The Golden Visa Is Dying. Here's What's Replacing It.

For the better part of two decades, the golden-visa product was remarkably consistent across Europe: invest a qualifying sum — usually in real estate, occasionally in sovereign bonds or business formation — and receive a renewable residence permit that counted toward naturalisation. The math worked. The political tolerance did not.

Portugal pulled the keystone first. Law 56/2023, the "Mais Habitação" housing package, removed real-estate investment as a qualifying route for the Autorização de Residência para Atividade de Investimento — the ARI programme, popularly the golden visa — effective October 2023. The precipitating data was local: the Portuguese government's own statistics service showed Lisbon house prices up roughly 70% between 2017 and 2023, with the golden-visa programme identified as a contributing pressure even though direct ARI-linked purchases represented a minority share. Political economy rarely waits for causation to be established.

Ireland closed its Immigrant Investor Programme in February 2023 with less drama and less public argument, citing operational risk and a shift in policy priorities. The IIP had quietly grown since 2012 to process around €1.25 billion in total investment, with roughly 85% of applicants originating from China. Spain followed with a staged wind-down: the Anti-Fraud Law amendments in early 2024 signaled the direction, and the full closure of the real-estate investment route under the golden-visa programme completed in April 2025. The remaining Spanish investment routes — €1 million in Spanish company shares or €2 million in public debt — remain technically open but are used by a tiny fraction of past applicants.

What has actually replaced these routes, for the people who were using them, is not obvious and depends heavily on the applicant's profile.

For investors seeking European tax residency and eventual EU citizenship, the remaining options are narrower and less uniform. Greece's golden visa remains operative, though thresholds doubled to €800,000 in Athens, Thessaloniki, Mykonos, and Santorini in August 2024. Malta's citizenship-by-investment programme faces an ongoing European Court of Justice case that will likely force major reform before 2027. Hungary has relaunched a more restrictive residency-by-investment programme. None of these is a like-for-like substitute for the Portuguese or Spanish routes at their peak.

For applicants who were using the golden visa as a path to talent mobility — and this cohort was always larger than the pure-investment narrative suggested — the replacement story is actually stronger than the predecessor. Germany's Skilled Immigration Act amendments, which came into full effect in March 2024, consolidated the Blue Card, the Opportunity Card, and several ancillary permits into a markedly more liberal framework. The Blue Card threshold was lowered to €48,300 gross annual salary in 2025, with a shortage-occupation reduction to €43,759 covering most ICT and engineering roles. Permanent residence now vests at 48 months — 27 months with B1 German — replacing the older 33-month requirement that deterred many applicants.

The Netherlands' Highly Skilled Migrant programme has been the quiet European success story. The IND issued around 41,000 HSM permits in 2024, with a two-week decision target that, per IND published performance statistics, it consistently hits. The salary thresholds — €5,688 per month for applicants over 30 as of 2025, €4,171 for under-30s, and €3,015 for recent graduates — are meaningful but well below Blue Card equivalents. Employers must be IND-recognised sponsors, a filter that keeps quality high and processing fast.

Ireland's Critical Skills Employment Permit, which serves a similar function to the Dutch HSM, processed roughly 23,000 permits in 2024 per Department of Enterprise figures, with a four-week decision target. The minimum threshold is €32,000 for designated critical-skills occupations and €64,000 for non-list roles.

These pathways are materially different from golden visas in their underlying proposition. They require a job, a skill, a sponsor. They do not accept a bank wire. What they offer, in exchange, is faster processing, clearer residency terms, and a far more stable political trajectory. No European government has indicated any serious intent to close these routes; several have expanded them.

The applicant profile that wins out under the new settlement is the skilled professional with a firm job offer. The profile that loses is the passive investor who wanted residency without employment ties. For that latter group, the remaining European options are increasingly expensive, increasingly scrutinised, and — on current trajectory — unlikely to survive the decade in recognizable form. The quiet reality of 2026 is that the golden visa as a pan-European product is effectively finished. What replaced it is a more demanding system that happens, for most applicants, to be a better one.