Cabo Verde

Yes. This is the genuine, under-marketed option. The Green Card (Estatuto de titular de segunda residência) has been in force since 31 December 2021 under Lei n.º 30/IX/2018 and its implementing decrees. It grants permanent residence directly, skipping the normal five-year ladder, for property worth EUR 80,000 in a below-average-GDP municipality, or EUR 120,000 in a higher-GDP one like Sal, Boa Vista or Praia. Family members are expressly covered. It stays under-marketed precisely because no agency earns a large fee on it. The EUR 80k tier points you toward Brava, Maio and São Nicolau, thin, illiquid markets where exit may be hard at any price.

This is routinely misrepresented. The EU relationship is a Mobility Partnership plus a short-stay visa-facilitation agreement. That means cheaper and simpler Schengen visa procedures, not visa-free travel. CPLP mobility likewise gives facilitated procedures, not free movement. The passport carries 64 visa-free destinations at rank 74 on the Henley index for June 2026. Any agency implying Schengen access is misrepresenting what the passport actually delivers.

No. Treat it as a second residence, not a tax plan. Cabo Verdean tax residents are taxed on a worldwide basis. The jurisdiction has CFC rules, catching a 25%+ holding in a clearly more favourable regime, and only three double-tax treaties, with Portugal, Macau and Guinea-Bissau. The idea of a low-tax island base is false for anyone who actually moves there. The Green Card is designed to be held on a non-resident basis. Its whole appeal is optionality without tax migration. Capital gains, notably, are a strikingly low 1% flat.

It is written into law but not operational, and never has been. Article 14 of Lei n.º 33/X/2023 creates nationality by investment, but every amount is left to be fixed by a law that was never passed. The EUR 200,000 figure circulating in the market has no legal basis whatsoever. The legislature itself admitted, in the preamble to the amending Lei 37/X/2024, that without the regulation the nationality law would be inapplicable. Decreto-Lei n.º 29/2024 then expressly excluded investment cases. Anyone selling it is selling a statute its own legislature declared inapplicable.

Naturalisation follows five years of legal residence, under Article 13 of Lei n.º 33/X/2023. There is no language requirement. That test applies to ordinary permanent residence, not to naturalisation. Marriage shortens the wait to four years. There is also an unusually wide diaspora route. Under it, even great-great-grandchildren of a Cabo Verdean of origin can acquire nationality by declaration. Cabo Verde allows dual citizenship. One question remains open, and it matters for any long-term plan: whether Green Card time counts toward the five-year naturalisation clock.

No. The commonly quoted figure is wrong. The Remote Working Programme uses an average bank balance test, not a monthly income test. That means EUR 1,500 for an individual, or EUR 2,700 for a family, averaged over the preceding six months. It is among the cheapest visas anywhere, costing roughly EUR 20 plus EUR 34 in fees. But it is poorly designed for tax purposes. The six-months-plus-six-months structure walks you across the 183-day line into Cabo Verdean tax residency, and its worldwide tax charge. And the DEF online application was showing the message Em manutenção when checked.

Possibly not. This is a genuine uncertainty. The Green Card benefits were keyed to IUP at 1.5%, which was repealed on 1 January 2026 and replaced by IPI (0.1%) and ITI (1%). Whether the statutory benefits carried over to the new taxes is unverified. So the statute's headline benefit now references a tax that no longer exists. The permanent-residence status itself is unaffected. It is the tax sweetener that is in question. Treat the Green Card as a residence instrument first, and a tax benefit only once confirmed.

We found no physical-presence requirement for the Green Card. That is an absence of evidence, not confirmation, so it is worth verifying before you rely on it. On reporting, Cabo Verde is not a durable CRS holdout. It is currently a non-participant, but it has committed to first automatic exchanges by 2027. Plan on exchange being live by then rather than treating Cabo Verde as a lasting non-reporting jurisdiction.