Let Europe Kill The Golden Visa
You never needed them anyway.
Spain ended its Golden Visa in April 2025.
For a decade, the Golden Visa was the standard answer for an American with savings and a plan to leave. After buying property, you got residency, with a passport a few years down the line.
Those days are (mostly) over.
If you need a refresher on the difference between a Golden Visa and residency, check this article.
Spain is gone, Malta’s citizenship route was struck down by an EU court, and the programs still standing cost two to three times what they did in 2021.
If you are planning a move in the next few years, the residency advice you read in 2023 is already out of date.
But this is not all bad news.
The residency routes that actually suit a retiree are still wide open, and most of them never required a large upfront investment.
This is what this article is about. Actionable advice, instead of telling you things are “bad” or scaring you about the world ending.
So today we are going to look at what changed, and what still works.
Which Golden Visa deals are already dead, and which ones just got expensive
Why Portugal’s Golden Visa stopped being worth the money
The income-based routes that do the same job without a €500k price tag
I will start with the deals that are already gone.
What closed, and what just got expensive
Two of Europe’s most popular programs no longer exist.
Spain ended their program on April 3, 2025 and stopped taking new applications. Current holders keep their status while everyone applying after that date missed it.
Malta offered full citizenship, a full EU passport, for a contribution of around €750,000. In April 2025 the European Court of Justice ruled the scheme illegal, and Malta has to wind it down.
A residence permit is a national matter, but citizenship in one EU country is citizenship of the whole union, with all 27 member states.
The court said that is not something a member state can sell.
The programs still running mostly got more expensive. For years, Greece was Europe’s cheapest entry point, with a €250,000 property purchase for a five-year residence permit. That ended on September 1, 2024.
Greece now has three price tiers.
The high-demand zones cost €800,000, which covers Athens and the islands people actually want, like Mykonos and Santorini. Everywhere else is at €400,000, and the old €250,000 tier only applies for narrow restoration projects.
In 2025, the first full year under the new prices, Greece took 6,978 new Golden Visa applications. That is down about a quarter from 9,391 in 2024.
Part of the “Greek drop” is not just the price though.
Greece also banned short-term rentals on Golden Visa properties, so buyers can no longer put them on Airbnb, which eliminated the investment case for a lot of applicants.
The major programs and where they stand today:
Spain: €500,000 property route, closed entirely in April 2025
Greece: €250,000 flat, now €800,000 in the high-demand areas
Italy: Flat tax for new residents climbed from €100,000 a year to €300,000 (as of January 2026)
Hungary: relaunched in 2024, then dropped its €500,000 property option within a year
Malta: citizenship near €750,000, ruled illegal and ending
Takeaway: Since 2024, major programs are either closed or two to three times more expensive. A good residency deal is still out there, but only for a window, so timing is crucial.
PS: Looking to open a bank account outside of the US? Check this video for more info.
Portugal’s Golden Visa is open but barely moving
Portugal is still one of the best places in Europe to retire.
The D7 visa, the income-based route most retirees use, works exactly as it did before.
Everything that follows is about one thing only:
The Portugal Golden Visa.
The Golden Visa sold a clear promise. Once you put in the money, and a few years later you had residency and a clear path to an EU passport. The property route that drew most buyers closed in 2023, so what is left is mainly the fund route, €500,000 into a qualifying investment fund.
For that kind of money, the promise was always speed.
Five years to an EU passport, and you barely had to set foot in the country.
That promise broke in two places.
First, the wait.
Portugal’s immigration agency, AIMA, is still clearing a backlog of more than 400,000 immigration files. The legal limit to process one is 90 days, but real waits now run to two years or more for a first residence card. The government has promised to clear the backlog in 2026 (it made the same promise in 2025).
Second, the timeline.
In May 2026 Portugal signed a law extending the wait for citizenship from five years to ten. For a new applicant, that ten-year timeline only starts once the first residence card is issued.
The backlog pushes the starting line two years out before the count even begins.
For a buyer who plans to retire in Portugal, the passport timeline is a problem.
A 63-year-old who buys in today is realistically looking at an EU passport somewhere past 75, once the backlog and the ten-year clock both run their course.
Takeaway: Portugal’s Golden Visa is technically open, but the fast passport it was built to sell is gone, and €500,000 now buys a decade-long wait for an EU passport.
Most retirees never needed a Golden Visa
None of this should change your plan.
The Golden Visa is an investment product. It answers one question:
How to turn a large sum of money into legal status, with as little disruption to your life as possible.
A retiree planning a real move wants the legal right to live in the country they have chosen. That right is residency, and most countries grant it on the strength of steady income. Once you show a pension or passive income above a set threshold, and you get permission to live there.
Portugal’s D7 works this way, and so do retirement visas across Latin America and Southeast Asia.
This is why residency comes first and the passport later.
Residency is the part you actually use. It is the right to wake up in your chosen country, year after year, for as long as you like. A passport is a separate and slower project, and for a retiree it is usually optional. Golden Visa marketing always leads with the passport.
Why?
Because selling a Golden Visa makes more money than advising on a “simple” residency path.
I hold residency in five countries, and only one of them came from a Golden Visa. The income-based routes were always there, usually cheaper and far less marketed.
However, if you only remember one sentence from this article for far, make it this:
The right time to arrange residency is while you still have options open.
The good routes are still wide open
Set the golden visas aside, and the list of options is still long.
Europe still has income-based residence visas.
Spain has its non-lucrative visa and Italy has its elective residence visa, both built for people living on savings or a pension.
Latin America is wide open.
Panama’s Friendly Nations Visa still takes Americans, and Uruguay grants permanent residency to anyone who can show about $1,500 a month in steady income.
Southeast Asia runs its own long-stay routes, including Thailand’s Elite Visa and the ten-year LTR. There are more working routes than any one person could use, and a single Golden Visa closure in Europe barely makes a dent.
And you do not have to choose just one.
The strongest setups use more than one country.
Get residency where you want to live, and route your banking through a jurisdiction better suited to your finances.
A second residency, somewhere else again, sits in reserve, so no single rule change can strand you.
In practice it can look ordinary.
Retirement in Portugal on the D7 and keep your banking in a country chosen for how well it handles cross-border money (e.g. Switzerland). A LATAM or Asian residency sits in the background, unused, until the day you might want it.
All of this rewards moving sooner.
Why sooner?
Because the rules change constantly.
Spain, Greece, Portugal, and Hungary all rewrote their Golden Visa rules within two years. The income-based routes are not gone, but their thresholds and tax perks get revised constantly.
A route that looks generous today may not look that way in a year.
Takeaway: Good residency routes are everywhere, and the smart move is to lock one in while it is still a good deal.
Conclusion
That’s it.
The “cheap”, and fast Golden Visa deals are mostly gone. Two of the biggest programs are finished, and the survivors cost two to three times more.
A plan built on income and residency never needed a Golden Visa, even if you don’t read this in the marketing brochure
The routes that work are open and generous right now. The rules move every year, so move early.
One thing you can do this week:
Write down the monthly income you can prove on paper, pension plus any passive income.
That single number decides which of these routes are open to you.
If you have questions about your specific situation, drop them in the comments.
I read them all.
Appreciate you being here,
— Ben
PS
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For the record, Malta’s program that was struck down by the court was not a “Golden Visa” - it was citizenship by investment.