How we research visa programs

Program requirements are taken from official sources: the immigration authority, foreign ministry, or consular service of the country in question, and the legislation or decree underpinning the program where one exists. Every claim in a program's research file is tied to a numbered citation, and the sources we relied on are linked at the bottom of each program page under “External Resources”.

Travel blogs, listicles, and relocation-agency marketing pages are explicitly excluded as sources. They are frequently outdated, and they tend to copy each other's errors.

The research is performed by automated agents rather than a staff of human researchers. Each program is researched against the official sources above, written up as a structured document with citations, and converted into the data that powers this site. A scheduled job rechecks countries in rotation, and a separate scan watches for policy announcements that indicate a program has changed, launched, or closed.

We are telling you this because it bears on how much weight to give the result. Automated research is consistent, covers far more countries than we could by hand, and rechecks them far more often — but it cannot phone a consulate, and it can misread an ambiguous regulation. Every page links its sources so you can check the primary document yourself.

Changes we apply are logged publicly on the updates page.

Each program page shows the date its research was last confirmed against official sources. It means someone or something checked the requirements on that date and they matched what we publish. It does not mean the program changed on that date, and it does not mean the rules are guaranteed current today — a country can change a threshold the day after we check.

The date is not a proxy for when we edited the page. If a recheck confirms nothing changed, the date still moves forward, because what it records is the confirmation.

Alongside the official requirements, we publish “reality checks”: what applicants report actually happening. These are gathered from applicant accounts on Reddit, expat forums, and community groups — not from governments.

That makes them useful for things official sources never state, such as which consulates take three times the published processing time, or which documents get requested despite not appearing on any checklist. It also makes them anecdotal, skewed toward people motivated to post, and sometimes wrong. They are labelled separately from official requirements throughout the site, and you should weigh them accordingly.

• Consular discretion. Published requirements are a floor, not a guarantee. Individual consulates apply rules inconsistently and may request documents that appear on no official list.
• Currency conversion is approximate. Thresholds are recorded in the currency the government publishes them in. Converted figures used for sorting and comparison rely on periodically updated reference rates, so treat them as indicative, never as the amount you need to show.
• Indexed thresholds drift. Many income requirements are pegged to a national minimum wage or similar benchmark and change when that benchmark does, sometimes without any announcement.
• Translation. Where a program is documented only in the local language, the requirements are our reading of the official text, and nuance can be lost.
• Coverage is uneven. Some countries are documented in far more depth than others, usually because their governments publish more.

Corrections are the fastest way this gets better. Every program page has a “Report an error” link that opens a pre-filled email, or write to [email protected]. If you can include a link to the official source that contradicts us, we can usually fix it the same day.