Your passport, your route and five answers run against the active visa programmes we can assess in two stages: gates decide your verdict, then a score ranks the routes that survive. Each route comes out with a verdict, a rank, and the rule that produced it. Same engine for everyone — paid and free.
Written by Antonio Mira
Fact-checked against official government sources · Editorial standards
Founder · Tracks visa policy across 200+ countries
These are two different mechanisms and we are not going to blur them. First the gates run: age, nationality, education floor, language requirement, job offer, income floor and the rest. A gate is boolean. Fail one and the route cannot be Eligible — no score rescues it. The gates, and only the gates, produce your verdict.
What survives the gates is then scored, and the score does exactly one job: it ranks routes against each other. It is a sorting key, not a verdict and not a probability of approval. The score blends three layers — Execution (can you actually get it), Survival (can you afford to stay) and Upside (is it worth doing) — and is then multiplied downwards by our data-confidence factor and a desirability factor. Both multipliers can only reduce it, never raise it.
Because of that, the score is deliberately not a percentage and does not run to 100. The three layers are weighted 0.25 / 0.25 / 0.30 — they sum to 0.80, not 1.0 — so even a flawless route on perfect data cannot reach the top of the scale. The worked example above is a real engine run, not an illustration: Execution 7.25, Survival 10.0, Upside 7.19 give (0.25 × 7.25) + (0.25 × 10.0) + (0.30 × 7.19) = 6.47, and 6.47 × 0.868 confidence × 10 = 56.2. That is the highest band our engine produces in practice — a 56 is a strong route, not a mediocre one. If you ever see us publish a score that is higher than the arithmetic allows, it is wrong and we want to hear about it.
Passport / nationality list, age range, education floor, language requirement, job offer, income floor, savings floor, investment minimum, eligible-occupation list, programme status. Pass/fail only. A route you fail on any of these is not Eligible, and it is dropped from your ranked matches entirely — it is not scored at all. Where the gap is one you can close (a degree, a language certificate, a job offer), the route is reported to you as Almost with that gap named as the unlock step, rather than silently disappearing.
Financial buffer against the route's own money thresholds (50% of this layer), official processing speed (25%), document complexity (15%) and spouse work rights (10%). Document complexity is currently held at a neutral constant — we compute a difficulty figure and show it in your report, but we deliberately do not let it move your ranking, because ranking by "what's easiest" is how people end up on the wrong visa.
Your income against local cost of living (35% of this layer), tax burden (25%), savings runway (20%) and language fit (20%). Savings and investments are treated as alternatives (max, not sum) so the same money is never counted twice. Note the language entry: language appears here as well as in the gates — see §02.
Career fit for your profession against local demand and shortage lists (30% of this layer), the value of what the route leads to — permanent residence, citizenship, and how fast (25%), quality of life (25%), and how well the country matches the priorities you actually ticked (20%). This is the heaviest of the three layers: we weight "is this worth it" above "is this easy".
Data confidence (0.1–1.0) falls when the country data behind a route is thin, stale or unsourced — a route we are unsure about is ranked lower, never higher. Desirability (0.55–1.0) stops a low-income destination from topping your list purely because its visa is easy to get. Fixed penalties then apply on top: active conflict, a route that is really a downstream naturalisation/PR endpoint rather than a way in, a neighbouring country you already know about, and study/short-stay permits when study is not your goal. Nothing in this row can ever raise a score.
Before scoring, the engine runs the gate checks — any fail removes the pathway from your ranked matches, and no score can compensate for it. These are named in your report, so you understand why a country you expected to see didn't appear.
Two of them do double duty, and that is worth saying plainly. Language is a gate and a scoring input: it can eliminate a route outright (§ Gate 04), and — for routes it does not eliminate — it also feeds 20% of the Survival layer, because living somewhere you don't speak the language is harder even when the visa doesn't ask for a certificate. Education is a gate only: it can remove a route, but it never nudges a score up or down. Anywhere we have previously implied these are "just scoring dimensions that never gate you out", that was wrong.
If a pathway caps at 35 and you're 38, it's out. Working Holiday visas (most cap 30–31) and youth-mobility programmes are the most common triggers. Some countries raise the cap if you have dependants or specific qualifications — we encode those exceptions.
Many pathways are bilateral (e.g. Australian Working Holiday is restricted to ~45 nationalities). We use the actual eligible-nationality list per pathway, not a generic "European" shortcut.
Critical Skills, EU Blue Card, and most Express-Entry-style pathways require a degree. If you don't have one and a pathway requires one, it's gated out. The report also flags pathways you'd qualify for if you got a degree.
If a pathway requires B2 or C1 in a language you don't list as fluent, it's out. The engine separates "passive fluency" from "certificate held" — Portugal D7 requires certified B1 in year 5, not self-reported.
Two layers, two different standards of proof — and we will not blur them. The visa rules that decide your verdict come from government. The country context that colours it (cost of living, quality of life, tax, banking) mostly does not. Both are named below, with the number of facts each source feeds.
Layer 1 — visa rules (the part that decides your verdict). Every visa programme in the database carries a link to its official source page. Of the 12,275 individual visa-rule facts in our provenance log, 10,164 (83%) are attributed to a statutory public agency — a government immigration, tax or legislative body. 315 (2.6%) come from a private aggregator, the rest from academic, multilateral or as-yet-unclassified sources. Crowdsourced data is barred by policy from ever supplying an immigration or tax rule: in our source registry Numbeo is marked blocked for both. It can never move your verdict.
Layer 2 — country context (the part that does not decide your verdict). This is a different animal and we would rather say so than have you find out. Numbeo — a crowdsourced panel, not a statistics agency — supplies 2,033 of the 2,486 cost-of-living facts we serve (82%). Practically every rent and grocery figure on this site is Numbeo. Only 273 of 16,273 country-level facts (1.7%) come directly from a government body. Calling this "government-sourced data" would be a lie, so we don't.
| Data category | Primary sources (facts served) |
|---|---|
| Visa requirements & pathways7,000+ pathways | Government immigration portals Embassy / consular sites National gazettes |
| Quality of life & safety3,912 facts | World Bank — 1,130 EF English Proficiency Index — 402 Our World in Data — 386 Numbeo — 355 (crowdsourced) Cable.co.uk Broadband Speed League — 229 Transparency International CPI — 199 IQAir Air Quality Index — 87 Global Peace Index (IEP) — 78 Ookla Speedtest Global Index — 5 No source recorded — 1,041 (27% of this row) |
| Tax regimes3,163 facts | PwC Worldwide Tax Summaries — 1,984 National tax authorities — 249 World Bank — 161 EY Worldwide Tax & Immigration Guide — 138 Block-level fallback, verification pending — 207 Wikipedia tax-rate table, verification pending — 17 No source recorded — 407 |
| Cost of living & rent2,486 facts | Numbeo — 2,033 (crowdsourced · 82% of this row) World Bank — 447 Market cost-of-living index — 2 No source recorded — 4 |
| Economics & labour market2,599 facts | World Bank — 1,921 ILOSTAT (ILO) — 322 National statistics offices — 24 Our own audit / derived figures — 25 Pre-2026 import, verification pending — 76 No source recorded — 231 |
| Education515 facts | World Bank — 203 OpenAlex — 200 No source recorded — 112 |
| Banking access895 facts | WTE internal calculation — 395 N26 supported countries — 250 Wise supported countries — 250 |
| Practical logistics1,106 facts | World Bank — 426 Numbeo — 89 (crowdsourced) No source recorded — 591 (53% of this row) |
| Immigration context1,597 facts | EY Worldwide Tax & Immigration Guide — 192 No source recorded — 1,405 (88% of this row) |
16,273 country-level facts across our 250-country reference table, served over these 8 domains — counted on 3 September 2026 (this count changes as fields are added, retired, or fail freshness checks). By publisher type: 28.3% intergovernmental (World Bank, ILOSTAT) · 23.3% no source recorded · 15.2% Numbeo's crowdsourced panel · 14.2% professional tax-advisory firms (PwC, EY) · 7.5% private providers (N26, Wise, EF, Cable.co.uk, IQAir, Ookla) · 3.6% open academic datasets (Our World in Data, OpenAlex) · 2.6% our own calculations · 1.8% carried over with verification still pending · 1.7% NGO indices (Transparency International, Institute for Economics & Peace) · 1.7% direct government sources. This layer is separate from the visa programmes above, and is held to a lower standard of proof.
What we are not going to pretend
3,791 of those 16,273 country facts (23%) carry no source attribution in our database, and a further 300 (1.8%) carry only a placeholder we have not yet verified. The unsourced ones are concentrated in immigration context (1,405 — derived profile attributes such as entry difficulty, pathway availability and residence timelines), quality of life (1,041 — climate zone, healthcare-system type and expat sentiment scores) and practical logistics (591 — relocation cost estimates and whether foreigners can open an account). They are still shown, because we judge a named-but-unsourced figure more useful than a blank — but they are not evidence, we are not going to dress them up as evidence, and they are the top of our repair queue. No unsourced fact is ever allowed to set an eligibility verdict: that runs entirely on Layer 1.
This share went up, not down, since we last published it (19% on 13 July 2026). Two things moved: education was largely repaired — 1,379 unsourced facts there are now 112 — while the immigration-context and quality-of-life domains grew with derived attributes that we have not yet attributed one by one. We would rather show you the number moving the wrong way than quietly restate the old one.
Top destinations are re-verified quarterly. Long-tail countries are checked at least annually. When data is older or partial, we adjust the score downwards, never inflate — the worst sin a decision engine can commit is to be confident about old data.
All key fields verified from official sources within the last quarter. Used for top destinations: Portugal, Spain, Germany, Netherlands, Canada, etc.
Most fields present, some estimated, some older than 6 months. Used for second-tier destinations and emerging programmes.
Significant gaps, often micro-states, restricted-access programmes, or jurisdictions with poor English documentation. Flagged in the report.
Three buckets. No 5-star ratings, no "B+" grades, no "promising" hedges. Your verdict is decided by the gate checks in §02 — not by a score band. We used to print a score-range table here (70–100 = Eligible, and so on). It was wrong twice over: the engine has never set your verdict that way, and those ranges were not even reachable on our own scale. We removed it rather than quietly correct it.
Every gate the route publishes — nationality, age, education, language, income, savings, job offer — is satisfied by the profile you gave us. Where a route has almost nothing on file to check you against, we downgrade it to a verification step instead of calling it a pass: an empty check is not a pass.
What to do: contact a lawyer, start the application.
You fail a gate, but on a requirement you can go and get: a language certificate, a degree, a job offer, more savings, more experience. Your report names the specific gap and what closing it would take.
What to do: read the blocker, fix the gap, re-run.
You fail a gate you cannot realistically close: your nationality is not on the route's list, you are past a hard age cap, the programme is suspended, or your occupation is not on its eligible list. No amount of preparation changes these.
What to do: read the alternatives in your top 10.
So what is the score for? Ranking, and nothing else. Once the gates have said which routes are open to you, the score decides the order we show them in, so the strongest of your open doors is at the top rather than an arbitrary one. A high score never makes you eligible, and a low score never makes you ineligible.
A decision engine is a starting point, not a substitute. Two lists — what we do, what we explicitly don't.
Five questions. 3 minutes. One programme per country, matched against the layers you just read about.
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