A second passport used to be the preserve of the very wealthy. It is not any more: a handful of countries grant citizenship — an actual passport, not just residence — in exchange for an investment that now starts around US$115,000, and one of them issues it in as little as one to two months. But the headline price is only half the story. The other half is what the passport is worth: how many countries it gets you into visa-free. We built a Cheapest & Fastest Second Passport ranking that scores every open programme on all three axes — cost, speed and reach.
The cheapest and the fastest
On raw price, Nauru’s new Economic & Climate Resilience Citizenship (launched November 2024) is the lowest at US$115,000, narrowly ahead of Vanuatu at US$130,000. Vanuatu is also the fastest passport in the world — often issued in just 1–2 months. In the Caribbean, Dominica sets the lowest donation floor at US$200,000, with Antigua & Barbuda (US$230,000), Grenada (US$235,000), St Lucia (US$240,000) and St Kitts & Nevis (US$250,000) close behind, all processing in a few months to under a year.
Cheap can mean weak
Price and power do not move together. Egypt’s US$250,000 citizenship asks for no residence or language — but the Egyptian passport opens the fewest destinations of any programme here (around 49, on the Henley Passport Index). The Caribbean is where value concentrates: a St Kitts & Nevis passport reaches roughly 157 destinations, Antigua 154 and Grenada 147 — and Grenada is the only Caribbean citizenship with US E-2 treaty access, plus visa-free China.
Reach can be revoked
The cautionary tale is Vanuatu. It is the fastest and among the cheapest — but the European Council fully suspended its Schengen visa-waiver agreement over exactly this golden-passport scheme, so a Vanuatu passport no longer opens Europe visa-free, and its Henley reach (around 87) sits far below the Caribbean despite a similar price. A passport’s value is only as current as the politics around it — which is why we date every figure.
The outlier: paying in Bitcoin
The most novel programme is El Salvador’s “Freedom Visa” — citizenship for a US$1,000,000 investment in Bitcoin or Tether, the world’s first crypto-funded citizenship, capped at 1,000 grants a year. It is by far the most expensive option here, but it points to where this market is heading. Note that Malta’s old route to an EU passport is gone: the EU Court of Justice struck it down in April 2025, so there is no longer a direct citizenship-by-investment path to the European Union — the full status picture is in our Golden & Investor Visa Tracker.
How we ranked this
We include only open citizenship-by-investment programmes (residence “golden visas” are tracked separately). Cost is the cheapest single-applicant route; timelines are typical published ranges; and visa-free reach uses one consistent source — the Henley Passport Index 2026 — so the rows are genuinely comparable. Our full process is in our Editorial & Data Standards; to rank passport strength on its own, see our Passport Power Index.