What the dataset covers
Citizenship Times maintains structured dossiers on 67 jurisdictions, of which 17 carry a citizenship-by-investment or fast-track citizenship route. Each dossier holds the same fields — investment thresholds, residency and citizenship timelines, passport strength, tax treatment, work-permit and skills-migration routes, and an assessment of who the programme actually suits. The fields are identical across jurisdictions by design, because the point of the dataset is comparison.
The structured data behind each dossier is published as schema.org Dataset markup on the page itself, and every dossier carries a last-verified date. If a figure has no date next to it, treat it as undated and check the source.
Sources, and what each one is bad at
We use seven recurring inputs. Where two disagree, the government source wins; where a government source is silent and an index is stale, we say so on the dossier rather than picking the more flattering number.
Government programme units and gazettes
Investment thresholds, government fees, processing timelines, eligibility rules, programme suspensions and closures.
Limitation. Primary and authoritative, but slow and inconsistently published. Several Caribbean units announce fee changes by circular to licensed agents before the gazette catches up.
Henley Passport Index
Passport rank and the visa-free / visa-on-arrival destination count shown on each dossier.
Limitation. Counts visa-on-arrival and e-visa-on-arrival alongside true visa-free entry, so headline numbers run higher than a strict visa-free count would. Updated quarterly; a mid-quarter revocation will not appear until the next release.
Freedom House — Freedom in the World
The civil and political liberties rank that forms one third of the composite rank.
Limitation. Scored annually on a 100-point scale, which we convert to a rank. Ties are common and are shown as equal ranks.
World Happiness Report
The quality-of-life rank in the composite. Where a jurisdiction is not surveyed, a neutral placeholder rank of 75 is used.
Limitation. Most small island states — including nearly every Pacific and OECS jurisdiction — are not surveyed at all, so the placeholder does real work in those rows. Treat composite ranks for micro-states as the weakest figure on the page.
IMF World Economic Outlook and national statistics offices
GDP, GDP per capita, and unemployment figures.
Limitation. Small-economy estimates carry wide error bars and are revised frequently. Figures are rounded to signal that precision.
EU Council decisions, UK Home Office statements, US State Department notices
Visa-waiver suspensions and revocations, and travel-document restrictions.
Limitation. These move faster than any index. Where a revocation postdates the latest index release, we override the index and say so on the dossier.
Licensed agents, law firms, and programme units we speak to directly
Real-world processing times, due-diligence practice, and rejections — the gap between the published rule and the applied one.
Limitation. Not independently verifiable and never the sole basis for a figure. Used to qualify official numbers, not to replace them.
The composite rank
The composite rank shown on dossiers and in the annual index is the unweighted mean of three published ranks:
composite = (passport rank + happiness rank + freedom rank) / 3
Lower is better, as with each of its inputs. It is deliberately crude. There is no weighting, no normalisation, and no attempt to convert three different measurement systems onto a common scale — averaging ranks treats a one-place move at the top of an index as equal to a one-place move in the middle, which is not true of any of the three underlying scores.
We publish it anyway because it is reproducible from public data in one line, and because the alternative — a proprietary weighted score only we can compute — is exactly the kind of number this industry already has too many of. Use it to sort a long list, not to separate two jurisdictions that land within a few points of each other.
Where it is weakest
A jurisdiction with no Freedom House entry gets no composite rank at all. A jurisdiction not surveyed by the World Happiness Report receives a placeholder rank of 75, which flatters micro-states with genuinely limited healthcare, schooling, and infrastructure. Both cases are common across the Pacific and the smaller Caribbean programmes.
Suitability scores are editorial
The three 0–100 scores on each dossier — citizenship, residency and lifestyle, and tax — are not computed. They are editorial judgements, assigned by the desk covering the region and reviewed when the underlying facts move. They exist to answer “is this programme a serious option for this purpose?”, and nothing finer than that.
Treat differences of five points or less as noise. Treat a large move between revisions as the signal: when Vanuatu's citizenship score fell from 83 to 70 in August 2026, that was the passport losing UK and Schengen access, not a recalibration of the scale.
No score, rank, or dossier placement is available for purchase, and no advertiser, programme unit, or licensed agent has sight of a rating before publication. That policy is set out in full in our editorial charter.
How often this changes
Every dossier carries a verified date, which we bump only when the structured data is materially revised — not when a typo is fixed. Dossiers on active programmes are reviewed at least twice a year; the Caribbean CBI programmes and the EU golden-visa routes are reviewed quarterly because they change that often.
Anything we consider fast-moving — a fee change, a route closing, a visa waiver being pulled — is written up as an intelligence briefing on the day we can confirm it, and the dossier is corrected in the same pass. The briefing is the audit trail for the change.
Corrections
If a figure here is wrong, we want to fix it, and we would rather hear it from you than leave it standing. Email corrections@citizenshiptimes.com with the page, the figure, and a source. Substantive corrections are made to the dossier and noted in the next intelligence briefing for that jurisdiction; the verified date moves at the same time.
We do not remove unfavourable assessments at the request of a programme unit or its agents, and we do not treat a disagreement about a judgement as a correction. Errors of fact we fix quickly and without argument.
Citing and reusing this data
Researchers, journalists, and advisers are welcome to cite these figures. Please name Citizenship Times, link to the specific dossier or to the annual index, and include the verified date — a passport count without a date is not a fact, it is a rumour with a number in it.
If you want a live comparison on your own site rather than a static quote, the embeddable comparison widget stays current on its own. Bulk or commercial reuse of the underlying dataset needs permission first — the terms are in our terms of use.