Abstract Prior studies have examined why people emigrate from their country of birth during retirement. By focusing on describing motives for international retirement migration, these studies overlook what inhibits or enables people to have particular motives to migrate. We collected data from a representative sample of Dutch nationals aged 66–90 who were born in the Netherlands and migrated after age 50. We distinguish seven—not mutually exclusive—migration motives: longing for tranquillity, the culture in the destination, to start a new life, a better climate, economic reasons, health reasons and dissatisfaction with the origin country. Using Ordinary Least Square regressions, we estimate how people's socioeconomic status, premigration health, premigration residential environment, cultural values and personality traits explain migration motives. We examine how motives relate to destination countries. The results show that there are various motives for which people migrate and that different types of motives are systematically related to the types of people who migrate. For example, people with a lower socioeconomic status are more likely to migrate for economic and dissatisfaction motives and less likely to migrate for tranquillity than people with a higher socioeconomic status. By distinguishing migration motives in 12 destinations, we broaden our understanding of out‐migration from high‐income countries.