Living in Bali.

Landlords here usually ask for six or twelve months of rent up front, in rupiah, before you have an Indonesian bank account. That first transfer is often the biggest payment of the whole move, so a better exchange rate on it can save you more than a month of careful budgeting.

A wire from your home bank is rarely the cheapest way to send it. Compare what each service delivers in rupiah, then read the Bali money guide for ATMs, cards and QRIS once you are here.

Only with an Indonesian permit, and there is no Bali-specific one. The routes are the same as anywhere else in the country, and our Bali visa guide walks through each. In practice, foreign residents here are on one of:

• E33G remote-worker KITAS, the usual route for nomads, on foreign income of at least USD 60,000 a year. It only covers work for companies and clients outside Indonesia; taking on Indonesian clients needs a different permit.
• Retirement KITAS (E33F), age 55 and over, with proof of a pension.
• Investor KITAS, if you set up a PT PMA (a foreign-owned Indonesian company) and hold IDR 10bn of its shares yourself. The rules are stricter than most people are told; see Opening a business in Bali below.
• Spouse KITAS, if you marry an Indonesian. It does not by itself let you work.
• Second Home Visa, five or ten years, if you deposit roughly USD 130,000 in a state bank or buy qualifying property.
• Visa runs (leaving the country to start a new tourist stay) are not a legal route. Many people still live here on repeat tourist entries and C1 visit-visa extensions (the old B211A), and immigration has grown steadily stricter about it.

One person on a normal remote-work setup spends about USD 1,700 a month. That means a modern one-bed, a coworking desk, a scooter and eating out several times a week. A simple room inland with warung food and no car costs closer to USD 790. A villa with a pool, a car and dinner out most nights is around USD 3,060. These are worked examples built from current local prices, not island averages.

Where you rent changes the total more than anything else. Based on local listings, rent in Uluwatu and Canggu is 30 to 40% above the island average, Seminyak about 20% above and Sanur about average. Ubud is around 15% below and Denpasar a third below. For specific villas the gap is far wider: the same two-bed pool villa can cost more than twice as much in Canggu as in Denpasar.

The full breakdown, with a calculator you can set to your own household and area, is on the Bali cost of living page.

Freehold, Hak Milik, is reserved for Indonesian citizens, in Bali as everywhere else in the country. The only ways a foreigner ends up holding it are becoming Indonesian, which means giving up your own passport, or inheriting it, which comes with an obligation to sell it on. Neither is a way to buy a house.

What you can register in your own name as a foreign resident is Hak Pakai, a right-of-use title. Under the 2021 land regulations it lasts 30 years, can be extended by 20 and renewed by a further 30, so up to 80 years if each step is granted. That is very different from the plain 25-year lease most Bali villas are marketed on. Apartments can also be held on strata title, and a PT PMA company can hold Hak Guna Bangunan, the right to build.

Stay away from nominee deals, where an Indonesian holds the title on your behalf. They exist only to get around the rule above, so the courts treat them as void, not as a contract you can enforce. If the nominee keeps the property, you have no legal claim to it.

Check the building as well as the title. The south has been building flat out for a decade, and construction quality is very uneven: villas go up in months, and cracked pools, damp, bad drainage and subsiding retaining walls turn up on properties only a few years old. Get an independent survey instead of trusting the photos. Look at the land next door too, because the empty lot beside a quiet villa can become a building site.

For most people, renting is the better choice. Yearly rentals are easy to find, and renting keeps you out of a decades-long bet on an island that is changing fast. If you do buy, the title type is the most important decision, so use an independent notary, not the seller's.

When you rent, try to spread the payment. Landlords often want twelve months up front, and once they have the money, fixing the aircon or the water pump stops being urgent. Paying quarterly or in two installments keeps some leverage. Expect a higher monthly rate for it, and write the repair responsibilities into the agreement.

You need a KITAS or KITAP. BCA, Mandiri, BNI and BRI all ask for one before they open a personal account. On a tourist visa you will live on a foreign card and ATM withdrawals at first, which the Bali money guide covers. OCBC NISP and a few Permata branches have opened accounts for foreigners without a stay permit, usually with a larger deposit and more questions.

Answers vary by branch. Indonesian bank staff have a lot of discretion, so a no in one office can be a yes in another the same week. Arriving with every document complete does more for you than arguing.

BCA is the default for most foreign residents. It has the most ATMs on the island, an app in English, and an account number every landlord, agent and mechanic already knows how to pay into. CIMB Niaga is worth a second account if you are paid in more than one currency, because it holds foreign currency alongside rupiah. Its ATMs here are few, so most people keep BCA for cash. If you are on the Second Home Visa, the deposit has to sit in a state bank (Mandiri, BNI, BRI or BTN), and BCA does not qualify.

Get an Indonesian SIM before you go to the branch. Mobile banking here sends codes to a local number, and without the app the account is hard to use. With the documents in order, BCA and CIMB Niaga often open the account the same day and hand you a debit card. The state banks take longer and ask more questions.

A local account lets you pay by QRIS at warungs, markets and parking, use the local wallets (GoPay, OVO, DANA), and receive money from home in rupiah instead of taking it out of an ATM a few million at a time. Once it is open, note two things. A transfer only lands if the name matches the account exactly. And interest on Indonesian savings is taxed at a flat 20% at source, so a savings account here is not worth it for the interest.

You have to go in person, whatever the app suggests, and bring:

• Your passport, with at least six months left on it.
• Your KITAS or KITAP, in the same name.
• Proof of where you live: a domicile letter (surat keterangan domisili, issued by your kelurahan, the local neighborhood office) or the signed lease.
• A sponsor letter if your permit came through a company, which covers work and investor KITAS holders. Your sponsor writes it.
• Your NPWP, if you have one. A basic savings account does not legally require it, but branches ask more often than they used to, and larger balances and some account types make it unavoidable.

Buying a SIM is easy. Any Telkomsel, XL Axiata or Indosat store will sell you a prepaid number against your passport and register it at the counter, and a starter pack with a month of data costs a few dollars. Get one in the first week. Bank verification codes, QRIS payments, GoPay, OVO, DANA, Gojek and Grab all need a local number to work properly.

A phone you bought abroad stops working on Indonesian networks after 90 days unless you register it. Indonesia keeps a register of handsets, and foreign phones are not on it. When the shop sells you the SIM, it files a tourist registration that clears your phone for 90 days, so nothing looks wrong at first. After that the phone only works on Wi-Fi. A new SIM does not help, because the block is on the handset, not the number.

If you are here to live, register the phone with customs. Do it at the arrivals hall in Denpasar before you walk out, and the first USD 500 of the declared value is exempt, which covers most phones outright. Once you leave the terminal you have 60 days to register at a customs office, without the exemption. You can register two devices per passenger, under customs regulation PER-13/BC/2021.

Without the exemption, the charge falls on the whole declared value: 10% import duty and 11% VAT. Customs guidance also lists income tax of 10% with an NPWP or 20% without, though not every office charges it on a passenger's own phone. Budget 20 to 40% of what the phone is worth.

A roaming eSIM from a foreign provider connects as international roaming, which the handset register does not cover, so it keeps working whatever your phone's status. That works for a few weeks but gets expensive over a year. A local eSIM is an Indonesian profile and follows the same rules as a plastic SIM. Most people who stay buy a phone here instead. Anything sold legally in Indonesia is already registered, and a decent mid-range Android costs less than the tax on a flagship you carried in.

Keep the number once you have it. Prepaid numbers lapse if you stop topping them up, and losing yours means redoing verification on every account tied to it. With a KITAS you can move to a postpaid plan that bills monthly and does not expire.

You can own a vehicle in your own name if you hold a KITAS or KITAP. Samsat, the office that registers vehicles, wants the permit, the passport behind it, and your residence papers: for a KITAS holder that is the SKTT (certificate of residence), and a KITAP holder can use their resident ID card. A tax number is asked for more often on cars than on bikes. On a tourist visa you cannot register anything, which is why so many scooters in Canggu belong on paper to an Indonesian friend, a landlord or an agent.

The STNK is the registration card you keep with the vehicle. It lasts five years, with the road tax paid and the card endorsed every year, and at the five-year mark the vehicle is inspected and gets new plates. The BPKB is the ownership book, and you keep it at home. Whoever is named in the BPKB is the owner, whatever the receipt says and whoever paid, so a bike still in the seller's name is not legally yours.

Transferring a vehicle into your name is cheaper than it used to be. The transfer duty on used vehicles, BBNKB II, was dropped nationally on 5 January 2025 under the 2022 revenue law. A balik nama (change of owner) now costs only administrative fees. On a motorbike that is IDR 225,000 for the BPKB, 100,000 for the STNK and 60,000 for plates, so IDR 385,000 in document fees. The physical inspection, the small SWDKLLJ accident levy and a mutasi fee (if the bike is registered in another regency) come on top, and the total is still well under a million. Expect a day or two at the Samsat counter, or pay an agent to do it.

Bring the seller, or at least a copy of their ID and a signed receipt, along with the original STNK and BPKB. Samsat checks the chassis and engine numbers against the book in front of you.

Check the STNK is current before you pay. Cheap secondhand bikes often have something wrong with the papers. Under article 74 of the 2009 traffic law, a vehicle left un-renewed for two years after its STNK expires can be deleted from the register, and a deleted vehicle cannot be registered again. The arrears stay with the vehicle, not the seller, so whoever renews the STNK next pays the back tax and the penalty.

The yearly tax is small. Road tax (PKB) is just over 1% of the vehicle's assessed value under Bali's 2024 tax rules, plus a regency surcharge of 66% of that tax. A small scooter costs a couple of hundred thousand rupiah a year and a family car a few million. The same rules dropped the higher rate on second and later vehicles. Pay at a Samsat counter, a Samsat van or through the SIGNAL app.

Insurance is a separate purchase. The levy inside the STNK pays into a national accident fund and is not cover. Private policies come as total-loss-only or all-risk.

Rent by the month until you know you are staying. Buying is only worth the paperwork if your permit lasts longer than the process takes. Either way you need a license: a SIM C (the Indonesian motorbike license) or a SIM A for a car, or your own license plus an international driving permit for a short stay.

You can, through a PT PMA, but a legally foreign-owned company can still be operating an illegal business. Many foreign residents here have a cafe, a villa operation or a small agency. The usual advice is to set up a PT PMA, get an investor KITAS, and start. That leaves out the rules on money and on what the company may do.

Two money tests apply, and they are separate. A PT PMA needs IDR 2.5 billion of paid-up capital under the 2025 investment rules, and generally more than IDR 10 billion of investment, excluding land and buildings, per business line per location. The E28A investor KITAS is a different test: you personally have to hold at least IDR 10 billion of shares in the company sponsoring you, roughly USD 610,000. Meeting one does not mean you meet the other.

What you are allowed to do depends on your company's KBLI code (the official Indonesian classification of business activities), not on what you call the place. A restaurant in a fixed building, as opposed to a cart or a stall, is KBLI 56101 and open to full foreign ownership. The cafe and drinking-house code is open nationally but blocked for new foreign-investment applications in Bali. Warungs and small retail are mostly reserved for Indonesian small businesses.

Holiday villa rental is closed to foreign-owned companies. It is reserved for Indonesian cooperatives and small businesses, so a PT PMA cannot legally operate an ordinary four- or ten-villa rental business on the villa license. Putting it in an Indonesian friend's name is the nominee arrangement that investment law bans outright. Some accommodation is open to foreign investment, including a genuine hotel and the condotel category, but the building, zoning, license and KBLI code all have to match what you actually operate. In May 2026 Bali closed new foreign-investment applications in 18 categories, among them star and non-star hotels with less than 6,000 m² of building area.

The rules are enforced. Through 2025 BKPM (the government body that approves and polices foreign investment) inspected foreign-owned businesses in Bali, found 426 with licensing violations and sanctioned 423 of them. The reasons were nominee shareholding, operating in a closed sector, investing less than the minimum, shell companies, and missing building or environmental permits. BKPM has said it will push harder in 2026.

Land and building permits matter as much as the company papers. On 21 July 2025 the authorities began demolishing 48 buildings at Bingin Beach in Uluwatu: villas, homestays, restaurants and other tourism businesses, most of them two to four stories and one of them nine. Several had been trading for over a decade, and the largest for close to nineteen years.

They came down because they stood on Badung regency government land, inside the protected coastal setback, against the spatial plan and without building permits. Bali's provincial parliament also raised cliff cutting and height breaches. A May 2025 investigation listed 33 Indonesian owners against six foreign ones. The rules had not changed either: officials had discussed acting since 2023, and did not move until the provincial parliament pushed it back onto the agenda.

Do things in the right order. Settle the KBLI code and check it can be registered in Bali at your scale before you sign a lease or spend money on the place. Use a consultant who is willing to tell you no.

Working in your own company on the wrong permit is a separate offense. Bali Immigration deported 342 foreigners in the first half of 2026, mostly for overstaying and misusing a residence permit, and people caught working on a tourist visa are among those cases.

Indonesian tax residency is based on how much time you spend in the country: broadly 183 days in a twelve-month period, or being present with the intention to stay. Once you are a resident, Indonesia taxes your worldwide income at progressive rates up to 35%, whether it lands in an Indonesian bank or a foreign one.

Your actual rate can be much lower than 35%. Foreign dividends reinvested in Indonesia and held three years are exempt. Selling listed shares costs 0.1% of the sale value instead of a tax on the gain. Some skilled newcomers are taxed only on Indonesian-source income for their first four years. Which of these helps depends on where your income comes from.

The estimator above uses the current brackets and the single-status personal allowance. Treat it as a starting point and confirm your own position with an adviser. The E33G is often sold as a nomad visa, but it does not exempt you from any of this.

BIMC in Kuta, Nusa Dua and Ubud, and Siloam in Denpasar and Kuta, handle everyday medical needs well: infections, stitches, dengue, scooter road rash, routine surgery. Standards are higher than you would expect on an island this size, because tourists and their insurers pay well for care and the private hospitals are built around that.

Specialist care is where Bali falls short. Complex heart, cancer and major trauma cases are stabilized here and then, depending on the condition and what your insurer agrees to, moved to Jakarta or Singapore. Before you buy a policy, check that it pays for medical evacuation and treatment abroad, not just a hospital bed in Denpasar, and read what it excludes.

BPJS, Indonesia's public health insurance, is open to KITAS and KITAP holders once you register and keep paying contributions. It is cheap and worth having, but almost nobody relies on it alone. Take private insurance as well and check it covers scooter accidents, pregnancy and existing conditions, the three things people most often find are missing.

Dengue is a risk all year in Bali and peaks in the wet season. Keeping mosquitoes down around the house does more for you than any clinic can after you catch it.

The air in Bali is cleaner than Jakarta's, but it is not clean. The WHO guidelines for PM2.5 are 5 micrograms per cubic meter as an annual average and 15 over any 24 hours, and the south of the island is above both for much of the year. Part of it is traffic. The rest is smoke.

Waste is burned here, at the roadside and in gardens, and the waste collection system is in the middle of being replaced. Suwung, the landfill for Denpasar and Badung, was ordered to stop accepting organic waste on 1 April 2026 and to shut completely from August. The waste-to-energy plant meant to replace it is not due to open until 2028.

Trucks were turned back at the gate, and within weeks Denpasar reported a jump in waste going into its rivers. Reports from Dalung and Canggu describe roadside burning and evening haze. Much of what burns is household plastic, and that smoke is more harmful than a garden bonfire.

If you have asthma or a small child, or you are used to clean air at home, you will notice this in the first few months. The Bali guide shows the live air-quality reading for the island. Check it on a smoky week, but the annual average matters more for your health than any one evening.

You cannot change the air outside, so spend the money on the air indoors. A HEPA purifier rated for the room, running in the bedroom overnight, is the most useful thing you can buy. Villas here leak air, so treat one room properly instead of the whole house badly. Pair it with a cheap PM2.5 monitor, because nobody can smell the difference between 15 and 60 micrograms, and the reading tells you when to shut the windows.

Split-unit air conditioning is not a filter. The mesh behind the front panel catches dust, needs washing monthly in this climate, and does nothing about fine particles. In the wet season a dehumidifier does more against mold than turning the aircon colder.

Check for this before you sign a lease. Ask the landlord what the room smells like in February, look for mold along the ceiling line and behind wardrobes, and look at the land around the house, because an empty lot next door is where the burning happens.

Bali has more international schools than an island of 4.3 million people usually would, because the foreign community has been here for decades. Published 2026/27 fees start at about USD 3,000 a year per child and reach USD 20,000 before uniforms, buses and trips, and they are usually a large part of a family's monthly costs.

Families tend to settle in Sanur, Umalas or around Ubud rather than Canggu, mostly because of the traffic and the daily drive to school. For everyday illness, children use the same hospitals as adults.

The main international schools, by curriculum:

• International Baccalaureate (IB): Bali Island School in Jimbaran, Canggu Community School, and Australian Independent School and Gandhi Memorial in Denpasar.
• Cambridge: Dyatmika and ProEd Global.
• British: Sanur Independent School.
• Others: Sunrise School in Kerobokan, and Green School inland at Sibang, the well-known alternative choice.

Traffic is the main reason people leave. The road network in the south was built for a fraction of the current load, and a ten-kilometer trip through Canggu at the wrong hour can take an hour. It is the single biggest difference between visiting and living here.

The wet season, roughly November to March, brings flooding on the small roads, mold in cheaper houses, and ocean plastic washing up on the west-coast beaches.

Water and waste are slower problems. The island takes groundwater faster than it refills, dry-season shortages hit the busiest areas first, and construction has not paused.

Almost nobody arrives expecting the air quality, and evenings have been smokier since Suwung landfill stopped taking the south's waste. The air quality section above covers what helps indoors.

Permit paperwork never ends. Most foreigners hold one- or two-year permits with an agent on retainer, so there is always a renewal, a document or a fee due in the next few months.

If the traffic and the building work would break it for you, Lombok next door is the usual alternative. It is cheaper and far quieter, with fewer schools, hospitals and direct flights.

Bali is a good move if you are happy to rent and to renew a permit every year or two. In return you get warm weather, low costs and daily life in English. What you will never get is land, a passport or a year without paperwork. Rent before you buy anything, and keep evacuation cover for anything serious.

The people who stay treat it as an ordinary life in a better climate. The ones who leave came for a long holiday and found that while it is paradise, it comes at a cost.