Living abroad and keeping access to homeThe country you left is the one to check

Moving abroad breaks a specific and irritating set of things: the bank that refuses foreign logins, the government portal that will not open, the streaming subscription you keep paying for and can no longer use, the broadcaster you grew up with.

All of it comes from the same check — the country attached to your address — and all of it is fixed the same way. Which makes the choice of provider unusually simple: it has to have servers in the country you left, and preferably more than one city there.

• Check the count for your home country, not the provider's country total
• More than one city there is what saves you when an address is blocked
• Long routes cost more: we measured 40% to 90% of a line surviving
• Banks challenge unfamiliar addresses — connecting home makes yours familiar
• The account's registered country is separate and a VPN does not change it

Banking is the one that actually matters

Streaming is what people complain about; banking is what causes real problems. Institutions treat a foreign address as a risk signal, and the responses range from an extra verification step to a locked session to a blocked transfer at the worst moment.

Connecting through your home country makes the address ordinary again. This is probably the single most useful thing a VPN does for someone living abroad, and it almost never appears in the marketing.

Two cautions. Your bank may still flag the login if the pattern changes abruptly, so connecting through the same country consistently is better than switching around. And some institutions specifically prohibit it in their terms — worth reading before rather than after.

Why the city count is worth more than the country count

Providers advertise how many countries they cover. Living abroad, you need one country and you need it to keep working. Those are different requirements.

Services that block VPN addresses do so per address. If your provider has one location in your home country and it lands on a blocklist, you are stuck until they rotate the range — which can be weeks. With four locations, you move.

Of the seven providers we track, all publish at least one Japanese location and four publish two or more. That ratio is fairly typical: full coverage of the major countries, with a real difference in depth underneath.

What the distance costs you

Living abroad means long routes by definition, and long routes are the expensive end of our measurements. Across 14 cities the share of a raw line surviving the tunnel ranged from 40% to 90%, and the cities at the bottom were the ones with the longest hops.

The practical response is to choose the nearest location in your home country rather than whichever one the app defaults to, and to accept that video from the other side of the world will use a quality step less than it would at home. Neither is a provider fault.

What a VPN does not fix

It is worth being clear about the boundary, because expat forums are full of advice that ignores it.

• The account's registered country. Set when you created it, and a billing record rather than an address. Some services let you change it a limited number of times; a VPN is not one of the ways.
• Payment methods. A card issued in your new country is frequently declined by services that expect one from the old one.
• Physical delivery. Obvious once stated, routinely forgotten when someone orders something from home.
• Two-factor codes to an old number. A VPN does not deliver an SMS to a phone number you no longer have. This is the one that locks people out permanently, and it is worth fixing before you move rather than after.

Setting it up before you go

The same rule as any move to a filtered country, and it applies more widely than people expect: install and sign in before you leave. Provider sites are blocked in some destinations, and password recovery to an old phone number is exactly the problem above.

It is also worth testing the specific things you will need — your bank, your government portal, the streaming service — while you are still at home and can tell the difference between a VPN problem and a service problem.

How much speed actually survives the tunnel

Every VPN site says a tunnel costs you speed. Almost none of them say how much. We measured it by hand rather than repeating a claim: 14 cities, 46 paired runs, comparing NordVPN and Surfshark against the same raw line in the same session. In the 11 cities where we also measured the bare line, the share that survived the tunnel ranged from 40% to 90%.

Measured by VPN LIFE. Raw-line figures are rounded to the nearest 10 Mbps. Percentages are the share of the raw line that survived.

• 14 cities, 46 paired runs, measured by hand
• 11 of those cities also have the bare line measured
• 40% to 90% of the raw line survived
• We only name a winner in 4 cities — the rest have too few runs

The spread between cities is larger than the spread between providers. In London roughly nine tenths of the line survived on both services; in Tokyo it was closer to half. That is worth knowing before you blame the provider: "this VPN is slow" is usually "this route is slow".

We only call a winner in a city when we have five or more paired runs there and the gap is at least 10%. That threshold is met in 4 of the 14 cities — Tokyo and Los Angeles, where NordVPN averaged ahead, and London and New York, where the two were level. In the remaining ten cities we publish the numbers and say the sample is too small, rather than ranking on one run.

The apps behind our measurements

The providers we track

We rank on what we can check. Each of the five below publishes a location in this use; the tables are our own counts and the providers' own published terms, not a summary of their marketing.

ExpressVPN: the widest spread of cities

ExpressVPN publishes more multi-city countries than anyone else in our set — 11 countries where you can pick between two or more locations, including 56 in the United States, 7 in the United Kingdom, 6 in Australia and 4 in Japan. If your problem is a blocked address rather than a missing country, that spread is the thing that gets you out of it. It is the most expensive option here, and it is the one we would pick for streaming.

ExpressVPN in use

NordVPN: the largest country list, and the one we measured

NordVPN covers more countries than anything else we track. It is also one of the two services we measured ourselves, so the retention figures above are its actual numbers rather than a claim. It operates from Panama, has been audited by Deloitte, allows 10 simultaneous connections, and lists obfuscated servers and a kill switch among its features — the two things that matter where VPN traffic is filtered.

NordVPN in use

Surfshark: unlimited devices, and level with NordVPN in half our tests

Surfshark is the other service in our own measurements. In London and New York it was level with NordVPN; in Tokyo and Los Angeles it trailed by 11% and 17%. It places no limit on simultaneous connections, which makes it the sensible choice for a household rather than a person. Audited by Deloitte, operating from the Netherlands, with Camouflage Mode for networks that filter VPN traffic.

Surfshark in use

CyberGhost: the longest money-back window, with a catch

CyberGhost's 45-day money-back guarantee is the longest here, and it is the reason it appears on most lists. Read the condition: 45 days applies to the six-month and two-year plans, and the monthly plan gets 14 days. It publishes 10 multi-city countries, with 11 locations in the United States, but only a single city in Japan — so it is a weaker choice if Japanese services are your target.

CyberGhost in use

Private Internet Access: unlimited connections, US jurisdiction

PIA places no limit on devices and publishes an Advanced Kill Switch, obfuscation, multi-hop and port forwarding. Its no-logs claim has been audited by Deloitte Audit Romania. The trade-off is jurisdiction: it operates from the United States, which some readers will rule out on principle. We list it because the rest of the record is strong and because it is one of only four providers with two or more cities in Japan.

Private Internet Access in use

Frequently asked questions

Which country should I connect to?

The one you left, for anything from home. Your current country for anything local. Split tunnelling handles both at once, and three of the five providers publishing a feature list name it.

Will my bank close my account?

Using a VPN is not generally grounds for that. Some institutions do prohibit it in their terms, and the realistic consequence is a challenged login rather than a closed account — but read the terms rather than taking that from us.

Will it slow my connection down?

Yes, and we have measured how much: across 14 cities and 46 paired runs, between 40% and 90% of the raw line survived the tunnel. The variation between cities is wider than the variation between providers — London kept about 90% on both services we tested, Tokyo about half. If a VPN feels slow, the route is a more likely explanation than the provider.

Can I use a free VPN for this?

Usually not, and the reason is measurable rather than moral. Even on paid services we measured, between 10% and 60% of the raw line disappears into the tunnel — in Tokyo a 780 Mbps line came out at roughly half. Free tiers add a data cap and a much smaller server list on top of that. They also have to earn money somewhere, and where the product is free the revenue usually comes from the traffic itself.

Conclusion

One country matters: the one you left. Check the provider count for it, prefer one with several cities there, and set everything up before you move.

Our per-country counts are recollected daily, so the figures on this page are current rather than remembered.

Every figure on this page comes from our own daily collection or our own measurements. The files are published as open data under CC BY 4.0, and the method — including what the numbers do not prove — is on how we test.