Among UK adults who never lived abroad, 34% believe their career prospects would have been better had they spent time overseas, according to a 2012 British Council / Populus poll of 2,114 UK adults — rising to 54% among under-25s. That figure is the dominant rate in this entry.
On the action side, the Currencies Direct British Expat Report 2024, based on a Censuswide survey of 500 British citizens living abroad, asked directly about regret: 6% said they regret the decision; 37% rarely regret it and 38% never do. A smaller survey by Best Places in the World to Retire of 389 US and Canadian retirees in Central America found just 3% wouldn’t or probably wouldn’t move abroad again. Both figures represent direct or near-direct regret measures — a substantial improvement over the satisfaction-inverted proxies that previously anchored this entry. The inaction-side 34% is a career-opportunity counterfactual, not a direct relocation-regret question, but it at least addresses the same life decision (living abroad) rather than the vacationer travel regret that previously anchored this side. Roese and Summerville (2005) meta-analyzed 11 regret-ranking datasets and found that leisure — the domain encompassing travel and relocation — accounts for only 2.5% of all lifetime regrets, far behind education (32.2%), career (22.3%), and romance (14.8%). Relocation regret, in other words, is real but relatively rare as a top-of-mind life regret.
The 28-point gap is directionally consistent with the Gilovich-Medvec temporal pattern: in long-term retrospection, inaction regret tends to outweigh action regret because unchosen paths accumulate imagined upside while the anxieties that blocked the decision fade. The principal caveat is that the two sides still measure different constructs (direct regret vs. career-opportunity counterfactual) in different populations (British expats vs. UK non-movers in 2012). Survivorship bias inflates the action-side figure: expats who returned home disappointed are absent from the sample. The sponsor of the action-side survey (Currencies Direct, a foreign-exchange company) has a commercial interest in framing expat life positively. No large-sample survey was found that directly asks non-movers “do you regret not moving abroad?” The directional finding — more people regret not going than regret going — is consistent with the broader regret literature, and both measures now at least address the same life decision rather than comparing expat satisfaction with vacation travel regret.