Guides & Research
Guides that follow one decision to the end, and research on what has changed in the rules: the golden visa and citizenship routes of five jurisdictions, and living in Poland as a foreigner. Every entry lists the sections of our sources page its figures were checked against, and carries the date it was written — because a threshold that was right in August may not be in March, and an article that does not say when it was written is asking to be believed on trust.
Portugal asks a D7 applicant to prove €920 a month — the national minimum wage, indexed to it and not to the IAS. It asks a golden visa investor to prove the same, which almost no page about the golden visa mentions. And since 19 May 2026 it asks for ten years of residence before citizenship, not five. Every figure below is quoted from the instrument that sets it, with the date the text was read.
Jurisdictions pt
The routes that cost the most money test income the least. Greece, Malta and the UAE ask investors to prove nothing about their income; Portugal is the one exception and almost nobody writing about it says so. Every threshold below is quoted from the instrument that sets it, and the cost-of-living half explains why one comparison table would be a lie.
Jurisdictions pt · gr · mt · ae · cy
Buying property gets you residency in far fewer places than the advertising suggests. Portugal removed property from its qualifying routes in 2023, Greece raised the threshold to €800,000 across half the country, and on Malta the property is one of five payments rather than the route itself. Five jurisdictions read against the statute: thresholds, the full cost on top of the threshold, real processing times, and the restrictions that get a permit revoked.
Jurisdictions pt · gr · mt · ae · cy