The “buy a second residence or passport” market has changed more in the last five years than in the previous twenty. A wave of closures, court rulings and price hikes has quietly retired some of the most famous schemes — yet stale “best golden visa” articles still list programmes that were abolished years ago. To cut through it, we built a status tracker that grades every major programme open, tiered or closed, with its current minimum and the date of its latest change. Explore the full data set in our new Golden & Investor Visa Tracker.
The big closures
The single most dramatic move came from Spain, which abolished its golden visa entirely under Organic Law 1/2025, effective 3 April 2025 — no new investor-residence applications are accepted. It joins a long list: the United Kingdom closed its Tier 1 (Investor) route on 17 February 2022; Ireland ended its Immigrant Investor Programme on 15 February 2023; Cyprus terminated its citizenship-by-investment scheme back on 1 November 2020; Bulgaria abolished its citizenship route on 5 April 2022; Montenegro wound up its CBI on 31 December 2022; and Australia scrapped its Significant Investor Visa in the 2024 migration overhaul.
Malta: the EU’s last golden passport, struck down in court
On 29 April 2025 the European Court of Justice ruled that Malta’s citizenship-by-investment scheme — under which a contribution of up to €750,000 could buy an EU passport — was unlawful, ending the last “golden passport” programme in the European Union. Malta’s separate Permanent Residence Programme (the MPRP), which grants residence rather than citizenship, remains open. It is the clearest signal yet that the EU views selling citizenship as incompatible with the meaning of Union citizenship.
What is still open — but more expensive, and more tiered
Plenty of routes survive, but they have moved upmarket. Portugal’s golden visa is open via investment funds (€500,000) or a cultural-heritage donation (€200,000) — but its real-estate option ended in October 2023, and the path to citizenship has been stretched from five years to ten. Greece split its programme into price bands in 2024: €800,000 in prime areas such as Athens, Thessaloniki, Mykonos and Santorini; €400,000 elsewhere; and €250,000 for commercial-to-residential conversions and listed-building restorations. Hungary’s Guest Investor route runs on a €250,000 accredited fund unit, and Italy’s investor visa starts at €250,000 for a startup — neither is property-based.
Citizenship for less: the Caribbean and beyond
For an actual passport rather than residence, the Caribbean remains the value play. The five programmes harmonised a US$200,000 minimum floor in mid-2024: Dominica sits at US$200,000, Antigua & Barbuda at US$230,000, Grenada at US$235,000 (the only one with US E-2 treaty access), St Lucia at US$240,000 and St Kitts & Nevis at US$250,000. Elsewhere, Türkiye grants citizenship for US$400,000 in real estate, Egypt for a US$250,000 contribution, and — most novel of all — El Salvador’s “Freedom Visa” offers citizenship for a US$1,000,000 investment in Bitcoin or Tether, the world’s first crypto-funded citizenship programme.
Watch the deadlines
Some of the open programmes are about to get pricier. Panama’s Qualified Investor route still offers permanent residence for US$300,000 in real estate, but that floor rises to US$500,000 after 15 October 2026. The takeaway: thresholds drift, deadlines bite, and programmes vanish — so a figure is only as good as its date. Every row in our tracker is dated and sourced, and we re-verify it; compare it with our Digital Nomad Visas by Income study if you want a route to live somewhere without the seven-figure cheque.
How we verify this
Each programme’s status and floor is checked against the highest available authority — government portals, the programme’s own rules, and court judgments such as the ECJ’s April 2025 Malta ruling — then cross-checked across immigration-law and industry trackers and dated. Our full process is in our Editorial & Data Standards.