Living in Egypt

Egypt stands out for the squeeze on the cost side. Pay stays near the bottom while the cost of city life sits in the middle of the global range, and the gap between them leaves a salary with nothing once the month is paid for. Tax is moderate rather than heavy, so the pressure comes from prices rather than deductions. English opens doors in particular fields without carrying on its own, and breaking in without a local foothold is hard.

Egypt has the largest diaspora in Africa — about 4.8M people, a figure that has grown 15% over the past decade. Most are labor migrants in the Gulf and the wider Arab world, led by Saudi Arabia (1.5M), the UAE, and Jordan. Egypt also shelters a sizable foreign-born population of 1.1M, many of them from Sudan, but in a country of 116.5M they are well under 1%.