Most of what you’ll read about moving to the DR is either tourism marketing or someone venting in a Facebook group at 2am. Neither is that useful.
Here’s the practical version. The things that catch people out in the first three months, from someone who’s been watching expats arrive and adjust for years.
1. The power cuts are scheduled, not random
This is the thing that surprises people most. The cuts in established areas are not random outages. They follow a schedule. EDESUR and EDENORTE, the two distribution companies, publish the rota. Your neighbours know it.
Once you know the schedule, the cuts become logistics rather than chaos. You know not to start a video call at 2pm on a Thursday. You know when to run the washing machine. The expats who find the power situation unbearable are almost always the ones who never figured out their local schedule.
Get an inverter in week one. Your router goes on it. Your laptop goes on it. The problem shrinks to a minor inconvenience.
2. You need two SIM cards, not one
Claro and Altice cover different parts of the island better. What gets three bars of Claro at the beach might be dead on Altice. What works inside your apartment might flip the other way.
Remote workers who only carry one SIM will have a bad day at some point. Two SIMs and $30-50/month is the standard setup. Don’t skip this.
3. Ask about Starlink before you rent anything
Starlink has changed the DR significantly in the last two years. Properties with Starlink offer 100-200 Mbps download speeds that hold up for video calls and large uploads. Properties without it are back to sharing a building router or hoping the fibre connection is what they claim.
“Wifi included” is not enough information. Ask for the provider and ask to run a speed test before you sign. If the property has Starlink, the landlord will tell you. If they don’t mention it, ask directly.
4. The DR is not one place
This sounds obvious. It isn’t. People arrive with a picture of the DR from a Punta Cana holiday and move to Cabarete wondering why it’s different. Or they read about Cabarete and think Las Terrenas will be the same vibe, closer to the airport they need.
The DR has 10 genuinely different regions. Cabarete is a kite town. Las Terrenas is a French-colonial beach town. Jarabacoa is a mountain town at 1,200 metres with a 10-degree temperature difference. Santo Domingo is a full Latin American capital of nearly 4 million people.
Choose your region based on what your daily life will actually look like, not what the photos look like. The quiz is built specifically for this.
5. The rental market moves fast
Good apartments at fair prices get taken quickly, especially in high season (October to April in Cabarete, year-round in Las Terrenas). Booking from abroad for more than a month before you arrive is a risk because you haven’t seen the property, the neighbourhood at night, or the actual wifi speed.
The standard expat approach: book a short-stay Airbnb or guesthouse for the first 2-4 weeks. Walk the areas you’re considering. See properties in person. Negotiate from there.
Landlords who target expats know this and will try to get you to sign from abroad. It’s not always a scam, but the properties that require long-distance commitment tend to be the ones that need to lock you in before you can see the problems.
6. Spanish matters more than you think outside expat zones
In Cabarete’s main strip, Las Terrenas, and Santo Domingo’s expat areas, you can get by in English. Step outside those corridors and Spanish is the working language for everything. Government offices, local markets, mechanics, landlord conversations, healthcare appointments outside the private expat clinics.
You don’t need to be fluent. You need enough to function. Starting Spanish lessons in month one, not month six, is the difference between finding the DR frustrating and finding it manageable.
Duolingo will not get you there. A local tutor for an hour a week costs $15-25 USD and is worth every peso.
7. Private healthcare is better than you expect
The DR’s public healthcare system is not where you want to end up. The private system is different. Major private hospitals in Santo Domingo, Cabarete, and Punta Cana are equipped to handle most things you’ll actually face.
A private GP consultation costs $30-60 USD. Specialist visits run $50-100. Basic private health insurance starts around $80-150/month. The quality varies by facility, but the best private hospitals have English-speaking staff and modern equipment.
Sort your health insurance in month one. Don’t assume your home country coverage works here. Most of it doesn’t.
8. Residency takes longer than the lawyer’s first estimate
Every immigration lawyer in the DR will tell you it takes 3-4 months. Plan for 5-6. Documents need apostilling from your home country (2-8 weeks depending on where you’re from). Apostilles expire. The migration office has backlogs. Something in the paperwork will need fixing.
None of this is a disaster. You can stay on your tourist card throughout. But if you’re planning life around having your cedula by a specific date, build in extra time.
9. The local WhatsApp groups are the real internet
Every expat area in the DR has multiple WhatsApp groups. Cabarete Expats. Las Terrenas Community. Santo Domingo Residents. These groups are where people share: the power cut schedule, which plumber didn’t show up, which landlord to avoid, which beach bar has live music, and which road is flooded.
They’re also where people ask questions and get real answers from people who live there. More useful than any blog post. Find your local groups in the first week.
10. The first month is the hardest. Most people who leave, leave then.
The adjustment is real. The heat, the noise, the power cuts, the language, the way time works differently, the bureaucracy, the driving. It hits in the first month.
The expats who are still there three years later mostly say the same thing: they committed to one month of figuring it out rather than one month of comparing it to home. The DR is not a worse version of where you came from. It’s a different place with a different set of trade-offs.
Get your inverter. Buy two SIMs. Find the WhatsApp group. Give it 30 days before you decide anything.
Not sure which region to start in? The quiz takes five minutes and gives you a region match based on your actual priorities.
