The Best Golden Visa Programs in 2026: Investing in an International Lifestyle
April 10, 2026
Spain's golden visa is closed and Malta's CBI is dead. Here's an accurate 2026 look at which residency-by-investment programs are actually open, and how they compare.
If you researched golden visas a few years ago, throw that research out. Two of the programs that used to anchor every “best golden visas” list, Spain’s real estate route and Malta’s citizenship-by-investment scheme, no longer exist in the form you read about. Spain stopped accepting new golden visa applications tied to real estate in April 2025. Malta’s citizenship-by-investment program was shut down in 2025 after the EU’s top court ruled against it. Anyone still pointing you toward either one is working from an outdated list, not the current rulebook.
That volatility is the first thing to understand about this market: golden visas are policy products, not fixed contracts. Governments open them to attract capital, then narrow or close them once the political mood shifts (usually around housing prices, since real estate-linked visas tend to draw the most local resentment). The programs below are the ones that are plausibly still open and accepting applicants in 2026, but “plausibly” is doing real work in that sentence: verify current status directly with the relevant government agency before you wire any money.
Golden visa versus citizenship by investment: get this distinction right first
The two are frequently confused, and the confusion costs people money and years of misplaced expectations.
A golden visa (residency by investment) grants you the right to live in a country, and often to travel visa-free within its regional bloc, in exchange for an investment: real estate, a government fund, a business, or a donation. Citizenship is not part of the initial deal. It’s a separate, later application, filed under the country’s ordinary naturalization rules, after you’ve held residency for a set number of years and typically met physical presence and, sometimes, language requirements.
Citizenship by investment (CBI) skips residency and sells the passport directly. It’s faster (often a matter of months rather than years) and the applicant pool today is much smaller than it used to be: mainly a handful of Caribbean nations (Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia), plus a few non-Caribbean outliers. Malta’s CBI program was the highest-profile EU entry in this category, and its 2025 shutdown, following a Court of Justice of the European Union ruling that selling citizenship is incompatible with EU membership obligations, removed the only direct citizenship-by-investment route into the European Union.
For a deeper comparison of how these two paths differ in cost, timeline, and what you actually end up holding at the end, see our explainer on golden visas versus citizenship by investment.
What actually happened to Spain and Malta
Worth stating plainly, since so much content online still gets this wrong:
- Spain. The government closed its golden visa program to new real estate-based applicants in April 2025, citing pressure on housing affordability in cities like Barcelona and Madrid. Existing permit holders were grandfathered under transition rules, but if you’re reading a 2026 roundup that lists Spain as a live option for new investors, that roundup hasn’t been updated. Spain’s closure is also the clearest cautionary example in this space: a program that looked stable for over a decade can be gone within a legislative session.
- Malta. Malta’s citizenship-by-investment scheme (marketed for years as one of the fastest routes to an EU passport) was struck down after the European Commission challenged it before the Court of Justice of the European Union, which ruled that granting citizenship in exchange for predetermined payments, without a genuine link to the country, breaches the principle of sincere cooperation underpinning EU citizenship. Malta shut the program down in 2025. It is not a current option, and no legitimate advisor will tell you otherwise.
Both closures underline the same lesson: treat any golden visa or CBI program as a snapshot, not a guarantee. Confirm status with the issuing government (a ministry, an immigration agency, or the governing legislation) before you commit capital.
The programs that are plausibly still open in 2026
The countries below have residency-by-investment routes that, as of this writing, remain active, though minimums and rules shift often enough that you should confirm the exact current figures with the relevant agency rather than treating anything here as a quote.
Portugal
Portugal restructured its golden visa in 2023, removing real estate as a qualifying investment for most applicants. What’s left leans toward investment funds, business investment, job creation, and cultural or scientific donations, with minimums typically in the hundreds of thousands of euros depending on the category. Physical presence requirements remain light (a matter of days per year rather than months), which is why Portugal is still frequently cited as one of the more accessible routes to eventual EU citizenship. The path to citizenship runs through several years of legal residency, not an automatic grant.
Greece
Greece’s program remains real estate-anchored, and minimum investment thresholds have climbed more than once as demand concentrated in Athens and a handful of islands, with higher minimums now applying in those higher-demand zones and a lower tier still available elsewhere. Greece is typically the more affordable EU golden visa entry point, though “affordable” is relative and the higher-tier zones have pushed the effective minimum up for a lot of applicants. Like Portugal, it grants residency first; citizenship is a separate, later naturalization step with its own residency-period and, generally, language requirements.
Italy
Italy’s investor visa runs on a menu structure: different investment types (government bonds, an innovative startup, an established company, or a philanthropic donation) carry different minimums, generally ranging from the low hundreds of thousands of euros for a startup investment up toward a couple million for government bonds. It grants a renewable residence permit rather than instant citizenship, and Italy’s ordinary naturalization timeline for residents is long by European standards, so this route suits people who value the Italian residency itself, not people looking for the fastest EU passport.
Other jurisdictions worth researching directly
Several non-EU and smaller-market programs (in the Caribbean, the Gulf, and parts of Latin America and Asia-Pacific) continue to offer residency-by-investment or CBI routes with their own tradeoffs on speed, cost, and what the resulting document actually gets you at the border. These move even faster than the EU programs above, both in rules and in visa-free access for the passports involved, so they need firm, current-year confirmation rather than a rundown here.
A general comparison (verify current figures before acting)
| Country / Program | General investment range | General timeline to residency / citizenship |
|---|---|---|
| Portugal (golden visa, fund/business routes) | Typically in the hundreds of thousands of euros | Residency near-immediate; citizenship eligibility after several years of legal residency |
| Greece (golden visa, real estate) | Typically in the low-to-mid hundreds of thousands of euros, higher in high-demand zones | Residency near-immediate; citizenship eligibility after a longer residency period, roughly a decade |
| Italy (investor visa) | Roughly low hundreds of thousands to a couple million euros, depending on category | Residency near-immediate; Italy’s ordinary naturalization clock for residents runs long |
| Spain (real estate golden visa) | N/A: closed to new applicants since April 2025 | Not applicable; existing holders only |
| Malta (citizenship by investment) | N/A: program shut down in 2025 | Not applicable |
| Caribbean CBI programs (several nations) | Generally a lower outlay than EU golden visas, in the low-to-mid hundreds of thousands of dollars | Typically months, not years, to citizenship |
These ranges are deliberately approximate. Every one of these programs adjusts minimums, qualifying investment types, and processing rules with little warning, and a number that was accurate six months ago may not be accurate today.
What golden visas actually get you
Strip away the marketing and the honest list of benefits looks like this:
- Immediate legal residency in the host country, and often visa-free movement within its regional bloc while you hold the permit.
- Optionality, not obligation. Most programs don’t require you to live there full time, so you’re buying the right to relocate, not a mandate to.
- A slower, separate path to citizenship, gated behind the country’s normal naturalization process, its own residency and (often) language requirements, and its own timeline that has nothing to do with how much you invested.
- Exposure to policy risk. The investment is real; the program terms around it are not fixed. Spain and Malta are the two biggest recent proof points.
None of that makes golden visas a bad idea. It makes them a specific tool, for people who have the capital, want residency now, and are comfortable treating citizenship as a five-to-ten-year follow-on goal rather than the immediate deliverable.
Where this fits if you’re weighing your options
For most people, an investment route is one of several possible paths to a second residency or citizenship, not automatically the best one. If you have a parent, grandparent, or in some cases a great-grandparent from a country with a workable descent regime, that path is typically far cheaper and doesn’t require six figures of liquid capital. If you don’t have that option, or you need residency faster than a descent case can move, a golden visa becomes a much more reasonable comparison point.
Second Pass’s eligibility quiz checks both: it runs your family history against the descent regimes we track, and if investment is genuinely your best or only route, it tells you that too, rather than defaulting to whichever program has the best marketing budget this year.
Take the Second Pass eligibility quiz
Informational only, not legal or tax advice. Golden visa program terms change frequently; verify current details with the relevant government agency before acting.