Brazil

Roughly USD 90,000 buys it. That figure represents a BRL 500,000 investment in the share capital of a Brazilian company under Lei 13.445/2017 and CNIg Resolution 11/2017. It buys residency in a G20 economy and starts a four-year clock toward one of the strongest passports outside Europe (Henley 2026 rank 16, around 169 destinations). An innovation, technology or research company qualifies at just BRL 150,000. Notably, these thresholds have never been indexed for inflation. Judged on cost per unit of passport strength, this is among the best offers in the world. The tax regime is what keeps it from being an obvious choice.

Yes. Brazil's jus soli is unconditional. A child born there is Brazilian by birth, regardless of the parents' status. That birth then collapses the parents' naturalisation requirement from four years to one year of uninterrupted residence. The same one-year reduction applies to nationals of Portuguese-language countries such as Portugal, Angola and Mozambique. The sequence runs like this: obtain residency, have the child, complete a year of residence, then naturalise.

Yes, and aggressively. This is the decisive factor in any move to Brazil. Tax residency generally attaches the moment you arrive on a permanent visa. There is no 183-day cushion. Lei 14.754/2023 taxes the profits of your controlled foreign company at 15% every 31 December, whether or not the money is distributed, for anyone holding over 50%. It also treats foreign trusts as transparent to the settlor, so classic asset-protection trusts simply do not work. For a UHNW family, this can dwarf the original investment many times over in year one. Restructuring has to be complete before you land.

Lei 15.270/2025 introduces a minimum tax, the IRPFM, from 2026. Annual income over BRL 600,000 attracts a minimum rate that rises linearly to 10%. Income above BRL 1.2 million is subject to a flat 10% minimum. This sits on top of the ordinary 27.5% top rate. The direction is clearly a tightening cycle, not a loosening one. The offshore-asset amnesty has also closed, so there is no reduced-penalty route left to regularise historic undeclared assets.

BRL 700,000, roughly USD 130,000, for urban real estate in the North or Northeast under CNIg Normative Resolution 36/2018. That makes it one of the cheapest real-estate-backed residencies in any G20 country. The often-cited CNIg Resolution 13/2017 governs a separate corporate-investment visa, not the property route. Elsewhere in Brazil, the threshold is BRL 1,000,000. The property must be urban and either already built or under construction, which rules out buyers eyeing raw coastal land. The funds must arrive through the formal exchange market and be registered with the Banco Central. Brazilian title diligence, covering matricula chains, spousal consent and undivided inheritances, is not optional.

Yes. Naturalisation requires proficiency in Portuguese, typically shown through the CELPE-Bras exam or Brazilian educational documents. CELPE-Bras is a real exam with real failure rates, and it runs on a fixed calendar. The 2026/1 registration window ran from 24 February to 6 March, so it will shape your timeline rather than serve as a formality. The visa is the easy part. The passport requires both the exam and genuinely uninterrupted residence.

Brazil allows dual citizenship, so you keep your existing nationality. There is one real distinction worth weighing. Naturalised Brazilians can be extradited for common crimes committed before naturalisation, and for narcotics cases at any time. Natural-born Brazilians cannot be extradited at all. Naturalising also means committing to Brazilian tax residency for the qualifying years, with all the consequences under Lei 14.754/2023. It is worth modelling the tax cost of those years against the value of the passport.

The investor and property permits can lapse if you stay away from Brazil for more than two consecutive years. The residency permit is forgiving on this point. Naturalisation is not. The four-year route, or the one-year route in some cases, requires genuinely uninterrupted residence, and long trips abroad can reset that clock. Keeping the visa alive is easy. Keeping the citizenship clock running is not.

The VITEM XIV retirement visa is built around a benchmark of USD 2,000 a month in stable, regular retirement income, transferred to a Brazilian bank account. That figure is administrative practice, not a fixed, indexed statute, and consulates apply it with some variation. In practice, advisors consistently recommend showing USD 2,500–3,000 instead. Unlike Panama's Pensionado programme, it does not require a lifetime government pension. But Brazilian tax residency follows once you qualify, and starting in 2026 the IRPFM minimum tax will catch wealthier retirees with annual income above BRL 600,000.