Every few months another headline announces the end of the golden visa. Portugal closed it. Spain abolished it. Latvia scrapped it. The impression that builds up is of an industry being shut down, country by country, and of a buyer who might as well wait for the dust to settle.
The legal texts tell a different story. Read the reforms of the last three years side by side, and two patterns repeat with remarkable consistency. The price of residence for money has gone up, not away. And almost every reform protected the people who were already in. Taken together, those two facts support a conclusion that runs against the headlines: for anyone who wants a residence-for-money route and can afford one, waiting has been the most expensive strategy available.
The price only moves in one direction
Start with the countries that kept their programmes.
Andorra introduced the investment condition for its passive residence in 2012. The preamble of the immigration law reform of that year set the minimum investment in Andorran assets at 400,000 euros, alongside a 50,000 euro deposit. In March 2025, Law 5/2025 rewrote the investment article, set the figure at 600,000 euros, and required any property bought for the purpose to cost more than 600,000 euros per unit. Eleven months later, Law 2/2026, in force since 13 February 2026, raised it again to 1 million euros, with more than 800,000 euros per property unit. It also turned the 50,000 euro deposit, and the 12,000 euros per dependant, from a refundable guarantee into a non-refundable payment to the state. Only one figure stayed put: an investment of 400,000 euros in the national Housing Fund, already allowed by the 2025 text, still qualifies.
Italy's fixed tax on foreign income for new residents was 100,000 euros a year until 10 August 2024. It then became 200,000 euros. For people who move their tax residence to Italy from 1 January 2026, the Agenzia delle Entrate confirms it is 300,000 euros, and the amount for each family member included went from 25,000 to 50,000 euros. The price tripled in under eighteen months. The Brief's earlier look at the regime, Italy's Flat Tax Mirage, was written at the 200,000 euro stage.
Gibraltar announced on 18 June 2026 that it intends to raise the application fee for Category 2 status from £1,233 to £5,000 and to update the minimum net wealth requirement for new applicants from £2 million to £5 million. The fee became law four days later, on 22 June 2026, through Legal Notice 127 of 2026, which amended rule 8 of the Category 2 Rules. The wealth figure is a stated intention: it is not written into the Rules, and Gibraltar Finance still gives the £2 million figure.
Three different legal systems, three different instruments, one direction. Not one of them lowered a threshold, and the one figure still waiting to be applied points the same way.
The cheap end is the part that closes
The countries that "abolished" their programmes did something narrower than the word suggests. They closed the routes most ordinary buyers used, which were the cheapest ones, and usually the ones tied to housing.
Portugal's Law 56/2023 opens with a single sentence of purpose: its first article says the law sets out measures to guarantee more housing. Article 42 then stops new applications for investment residence permits under three of the routes in the immigration law, the capital transfer route and the two property routes. Other investment routes survived in narrower form. Article 44 rewrote the immigration law so that, among others, a capital transfer of at least 500,000 euros into units of Portuguese non-real-estate investment funds, or into a Portuguese company that creates five permanent jobs, still qualifies.
Spain removed its investor residence articles entirely. A final provision of Organic Law 1/2025, a statute on the efficiency of the justice system, emptied articles 63 to 67 of the 2013 entrepreneurs law, the articles that carried the investor visa and residence permit. The law entered into force three months after its publication in the official gazette on 3 January 2025, which put the date at 3 April 2025.
Latvia's 2002 Immigration Law, whose article 23 allowed a residence permit for buying property worth at least 250,000 euros, lost force on 15 September 2026 and was replaced by a new Immigration Law adopted on 20 August 2026. The Brief set out what the new law keeps and what it drops in Latvia Ends Its Property Golden Visa.
Andorra did the same thing more quietly. Raising the minimum price per property unit from 600,000 to 800,000 euros prices out the flat and keeps the villa. And the name of its 2025 reform law says what it was for: sustainable growth and the right to housing.
The pattern is consistent. Governments are not ending the sale of residence. They are ending the sale of residence through the housing market at mid-market prices. What remains is expensive, or it is routed away from homes and into funds, companies or state accounts.
Quantity is being rationed too
Price is only one lever. Andorra shows the other one clearly.
In March 2026 the government adopted Decree 74/2026, setting the quota for all residence permits without work. The decree records that the previous quota, approved on 1 March 2023, allowed 600 permits, 490 of them for passive residents, and that it had been used up. The new quota allows 200 permits in total, 163 of them for passive residents. That is a cut of two thirds in the number of places, adopted a month after the price went up by two thirds.
The decree also sets the order of the queue. Applications are handled in strict chronological order, but with priority for nationals of states that have an agreement with Andorra, then for nationals of the EU and the European Economic Area, and only then for everyone else.
Gibraltar's announcement uses softer language for the same idea. Justice Minister Nigel Feetham said in the government's release: "We are seeing strong interest in Category 2 status following the Treaty announcement." The government responded by raising the fee and announcing a higher entry bar. When demand rises and a small jurisdiction answers with a higher price of entry instead of more places, the thing being sold has become scarce by design.
The people already inside kept their terms
Here is the second pattern, and the one that matters most for timing.
- Gibraltar: the government says existing Category 2 individuals "will be fully grandfathered" and will not be affected by the revised wealth requirement.
- Italy: the 300,000 euro amount applies to people who move their tax residence from 1 January 2026. Those who moved earlier are outside the new amount.
- Andorra: Law 2/2026 states that applications filed before the law was approved are governed by the rules in force before that date.
- Spain: the new transitional provisions let pending applications be decided under the old rules, and existing investor permits keep their validity. Renewals are decided under the rules that applied when the permit was first granted.
- Portugal: article 42 preserves the renewal of permits granted under the old regime, including for family members and on the path to a permanent permit, although renewed permits are converted into entrepreneur permits with minimum stay periods of 7 days in the first year and 14 days in each later two-year period.
Every one of these reforms drew a line through time. On one side, the old price and the old conditions. On the other, the new ones. No reform in this set took residence away from people who had already bought in. The pressure fell entirely on the next applicant.
That is not an accident of drafting. Taking rights away from existing residents is legally risky and politically expensive, and it punishes exactly the investors a country wanted. Raising the price for the next person is cheap and popular. Governments choose the cheap option, and in every case examined here they did.
What follows for anyone still deciding
If both patterns hold, and five jurisdictions in three years suggest they do, then several practical conclusions follow.
Waiting has a cost, and it is usually larger than the cost of acting early. A family that applied for Andorran passive residence under the 2025 rules faced a 600,000 euro investment, and its 50,000 euro deposit was to be returned, less the financial authority's fees, when the permit ended. A family applying today needs 1 million euros, or 400,000 euros tied up in the Housing Fund, and pays 50,000 euros it will not see again unless the first application is refused. In Italy, the Agenzia delle Entrate records that the annual amount was 100,000 euros until 10 August 2024. A mover in 2026 pays 300,000, and the regime can run for up to fifteen years, so the difference compounds.
Announcements are the real deadline, not laws. Andorra's transitional rule looks at applications filed before the law was approved, not before it entered into force. In Gibraltar, neither the £2 million nor the £5 million wealth figure appears in the Category 2 Rules, so no amendment will mark the day the new figure starts to apply. The announcement is the only signal an applicant gets. By the time a rule is published, the window has usually closed.
Housing-linked routes are the most exposed. If a programme lets people buy an ordinary home to get residence in a place with a housing shortage, its politics are fragile, whatever its legal basis. The routes that survive are the ones that send money somewhere governments want it: public funds, company capital, state bonds.
Do not assume a closed door will reopen cheaper. None of the programmes examined here has come back at a lower price. Greece, which still runs a property route, is covered in the Brief's Greece golden visa guide.
There is a fair counterargument. Rising prices do not make a programme a good buy. Andorra at 1 million euros is a very different proposition from Andorra at 400,000, and the real tax numbers have to justify it on their own, as the Andorra country page sets out. Nobody should buy residence in a place they do not want to live, simply because it will cost more next year.
But for someone who has already decided where they want to be, and who qualifies, the lesson of 2023 to 2026 is unusually clear. The price of residence for money is set by governments facing housing pressure and rising demand, and those governments have shown, in their own statutes, that they raise it for newcomers and leave incumbents alone. In this market, the early applicant is the protected one.
Work with Sebastian
Residence programmes now change faster than most people plan, and where a move depends on a threshold, a quota or a transitional rule, the timing of the application is part of the strategy; anyone weighing that timing can book a consultation with Sebastian.
