Golden visa countries in 2026: what closed, what survived, and what the price does not tell you

We track 102 residency-by-investment routes across 120 jurisdictions. Sixty-two are open with a published entry price. Fifteen are closed or suspended, and the list of the dead includes most of the names people still search for.

The United Kingdom closed its Tier 1 (Investor) visa on 17 February 2022, with no notice. Ireland closed its Immigrant Investor Programme on 15 February 2023, also with no notice, ending an eleven-year run. Portugal abolished the property and capital-transfer routes that made its golden visa famous in October 2023. Spain repealed its investor visa outright — Organic Law 1/2025, in force for new applications from 3 April 2025. Hungary wound down its residency-bond programme years earlier, and Canada cancelled a backlog of roughly 59,000 applications by legislation in 2014.

So the honest headline for 2026 is not a ranking. It is this: the cheap, passive, no-questions golden visa in a major European economy no longer exists. What is left divides into two groups, and the line between them is not price.

The rule that decides everything

Across every open programme we track, one relationship holds: the lighter the presence requirement, the less the permit leads to.

This is not a coincidence or a marketing failure. It is the mechanism. A residence permit that does not require you to reside cannot build the residence record that permanent residence and naturalisation are made of. States know this, which is why they are willing to sell the permit at all.

Work through it with the actual conditions:

• Malta's Permanent Residence Programme has no minimum stay. It is permanent for life. And it leads to citizenship never — the status is not a naturalisation track, and ordinary naturalisation in Malta is a separate, long and discretionary matter.
• Cyprus Category 6.2 requires a visit once every two years. The permit is permanent and does not expire. Naturalisation still requires roughly seven to eight years of genuine physical presence plus Greek.
• Greece's golden visa requires no minimum stay at all. Citizenship requires seven years of genuine physical residence plus a language and integration examination — and years spent outside Greece do not count toward it. The permit and the passport are on different clocks that do not touch.
• UAE Golden Residence requires nothing, does not lapse after long absence, and offers no path to permanent residence or citizenship whatsoever. Citizenship is by nomination only.

Each of those is a perfectly good product if you want the thing it actually is. None of them is a passport plan, and a large part of this industry sells them as one.

The exception worth understanding

Portugal is the outlier, and it is the reason the programme still commands the attention it does after losing its property route.

The presence requirement is seven days in year one, then fourteen days in each subsequent two-year period. That is among the lightest in the European Union. And yet permanent residence still arrives at five years of legal residence — unchanged by the 2026 reform, and now the programme's strongest remaining claim. Citizenship follows at ten years for most nationalities, or seven for nationals of EU and Portuguese-speaking countries.

That combination — near-zero presence, but a clock that genuinely runs — is rare enough that it is worth stating plainly: on the data we hold, Portugal is the only major European programme where a low-presence investor is still building toward something. The Portugal Golden Residence Permit entry sets out the surviving routes and the current EUR 250,000 floor.

Whether that survives the next reform is a different question, and we would not build a ten-year plan on it without saying so.

What is actually open in Europe

These are the open European routes we hold, at their published entry thresholds. Every figure is the floor, not the total: state fees, legal costs and family additions sit on top, and several of these carry per-dependant charges that materially change the arithmetic.

Two entries on that list deserve a warning rather than a recommendation. The Czech threshold — roughly EUR 3m plus twenty new jobs sustained for two years — is not a golden visa in any useful sense, and specialist surveys of open European programmes correctly leave it off. Latvia's EUR 50,000 share-capital route is the cheapest headline in the Union, but a shelf company fails at renewal, and the wider Latvian programme is mid-repeal: a new Immigration Law passed on 11 June 2026 and was returned unpromulgated by the President on 19 June. Treat that window as closing.

We also do not list Slovakia, because there is no Slovak investor or golden visa programme. We say that plainly because commercial sites market one anyway, complete with a threshold and a timeline that appear in no Slovak government source.

Outside Europe, the price collapses

If the requirement is a lawful second residence rather than a route into the European Union, the numbers change by an order of magnitude.

Paraguay is the one that repays a closer look. Permanent residence is immediate — that immediacy is the entire point of the programme — presence is roughly one entry every three years, and citizenship arrives three years from permanent residency, subject to a real arraigo test that is not a formality. On the numbers, nothing in Europe is close.

Moldova is the opposite lesson. EUR 26,000 buys a genuine investor residence, and the passport carries visa-free Schengen access. But naturalisation takes ten years counted only from the grant of permanent residence, which itself takes about five — so fifteen years, realistically. The cheapest entry on the list is also the longest road.

The four questions worth asking before the price

1. What does it lead to? Permanent residence, citizenship, or neither. Ask for the answer in years and in presence-days, not in adjectives.

2. What counts as presence? Days in country, tax residence, or a stamp every two years. These are not the same test, and programmes that satisfy one routinely fail another.

3. What happens to the money? A property you can sell, equity in a company that must genuinely trade, a fund unit with no secondary market, or a non-refundable contribution. The exit is priced very differently from the entry, and it is rarely quoted.

4. What does it do to your tax position? This is the one that decides whether the plan works. A residence permit is not tax residence, and tax residence is not the permit. Our tax profiles cover 209 jurisdictions, and the non-dom and flat-tax regimes are frequently the actual objective that the visa was only ever a means to.

What we would tell you not to buy

Any programme sold as a path to an EU passport when its own presence requirement forecloses naturalisation. That description fits several of the best-known products on the market, and the conflict is visible in the programme's own conditions.

Any threshold quoted without the state fees, the per-dependant charges and the recurring costs. On several European routes those add 30% or more to the headline.

Any route where the investment has no exit. A fund with two approved managers and no secondary market is not liquid because the brochure says five years.

And any programme whose legal basis is a draft. Fifteen of the routes we track are proposed rather than enacted, and proposals in this field have a poor completion rate.

Where to start

If the objective is a passport rather than a residence, two companion pieces cover it: what the investment programmes have lost since 2023, and why the cheapest second passport is usually free.

If you know the outcome you want — a second residence, a tax move, an EU passport in a defined number of years — the programme falls out of that, usually to two or three candidates rather than a shortlist of twelve. Browse the full set by country in programmes, or compare thresholds side by side in compare.

If you do not know the outcome yet, that is the conversation to have first, and it is free. Tell us what you are trying to achieve and we will tell you which of these routes can actually do it — including when the answer is none of them. We take no commission from any programme, government or developer, so we have no reason to point you at the expensive one.

Figures move, and this field moves faster than most. Every threshold here is current to our review in August 2026, and each programme page carries its own verification date so you can see when it was last checked.