Worked out the portfolio you'd need in 32 countries to match what $1,000,000 buys in the US. The median country comes out at $457,100.

The "you need a million to retire" number is an American number, and I wanted to know how much of it is actually about retirement versus just about US prices. So I pulled World Bank data for all 195 countries and worked out what the same purchasing power costs elsewhere.

The method is a price level ratio. How many dollars it takes to buy a dollar's worth of goods somewhere compared with the US. Portugal comes out at 0.6037, so the same basket runs you 60 cents there. Multiply your target by that ratio and you get the portfolio that throws off the same local purchasing power. The withdrawal rate cancels out of the comparison, so it holds at 4 percent or 3 or whatever you actually use. Drop to 3 percent and every number just scales up by a third, and the ranking is identical.

What came out of it.

The median country is $457,100 and 108 of the 195 sit under $500,000.

Only 8 come out above the US. Bermuda, Cayman, Iceland, Switzerland, Barbados, Nauru and Israel. Sudan shows up too but that's an exchange rate artifact and I'd ignore it.

I expected a cliff between the rich world and everywhere else and there isn't one, it's a smooth slope the whole way down. The rich world is the tight part, twelve countries sit between $765,700 and $1,178,500, so the entire developed world fits inside a 1.5x band.

Portugal $603,700. Spain $645,200. Japan $648,700, far cheaper than its reputation, though that's mostly the yen having fallen rather than Japan getting cheap. Thailand $306,900, Malaysia $316,300, Philippines $331,600.

Where it breaks down, and this sub will spot it faster than most. Price levels average a whole national basket and most of that gets bought by locals on local wages. Import familiar food, run a car, carry international health cover or put kids in an international school and you're buying a different basket at something much closer to Western prices. Rents in the areas foreigners actually land in run well above the national average too. So it's the ceiling on your discount rather than the discount itself.

It also says nothing about the two things that decide this in practice, which are visas and tax. No treaty analysis, no FEIE or foreign tax credit, no wealth or exit taxes, no view on where your withdrawals get taxed and at what rate. It ignores currency risk as well, and this ratio moves ten or twenty percent in a couple of years without any real prices changing.

And national averages hide a lot. Lisbon is not rural Portugal.

Chart with all 32 countries and the sourcing is in the comments.