The golden-visa graveyard

There is a particular kind of advertisement that still runs, quietly, in the corners of the internet: buy a European golden visa, secure your family's future, act now. What the advertisement rarely mentions is that the product on offer has, in several cases, already been discontinued. The category has spent three years killing its own bestsellers, and the agents are still working through old stock.

Let me walk you through the graveyard, because the headstones tell a story.

The recently deceased

Spain abolished its golden visa in April 2025. The whole thing — property, funds, the lot. A programme that for a decade was the default answer for anyone Googling "residency Europe" simply stopped existing, killed by a government that decided foreign property money was making housing unlivable for its own citizens.

Ireland got there first, closing its Immigrant Investor Programme back in 2023 with almost no notice. Portugal did not close its golden visa but performed surgery on it in 2023, removing the real-estate route that was the only reason most people wanted it — and then, for good measure, lengthened the road to citizenship that was the prize at the end. Australia scrapped its Significant Investor Visa in 2024. Bulgaria, Cyprus and Montenegro had already shut their citizenship-by-investment schemes in the years before.

And the biggest headstone of all: Malta. In April 2025 the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that a member state cannot simply sell its citizenship — and with it, EU citizenship — for money. The last true golden passport in Europe, gone by judicial order.

The pattern, and why it matters

Stand back from the individual deaths and the pattern is obvious. These programmes die for two reasons, and both are accelerating.

The first is domestic politics. Golden visas were always a bet that a government would keep valuing foreign capital more than domestic anger about housing and inequality. That bet is losing across the developed world. When a programme becomes a talking point in a national election, its days are numbered — and property-linked visas are now a reliable talking point everywhere from Lisbon to Vancouver.

The second is Brussels. The European Commission has decided, with the CJEU now behind it, that selling access to the Union is not a member state's to sell. Malta was the test case. The pressure will not stop at citizenship; residency schemes that function as a side door into Schengen are next in the sights.

Put those two forces together and you can read the actuarial table. A programme is most at risk when it (a) links to housing, (b) sits inside the EU, and (c) has become politically visible. By that measure, the survivors are not as safe as their brochures suggest.

What the agents are still selling

Here is the uncomfortable part. A dead programme does not vanish from the internet. The pages stay up, the search ads keep running, and the enquiry forms keep collecting names — because a firm paid to build that funnel has every incentive to keep it turning, right up until the moment a client wires money for a product that no longer exists.

I have seen live, indexed pages in 2026 still selling Spain's golden visa as though April never happened. I have seen "EU passport in months" copy that can only mean Malta. This is not always fraud in the legal sense. Often it is just an unmaintained website and an agent who has not updated the pitch. The effect on you is identical: you spend months and money chasing a door that is already bricked up.

What a smart buyer does about a dying category

You do not stop buying. You change what you are buying, and how you check it.

Buy the country, not the visa. A residence permit is a means; a life is the end. Choose a jurisdiction you would actually live in, whose tax and legal system you have understood, so that if the specific programme changes under you, you still want to be there. People who bought Portugal for the property flip are furious; people who bought Portugal to live in Portugal are mostly fine.

Assume a shelf life. Treat any investment-linked route, especially an EU one, as a window that may close. Move earlier rather than later, and do not build a plan whose whole value depends on a rule that a court or an election could delete.

Check the date on everything. Before you speak to anyone, confirm the programme is currently open from a primary source — the government's own page, not an agent's summary. If the newest thing on an adviser's programme page is undated, assume it is describing a world that has moved on.

The verdict

The golden-visa era as a mass product is ending, and it is ending faster inside the European Union than anywhere else. That is not a reason to panic; it is a reason to stop treating these programmes as durable assets and start treating them as perishable ones. The winners in this category are no longer the people who found the cheapest door. They are the people who walked through a good one before it closed — and who would have been happy on the other side even if it never had a lock.