Dhaka, Bangladesh

🏛️ Capital City

Garments run this city. The ready-made garment sector drives roughly 80% of Bangladesh's export earnings, and Dhaka is its nerve center — factories, sourcing offices, buying houses, and the compliance consultants who orbit them. The Dhaka Stock Exchange lists over 750 companies, and the city generates 35% of the national GDP, so finance, logistics, and trade have real weight here too. Foreign professionals typically land through NGOs, development banks, diplomatic missions (50+ are based here), or multinational sourcing operations. Local salaries are low; expat packages are not.

A one-bedroom in the city center runs around $350/month, but Gulshan or Banani — where most expats actually want to live, near decent restaurants and reliable security — pushes that to $700–1,200/month easily. Traffic is genuinely brutal; a 5km commute can take 90 minutes. The metro (opened 2022) helps on its limited corridor. Healthcare at private hospitals like Square or Evercare is competent for routine care but serious conditions usually mean medical evacuation. Bengali is essential for daily life — English gets you through professional settings but almost nowhere else. Visa and work permit bureaucracy is slow and paper-heavy.

Winters (November–February) are legitimately pleasant at 15–22°C. Monsoon season means flooding, mosquitoes, and infrastructure strain from June through September — plan around it, not through it. The food scene rewards curiosity: Kacchi Biryani, hilsa fish, and street-side tea culture are genuinely excellent and cheap. The expat community is real but concentrated — mostly development workers, diplomats, and garment industry professionals who socialize in a fairly tight circuit of clubs and rooftop restaurants in Gulshan. Weekends mean those same restaurants, day trips to Sonargaon, or escaping to Cox's Bazar. This city suits career-driven expats on assignment packages who can tolerate serious urban friction in exchange for low personal costs and outsized professional impact.