Considering and Going Are Different Verbs: What 1-in-3 Americans Aren't Doing
Last verified: April 2026
One in three Americans says they're considering leaving the country. Searches for "how to leave the US" jumped roughly 1,500 percent in the days after the November 2024 election. The Census Bureau reported negative net migration for the first time since 1935. US passport applications hit a record in 2025. Forty-nine percent of Americans already living abroad told Greenback Tax in their 2025 expat survey that they're thinking about renouncing US citizenship — a sixty-three percent year-over-year increase.
These are large, real, well-documented numbers. They are also, almost entirely, numbers about thinking. The number of Americans who actually relocated abroad in 2025 was a small fraction of the people who told a pollster, or a search bar, or themselves, that they were on the way out.
I write goingspanish full-time. The ratio of inbox to airport — the share of people who write me a long email about Madrid versus the share who actually arrive — is not subtle. It looks roughly like the polling data, scaled down. So this article is not a recap of those numbers. It is the more useful version: why the gap between considering and going is so wide, and which obstacles I see eat the most people before they ever apply for a visa.
The Gap Nobody Talks About
Forty-two percent of Americans told Gallup in 2025 they were considering leaving in the next two years — sixty-three percent of Gen Z, sixty-one percent of LGBTQ+ respondents, sixty-one percent of Hispanic respondents. The share of US residents who actually emigrated in 2025 was, by Census-derived estimates, roughly one hundred and fifty thousand people. The US population is around three hundred and forty million.
That is roughly four hundredths of one percent.
The framing "1 in 3 Americans considering" and the framing "0.04% of Americans relocating" describe the same people in the same year. The difference between the two numbers is the difference between an emotional response to a news cycle and a planned international move. The first costs nothing. The second costs an entire restructuring of a life.
The pattern is well-documented in migration research and visible in the granular behavior of Google Trends itself: the 1,500 percent search spike for "leave the US" in November 2024 collapsed back to baseline within roughly six weeks. The emotional release happened, the calendar advanced, the search box closed, and the visa application — which is the actual step that would change someone's address — was never filed.
This is not a moral observation. Emotional release is a legitimate response to political stress. But it is not a relocation plan, and people who confuse the two end up frustrated at thirty-eight months instead of moved.
The Four Real Obstacles, In Order of Bodies They Stop
I sort these by how often I see them stop a real person. The order may surprise you. Money is not first.
Visa Friction
Spain's non-lucrative visa requires applicants to demonstrate roughly twenty-eight thousand eight hundred euros of passive income per year, indexed to the Spanish IPREM and adjusted annually. The digital nomad visa requires roughly two thousand seven hundred and sixty-two euros of monthly income from a foreign employer, also indexed. Both numbers exclude the additional supplements required for spouses and dependents. Both must be documented with bank statements, employment contracts, or pension letters, translated and apostilled.
Most Americans considering "moving to Spain" have neither income stream. They have a salaried job in Boston that will not go remote. They have savings of twenty thousand dollars, not the two-hundred-thousand-plus they would need to demonstrate non-lucrative passive income at the required threshold. They have a small business that does not yet generate predictable foreign-sourced revenue. The math does not work for them, and most of them discover this within the first hour of reading any honest visa breakdown.
I have walked readers through every visa option goingspanish covers. The single most common honest outcome of those conversations is the discovery that "considering" is far cheaper than "qualifying," and that the gap between the two requires either changing employers, changing income structure, or waiting several years to accumulate the documented income history Spain wants to see.
That gap stops a lot of people. It is not a Spanish problem; it is a structural feature of how the visa exists. But it eliminates the largest single bucket of considerers before any other obstacle has a chance to.
Citizenship-Based Taxation
The United States is one of two countries in the world that tax their citizens on worldwide income regardless of residence. Eritrea is the other one. This is not a tax exotic enough to require a footnote in most American minds, because most Americans never need to know it exists. People considering moving abroad rarely need to know it either, until the moment it becomes the central fact of their financial life.
The Foreign Earned Income Exclusion in 2026 is one hundred thirty-two thousand nine hundred dollars. That sounds generous, and for a lot of salaried American expats in Spain it is enough — they can earn within that ceiling and pay no US federal income tax on the excluded portion. But the FEIE excludes only earned income. Rental income, capital gains, business distributions, dividends, and Social Security do not qualify. An American moving to Spain who keeps a US rental property, sells US stocks, runs an LLC, or draws Social Security after relocation pays both Spanish IRPF on those flows and US tax on the same flows, with the US-Spain tax treaty and Foreign Tax Credit machinery reducing but rarely eliminating the double exposure.
The honest version is that someone who moves to Spain does not stop being a US taxpayer. They become a taxpayer in two systems forever, until they renounce US citizenship — which currently costs a four-hundred-fifty-dollar fee at the consulate (reduced from $2,350 effective April 13, 2026, after a State Department final rule), plus a potential exit-tax exposure for high-net-worth filers under IRC §877A who meet the covered expatriate thresholds: net worth over $2 million, average annual net income tax above $211,000 for 2026, or failure to certify five years of tax compliance on Form 8854.
The people I see who get furthest into a Spain move and then halt at this obstacle are usually small business owners and pre-retirees with significant US-sourced investment income. They do the math, see the dual-system reality, and either restructure for years before moving or quietly abandon the plan.
Healthcare Uncertainty
The single most-asked question in goingspanish's inbox is some version of "what happens to my insulin / my chronic condition / my Medicare?" People considering an international move from the US treat their healthcare arrangements as an extension of their identity, and the prospect of severing them produces more emotional friction than any tax form ever will.
Medicare does not follow Americans abroad. It does not pay for care delivered in Spain. The few exceptions are narrow enough — emergency care while traveling, some border-region situations — that for practical purposes a retiree relocating to Spain is leaving the US healthcare system, period. Private Spanish health insurance designed for the digital nomad and non-lucrative visa applicant pool starts around thirty-nine euros a month at Adeslas at the entry tier and runs to roughly forty-nine euros a month at Sanitas for a no-copay structure. After one year of legal residence, most Americans become eligible for Spain's public health system, either through a Convenio Especial paid contribution or through working contributions if employed.
Those are the facts. The healthcare deep-dive on goingspanish covers them with the granularity that an actual move requires. The reason this obstacle stops people is not that the facts are bad. They are mostly favorable. The reason is that the prospect of leaving a known system — even a known system that frustrates the person — for an unknown system feels viscerally heavier than the spreadsheet shows. A lot of considerers stall here because the spreadsheet stops being the relevant document.
Identity, Not Logistics
The deepest obstacle is the one no one wants to admit out loud. American identity is sticky. Children, aging parents, professional networks, friends from college, a particular bar in a particular city — these accumulate slowly and resist relocation in ways that are not financial and not procedural. A move to Spain that the spreadsheet endorses can still fail because the person, on landing, discovers that the cost of being thirteen flight-hours from a sister, eight time zones from an aging father, one cultural step removed from the small reflexive jokes of a native vocabulary, is higher than they estimated.
This is the actual reason most of the one-in-three never move. Not visa thresholds, not tax mechanics, not healthcare opacity — though all three eliminate plenty before this one even arrives. It is that the felt cost of leaving an American life, once you have actually pictured a Tuesday in Salamanca instead of imagining it in the abstract, is a number most people did not put in the spreadsheet.
I think it is honest to say so. The relocation industry has a strong incentive to underplay this obstacle. I do not.
What Changes If Spain Is Genuinely the Answer
If you have read this far and you are still in the move column rather than the consider column, the rest of goingspanish is built for you. The following is the homework, in the order I would actually read it.
Read the cost-of-living comparison before assuming Spain is "cheap." It is, on average, considerably less expensive than US metropolitan baselines, but the cheap framing breaks down the moment you compare Madrid centro to Phoenix suburbs, or factor in Spain's higher consumption taxes and dual-system US tax exposure. The honest version is more interesting than the brochure version.
Read the Spanish healthcare guide for Americans before assuming you will lose coverage. You will not lose coverage. You will trade systems. The trade is generally favorable, but the transition mechanics matter — particularly the Convenio Especial timing for Americans who arrive without an employment contract.
Read the NIE walkthrough before getting stuck on paperwork that is procedural, not philosophical. The NIE is an administrative number, not a moral test. It exists, it has predictable steps, it is solvable. Do not romanticize the obstacle.
Read the cities guide before assuming Madrid or Barcelona is the right answer. They might not be. The American who would thrive in Valencia is often the same American who arrived assuming Madrid because Madrid was the city they could name first.
Read the complete moving-to-Spain framework when you are ready to plan instead of consider. The framework piece is the one that links visa logic, tax mechanics, healthcare, NIE, and city selection into a single sequence. It is what I would want to read if I were starting from zero.
This is the homework, not the brochure.
Closing — Honest Takeaway
Considering and going are different verbs. The data shows tens of millions doing the first, and a few hundred thousand at most doing the second in any given year. That ratio has been roughly constant for decades, regardless of which way the political wind happens to be blowing.
If you are in the second group, the rest of goingspanish is built for you. If you are in the first, that is also fine — sometimes considering is exactly the right amount of doing. The problem is not considering without going. The problem is mistaking one verb for the other for long enough that the dissatisfaction compounds into something heavier than the move would have been.
The honest filter is small and concrete: have you priced your visa pathway? Have you done a single full year of US-plus-Spain tax projection? Have you spoken, by name, with a Spanish private health insurer about your specific medical situation? Have you visited the city you would actually live in for at least three weeks in the season you would find hardest? If any of those are no, you are still considering. If all of them are yes, you are going.
Most of one-in-three never gets past the first item. That is fine. Honest is better than restless.
— J. Alonso
This article references public surveys and government data current as of April 2026. Trends evolve. Verify current figures via the linked sources before making decisions.