whereTOemigrate Research · quarterly · July 2026 edition

The Visa Inflation Index™

The CPI of emigration — tracking what governments require to let you in, measured across 2,878 open visa pathways in 215 countries and territories.

↓ Download the baseline data (CSV) · free to reuse with attribution (CC BY 4.0)

Why an index

Everyone measures what a country gives you (passport power, quality of life). Nobody measures what it demands: minimum income, savings, investment — and how those demands rise. The Visa Inflation Index fills that gap. This July 2026 edition freezes the baseline (Index = 100); every quarter we re-measure the same pathways, paired one-by-one, and publish the change. Rises in thresholds are visa inflation — the price of the exit door going up.

The baseline, by region (median monthly income threshold)

Regions where fewer than 15 pathways publish a sourced income threshold are not shown — a median off a handful of routes is noise, not a finding.

Cheapest & most expensive countries to qualify for (median across their pathways, min. 4 with published thresholds)

Methodology

Computed from the whereTOemigrate pathway database: 2,878 open pathways across 215 countries and territories, each linked to a named source (2,874 of 2,878 are recorded against an official source) and re-verified on a rolling basis. Thresholds are counted only where the figure carries a source: 391 of the 2,878 pathways publish one. Index movements use paired comparison: only the same pathway measured in both quarters counts, so composition changes in the database never masquerade as inflation. We publish the median (not the mean) so outliers cannot distort the reading. Baseline frozen 6 July 2026; next edition: October 2026.