Golden visa income requirements, and what living there actually costs

The routes that cost the most money test income the least.

Buy €800,000 of property in Athens and Greece asks you to prove nothing whatsoever about what you earn. Put €500,000 of assets behind a Maltese permanent residence application and there is no income requirement in the regulations at all. Buy AED 2,000,000 of Dubai property and neither the federal authority nor the Land Department asks for a payslip. But apply to the same three countries as an ordinary person who works remotely or lives off investments, and you will be asked to document between €920 and €3,500 every month, indefinitely.

Portugal is the exception that almost no one writing about golden visas mentions, and it is the single most useful thing on this page: the Portuguese investment permit does not waive the means-of-subsistence test. The article that creates it disapplies exactly one requirement, and that requirement is the visa, not the income.

This piece has two halves. The first is what each jurisdiction makes you prove, quoted from the instrument that sets it. The second is what living there actually costs — and why putting four countries' household spending in one table would be a lie, even though everyone does it.

Golden visa income requirements: the routes side by side

Two things in that table are worth more than the numbers.

The first is the word "none". Every competing page handles a route with no income test by saying nothing about income, which a reader cannot distinguish from a page that simply did not cover it. It is worth stating plainly: on the Greek golden visa, the Maltese MPRP and the Emirati property route, no authority will ask what you earn.

The second is the last column. A threshold written into a statute is a different kind of fact from a threshold a government agency publishes on its own website, and only one of them needs a parliament to change it. Malta's €42,000 is the second kind. We say so in the Maltese section.

Portugal: the D7 income requirement is the minimum wage, and the golden visa does not escape it

Portugal sets no euro figure for residence income. It sets a percentage of the national minimum wage and lets that figure move on its own.

Portaria 1563/2007, article 2(2) fixes the scale: 100% of the minimum monthly wage for the first adult, 50% for each further adult, 30% for each child under 18 and each dependent adult child. Article 13 of the same order makes the update automatic, in step with the wage, so no new instrument is issued each year.

Decreto-Lei 139/2025 of 29 December, article 3, sets that wage for 2026: *"O valor da RMMG... é de € 920,00."* It took effect on 1 January 2026.

So, for 2026:

A couple with one child therefore documents €1,656 a month.

One correction worth making, because it is repeated everywhere. These thresholds are indexed to the RMMG, the minimum wage, and not to the IAS, the social support index. The IAS for 2026 is €537.13, set by Portaria 480-A/2025/1. Anyone quoting an IAS multiple for a Portuguese residence income test is anchoring to the wrong instrument, and the gap between the two is €383 a month.

Does the Portuguese golden visa waive proof of income? No, and here is the text

This is the claim on this page most likely to contradict what you read elsewhere, so it is set out in full.

Lei 23/2007, article 90-A(1)(a) — the investment residence permit — requires that applicants *"Preencham os requisitos gerais estabelecidos no artigo 77.º, com exceção da alínea a) do n.º 1"*: meet the general requirements of article 77, with the exception of subparagraph (a) of paragraph 1.

Article 77(1) lists those general requirements. Subparagraph (a) is possession of a valid residence visa. Subparagraph (d) is *"Posse de meios de subsistência, tal como definidos pela portaria a que se refere a alínea d) do n.º 1 do artigo 52.º"* — possession of means of subsistence, as defined by the order referred to in article 52(1)(d). That order is Portaria 1563/2007, the same one that produces the €920.

The exception in article 90-A is singular and explicit. It removes the visa. It does not remove the income test. An investor is therefore subject to the same means-of-subsistence proof as a retiree on a D7 — which is, in fairness, the lowest income bar of any route on this page.

We checked whether the 2025 reforms changed this. Lei 23/2007 was amended three times in 2025: Lei 9/2025 of 13 February, Lei 55-C/2025 of 22 July and Lei 61/2025 of 22 October. The amendment lists in the first and third name neither article 77 nor article 90-A, and the consolidated text incorporating all three still reads as quoted.

The D8 digital nomad visa: the widely quoted figure is not in any instrument

Article 61-B of Lei 23/2007 creates the digital nomad residence visa. It requires the applicant to demonstrate the employment relationship or the service contract. It contains no income figure and no multiple of the minimum wage.

The figure in general circulation is four times the minimum wage, which would be €3,680 a month in 2026. We could not trace it to any portaria, decreto or despacho. It appears on consultancy and law-firm pages and nowhere we could read in the legislation. That does not prove no such figure is applied — an immigration authority can operate a published checklist that is not itself legislation — but it does mean nobody should present €3,680 as Portuguese law, and we do not.

Greece: €3,500 a month for the FIP visa, and nothing at all for the golden visa

Greece runs the widest gap on this page between its investment route and its ordinary ones.

The financially independent person permit requires proof of *«κατ' ελάχιστο τρεισήμισι χιλιάδες (3.500) ευρώ μηνιαίως»* — at minimum three and a half thousand euros monthly. The amount *«προσαυξάνεται κατά 20% για τη σύζυγο και κατά 15% για κάθε τέκνο»*: increased by 20% for a spouse and 15% for each child. The permit sits in article 163 of Law 5038/2023; the figure is set by joint ministerial decision KYA 225679/2024, article 1(ι), gazetted at ΦΕΚ Β΄ 5223 of 17 September 2024.

The digital nomad permit uses the same €3,500 with the same 20% and 15% uplifts, but the figure sits in the statute itself, at article 68(2)(ε) of Law 5038/2023, rather than in a ministerial decision. That is a meaningful difference in how easily it moves.

For scale: the Greek statutory minimum wage from 1 April 2026 is €920 a month, set by ministerial decision 8934 of 27 March 2026 at ΦΕΚ Β΄ 1759. Greece asks a financially independent applicant to prove 3.8 times its own minimum wage.

Greece golden visa income requirement: there is not one

The residence permit for investment in real estate, article 100 of Law 5038/2023, imposes no income test. We confirmed this two ways rather than by absence of mention:

• The text of article 100 contains no reference to income or to sufficient resources.
• mitos.gov.gr, the Greek National Registry of Administrative Procedures — a government source, not a commentary — publishes the document list for the permit. It is title deeds, land registry proof, a notarial certificate, engineer's reports, private health insurance, the E9 property declaration and a photograph. Income evidence is not on it.

The investment thresholds themselves, for context: €800,000 in Attica, Thessaloniki, Mykonos, Thira and islands over 3,100 inhabitants; €400,000 elsewhere; €250,000 for change-of-use conversions and listed buildings.

So the arithmetic of the Greek system is this. Prove €3,500 a month, forever, and you may live there. Or transfer €400,000 once, prove nothing about your income, and you may live there. The second is the expensive option and the undemanding one.

Malta: €42,000 a year for the nomad permit, and a capital test rather than an income test for permanent residence

Malta permanent residence income requirement: it does not exist

The Malta Permanent Residence Programme is governed by S.L. 217.26, as amended by Legal Notices 310 of 2024 and 146 of 2025. Regulation 9(2) sets a test on capital, not income: the applicant must hold assets *"having a value of not less than five hundred thousand euro (€500,000), out of which a minimum of one hundred and fifty thousand euro (€150,000) shall be in the form of financial assets"*, or alternatively €650,000 of which at least €75,000 is financial.

There is no euro income requirement anywhere in the instrument. The regulations carry a qualitative requirement that an applicant have stable and regular resources sufficient to maintain themselves without recourse to Malta's social assistance system, and no figure attaches to it. Any page publishing a euro "MPRP income requirement" is publishing something that is not in the law.

The Gozo and southern Malta discount has been abolished

This is the correction most likely to matter to a reader comparing prices, and most of the market has not caught up.

The current regulation 3 defines a qualifying owned property as one purchased *"at a consideration of not less than three hundred and seventy-five thousand euro (€375,000) for a property situated in Malta or Gozo"*, and a qualifying rented property as one *"taken on lease for a rent of not less than fourteen thousand euro (€14,000) per annum for a property situated in Malta or Gozo"*.

One national figure, both islands. The original L.N. 121 of 2021 did differentiate — €350,000 in Malta against €300,000 in the south of Malta or Gozo, and €12,000 against €10,000 in rent — and L.N. 146 of 2025 removed the distinction. Pages still advertising a cheaper Gozo threshold are quoting a superseded instrument.

The rest of the Maltese cost, for completeness: an administrative fee of €60,000, a government contribution of €37,000 — now identical whether you buy or rent, where it once differed sharply — €7,500 per adult dependant and a €2,000 donation to a registered NGO.

The nomad residence permit: €42,000, and it is policy rather than law

Malta's Nomad Residence Permit requires *"a minimum gross yearly income of €42,000"*, with income evidenced for at least five cumulative months before the application. Applicants who applied before 1 April 2024 keep the earlier €32,400.

The threshold is not in any legal notice. The permit's only subsidiary legislation, S.L. 123.210, governs the 10% income-tax treatment rather than eligibility. €42,000 is published by the Residency Malta Agency on its own pages, which makes it an administrative figure. It can change without an instrument being laid before parliament, and it has: it rose by nearly 30% in 2024.

For scale, Malta's statutory minimum wage from 1 January 2026 is €229.44 a week for workers aged 18 and over, which is about €11,900 a year. The nomad permit asks for 3.5 times it.

UAE: USD 5,000 a month to work remotely, nothing to buy in

The golden visa through property requires property worth at least AED 2,000,000 and imposes no income condition. The federal authority states the requirement as a *"Letter from the Real Estate Registration Department confirming investor's ownership of property worth at least AED 2,000,000"*; the Dubai Land Department states *"The value of the property is 2 million AED, wholly owned by the investor"*. Neither service page lists salary, income or savings among its conditions — only title, a passport valid six months and health insurance.

The virtual working programme, Dubai's remote-work visa, requires employees to *"earn a minimum salary of USD 5,000 per month"*, and company owners to *"have an average monthly income of USD 5,000 per month"*.

If you have read USD 3,500 somewhere, that figure is stale. It is still being republished by pages ranking in the top three for the query. The official page now says 5,000. We could not source the date the change took effect, so we do not state one.

The retirement visa for applicants aged 55 and over with 15 years of prior service is stated by the Dubai residency authority in terms of property of at least AED 1,000,000, a deposit of at least AED 1,000,000, or fixed annual income of at least AED 240,000 evidenced by six months of bank statements. We report those figures with a caveat we cannot resolve: the official page is a machine translation and does not make unambiguous whether the property, deposit and income conditions are alternatives or partly cumulative. Do not plan around a clean "or" without asking the authority.

The UAE has no minimum wage, which removes the reference point

There is no statutory minimum wage in the United Arab Emirates. Article 27 of Federal Decree-Law 33 of 2021 is an enabling power — *"The Cabinet may... issue a resolution setting the minimum wage for Workers"* — and it has not been exercised generally. Cabinet Resolution 1 of 2022, the executive regulation, contains no minimum-wage article.

The AED 6,000 monthly figure now circulating applies to UAE nationals in the private sector under an Emiratisation measure. It is not a general wage floor and it does not reach the expatriate workforce this page is about.

That matters for the comparison. In Portugal and Greece, the residence income threshold can be read against a legal minimum wage — one times it in Portugal, 3.8 times it in Greece. In the UAE there is no such denominator, so USD 5,000 a month cannot be placed on the same scale as anything.

What living there actually costs, and why one table would be a lie

Here is where most pages on this topic stop being useful.

The standard construction puts four countries' living costs in a single table. It cannot be done honestly with national data, and this is why: the four national household budget surveys were run in four different years, by four different offices, on four different methods. Greece's latest wave is 2024. Portugal's is 2022–2023. Malta's is 2015. The UAE has published nothing since 2014. A table of those four numbers looks like a comparison of four countries and is actually a comparison of four vintages.

The one instrument that is genuinely comparable

Eurostat's comparative price level index is computed by one office, on one method, for the same year, across all member states. It expresses the price level of household final consumption against an EU average of 100.

Read that as: Portugal and Greece sit roughly 14% below the EU average price level, Malta about 8% below. Eurostat flags the 2025 round as preliminary and subject to revision when the calculation completes in December 2026, so the two 2025 figures may move.

The UAE cannot be placed on this scale at all. It is not in the index, and there is no equivalent series. Every four-country comparison you will read that includes Dubai has solved this by using a crowdsourced aggregator for all four, which trades comparability for the appearance of it.

Greece: the only current, official household figure of the four

The Hellenic Statistical Authority's Household Budget Survey for 2024, published on 25 September 2025 from a sample of 6,198 households, puts average monthly household expenditure at €1,724.54, up 3.6% on the previous year's €1,663.82.

Put that beside the FIP threshold and the comparison becomes concrete: Greece asks a financially independent applicant to prove roughly twice what the average Greek household actually spends.

On rents, Greece publishes direction but not level. Residential rents rose 6.8% in the year to July 2026; the housing group as a whole rose 8.8% and was the largest single contributor to headline inflation of 3.4%. There is no standalone rent index in euros — rents appear only as a consumer-price sub-index — so anyone quoting an average Greek rent in euros is not quoting an official Greek statistic.

Malta: a legal rent floor with no rent statistic to measure it against

Malta's most recent published household budget survey covers 2015 and puts average annual expenditure at €22,346. A new wave ran from November 2024 to November 2025 and had not been published as of 28 August 2026.

We are not going to inflate an eleven-year-old figure to today. That would be interpolation dressed as data, which is the practice this site exists to be the alternative to. The figure is published here with its year attached and nothing else done to it.

Malta publishes rent inflation but no rent level: the rent sub-index rose 3.6% in the year to July 2026, inside a housing group up 6.8% — the fastest-rising group in the index. Its residential property price index, at 104.19 in the first quarter of 2026 and up 6.7% year on year, measures purchase prices rather than rents.

Which produces a genuine oddity worth naming: the MPRP sets a legal rent floor of €14,000 a year, and there is no official Maltese statistic that would tell you whether that is above or below the market.

Portugal: the figure exists, and we could not read it at source

Portugal's statistical office published the results of its 2022–2023 household expenditure survey on 20 December 2023, and a quarterly median rent series that resumed on 26 June 2026 after being suspended earlier in the year.

We could not open either release. Every route to the office's own server failed at the network level across two attempts on two different days, and the fallbacks — the regional statistics office, the Eurostat household budget dataset, the main national data portal — either block the document paths, carry no Portugal-specific value in readable text, or do not carry the indicator.

So the position is this: figures for Portuguese household spending and median rent are in circulation, they originate from a real official release, and we have not seen the release. They are therefore not on this page. The comparative price level index above carries the Portuguese comparison instead, and it is the better instrument anyway.

Dubai: a rental index that publishes no rents

The UAE is the weakest link in every comparison of these five jurisdictions, and no page we found says so.

The Dubai Statistics Centre completed a household income and expenditure survey in 2024 with an 87% response rate and announced it in February 2025. As of 28 August 2026 the results are unpublished, with no publication date given. The last published wave is 2014. The federal statistics authority publishes no household expenditure survey at all.

On rents, the Dubai Land Department's Smart Rental Index, launched in January 2025, is widely cited as a source of Dubai rents. It is not one. It is a valuation and rent-increase-permission tool: it classifies buildings and produces the permitted increase ladder under Decree 34 of 2013, where *"Rental increases start at 0% for rents that are less than 10% below the average market rent and can reach up to 20% for rents that exceed the average by more than 40%."* It does not publish rent levels.

The Land Department's Residential Rental Performance Index does publish figures, on a hedonic regression model. The values we could retrieve carry 2022 reference periods. In a market that has moved as far as Dubai's has since 2022, republishing those as current rents would be worse than publishing nothing.

There is one more gap worth flagging because it is quoted often: the only Dubai consumer-price housing weight we could retrieve, 43.70 per 100, sits on a 2007 base year. The federal methodology document confirms weights were updated from 2007 to 2014 but publishes no numeric division weights. A 2007-base housing weight describes a pre-crash rental market and should not be presented as today's housing share of spending.

If you have income but no capital, and if you have capital but no income

The whole decision, reduced.

Capital but not documented income. The investment routes are built for you, and three of the four will not ask what you earn. Greece at €400,000 outside the expensive zones is the lowest entry with no income test at all. Malta tests €500,000 of assets rather than income. The UAE tests AED 2,000,000 of property. Portugal is the one place where capital does not exempt you from the income question, though the amount asked is the smallest on this page.

Documented income but not capital. Portugal's D7 is the cheapest income threshold in this comparison by a wide margin: €920 a month, the national minimum wage, with €460 for a spouse and €276 per child. Greece asks nearly four times that. Malta's nomad permit asks €42,000 a year and is a temporary permit rather than a path to permanence in the way the MPRP is.

Neither, but a salary from a foreign employer. The UAE virtual working programme at USD 5,000 a month and the Greek digital nomad permit at €3,500 a month are the two doors, and neither requires you to move capital.

What none of these tell you is what the country costs. A threshold is a legal test, not a budget. Greece will admit you on proof of €3,500 a month into an economy where the average household spends €1,725 — and Portugal will admit you on €920 into an economy at almost exactly the same price level. Those two facts sit oddly together, and they are both true.

Frequently asked questions

Where these figures come from

Every figure on this page is traceable to the instrument or dataset that states it. The legal thresholds come from the Diário da República for Portugal, the Government Gazette and the Ministry of Migration and Asylum for Greece, the consolidated subsidiary legislation published by Residency Malta for Malta, and the federal legislation portal, the Identity and Citizenship Authority and the Dubai Land Department for the UAE. The cost figures come from Eurostat, the Hellenic Statistical Authority and Malta's National Statistics Office.

Where a figure could not be read at its source we have said so on the spot rather than filling the gap: the Portuguese household spending and rent figures, the effective date of the Emirati remote-work increase, and the exact structure of the Dubai retirement visa conditions are all named as unverified above.

Cyprus is absent from this page. Its criteria could not be read in a primary source, and adding a fifth jurisdiction on secondary material to an article about the difference between primary and secondary sources would be self-defeating.

We do not sell property and we are not lawyers. This site compares rules and publishes the instrument beside the figure. If you have read the above and want to act on it, the next step is a licensed firm in the jurisdiction you have chosen, and finding you one is what we do.