Pros and Cons of Moving to Georgia: Is It Worth It?

Talk about moving to Georgia has picked up plenty of myths over the past few years: some paint the country as a tax haven with an unlimited residence permit, others warn of heavy bureaucracy and weak healthcare. Let's separate fact from fiction and weigh the main pros and cons of moving to Georgia in 2026.

Pros of Moving to Georgia

A Simple Residence Permit

One of the most visible pros is how accessible a residence permit in Georgia is. An investment-based permit is issued for buying property worth at least $150,000, while an entrepreneur-based one comes through registering your own company. The process takes a few weeks and doesn't require any knowledge of Georgian.

Low Taxes and Simple Business Registration

For people working for themselves, a 1% tax rate on turnover up to 500,000 lari a year is a strong draw for individual entrepreneur status in Georgia. It's worth remembering that a residence permit alone doesn't make someone a tax resident: that requires spending at least 183 days a year in the country and obtaining Georgian tax residency status.

Back in 2019, Georgia ranked 7th in the World Bank's Doing Business ranking (the index has since been discontinued), and registering a business today remains one of the fastest processes in the region: a company can be opened in a single day, and bookkeeping costs for a small business stay minimal.

Affordable Cost of Living

A comfortable monthly budget in Tbilisi starts at $500-700 per person, excluding rent, and the full budget for moving to Georgia is best calculated separately. By comparison, a similar standard of living in most of Eastern Europe costs noticeably more, and fresh produce and wine at local markets remain among the cheapest in the region.

A Choice Between Two Very Different Cities

Moving to Georgia also means choosing a way of life within it: busy, business-driven Tbilisi or calm, seaside Batumi. The two cities differ a lot in cost of living, climate, and infrastructure, and for many families the choice between Tbilisi and Batumi ends up mattering as much as the choice of country itself.

A Pet-Friendly Country

For pet owners, a real plus is that moving to Georgia with pets doesn't require quarantine as long as the rabies vaccination is up to date, and local airlines take a relaxed approach to carrying small pets in the cabin.

Safety on Par with Western Europe

On the Gallup Law and Order Index, Georgia scores 88 out of 100, one of the best results in the region, and the intentional homicide rate sits around 2 cases per 100,000 people a year, below the global average. Walking around Tbilisi late at night is simply a normal thing to do, not an exception, and many newcomers notice it within their first few weeks.

The real weak spot of safety in Georgia is the roads rather than the streets: the road death rate is several times the EU average.

Food, Wine, and Culture

Georgia is one of the oldest wine-producing countries in the world: winemaking in qvevri vessels dates back roughly 8,000 years, and the method itself has been on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list since 2013. For many newcomers, this cultural density, the wine, the food, the hospitality, is exactly what turns a short stay into a long one.

Mild Climate and Nature

Georgia's small territory packs in the subtropical coast around Batumi, the vineyard valleys of Kakheti, and the snow-capped peaks of the Caucasus, reachable from Tbilisi in a couple of hours. For anyone tired of long northern winters, this is a tangible upside from the very first winter after the move.

Cons of Moving to Georgia

Mandatory Health Insurance

A downside people often forget about early on: since 2026, everyone entering visa-free or on a tourist visa must carry health insurance in Georgia, and treatment without a policy is expensive, so this expense needs to be budgeted for in advance, not left until the last moment.

Education in Georgian

Education in Georgia is taught in the state language, and public universities are effectively out of reach for applicants who don't speak Georgian, and learning Georgian in Georgia to that level takes well over a year. Most foreign families choose private international schools or homeschooling instead, which noticeably raises the cost of the move.

Extra Work for Families with Children

On top of the general work of moving, families with children face their own extra tasks: finding an open spot in a kindergarten or school, arranging separate health insurance for a child, and giving them time to adjust to a new peer group and a new language. Parents who've already been through it know that moving to Georgia with kids has its own order of steps and its own timeline.

Bureaucracy in the First Month

The first few weeks after moving usually go toward everyday tasks: registering a SIM card, opening a bank account, finding housing.

A separate bureaucratic headache is the residence permit itself: documents from another country need to be apostilled and often translated into Georgian by a notary, and the application review at the House of Justice can stretch out over several months, even though the official deadlines are shorter.

The personal number issued at the same office is required for almost everything, from a bank account to insurance to a rental agreement, so it's worth getting early.

These exact formalities, the apostille, the translation, the personal number, are where people most often make the same common mistakes when moving to Georgia, and the basic order of steps for the first weeks shapes how the first month in Georgia goes.

Language Barrier Outside Tourist Areas

English works fine in cafes and hotels in central Tbilisi and Batumi, but government offices, notaries, and local markets more often call for Georgian or Russian. Even with a translation app on hand, everyday errands outside the big cities tend to move noticeably slower.

If the pros outweigh the cons and the decision to move is already made, the next step is knowing where to start moving to Georgia and in what order to go through the steps.