of that friction, and the ranking counts that in its favour rather than pretending relocation is free.
Honest enough to tell you to stay
When staying wins
A few honest cases, grounded in the axes where the US actually leads:
If your plan leans on earnings or career optionality. The US leads on economic opportunity—78 to the Netherlands’ 59 on that axis, a gap that clears the moderate band—and that is exactly the ground a relocation has to make up. Higher earnings ceilings and deeper labour markets are hard to replace, and for a mid-career household they often decide it.
If your income is fixed or earned abroad. The affordability axis reads close between the two (64 to 55, a tie inside the band), but that assumes you’ll earn a local wage. A pension, a remote US salary, or investment income keeps its size when you move while local prices rise to meet it, so a high-wage destination can be the more expensive place to land, not the cheaper one. For those households the math tilts toward staying.
If your roots are already where you are. Belonging comes out level on paper but is decisive in a life. The community you already have does not transfer, and the report cannot score what you’d be leaving—so weight it yourself before a clean number talks you past it.
Weigh the move against staying
The failure mode isn’t choosing wrong; it’s comparing the move against a wish—an imagined life abroad with none of the friction—instead of against the concrete option of staying put. Run your own household through the engine and it does the comparison the honest way: your weights, your budget, your passport, your horizon, with your current home in the ranking and the confidence shown on every score. The whole-country figures here read 68 for the Netherlands to 62 for the US on average, but the average isn’t your answer—your deck is.
How this was built
The axis figures cited here trace to named public datasets, read from the same registry that powers the live scores—as of 13 July 2026, over underlying data from 2022–2025. Nothing is collected by us, and no gap is filled with a guess. See the full sources & licenses and how a score is built.
Common questions
- Should we move abroad or stay where we are?
- Weigh the move against staying, not against a wish. Atlas Resolve ranks your current home against the alternatives on the same eight axes and the same budget gate, and returns a “stay” verdict when the move doesn’t beat it. Staying is a scored option, not the absence of a choice.
- When does staying in the US win?
- Most often when your plan leans on earnings or career optionality: the US leads on economic opportunity (78 to the Netherlands’ 59 on that axis), the one ground a relocation has to make up. If your income is fixed or earned abroad, the affordability math can favour staying too.
- Does the engine actually recommend staying, or just moving?
- It’s built to recommend staying when that fits. Enter your current location and it’s ranked honestly alongside the alternatives; a destination has to clear a budget gate and beat home on the axes you weight. If nothing does, the honest answer is to stay—and it says so.