Living in Bulgaria

Bulgaria is where the money starts to work in your favor. Pay holds up, tax stays light, and the cost of living is gentle enough that a solid amount is genuinely yours to keep or save. Almost all of that promise, though, runs through a single channel. IT hires in English and on merit and has drawn a steady stream of engineers to Sofia, while outside that world getting hired without local ties is hard and the language quickly becomes a wall. If your work fits the tech economy, few places in the region leave you more room.

Bulgaria's defining migration trend is departure. About 1.3M Bulgarians live abroad, and the diaspora has grown 22% over the past decade, even as the country's population shrinks. The largest communities are in Türkiye and Germany, at 348.1K and 338.4K respectively, with Spain a distant third. Inside Bulgaria, the foreign-born population is modest — about 298,000, or 5% of residents.