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Edition 1 · Q3 2026
The Property Residency Index: Edition 1
Ten programmes that grant residency in exchange for property, measured on seven published criteria. Qatar ranks first. Panama second. The UAE third. The scores matter less than what we found while checking them.
The ranking
| # | Programme | Composite | Criteria scored | What drives it, and what drags it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Qatar | 91 | 7 of 7 | Lowest confirmed transfer cost in the set, USD 200,000 entry, statute-confirmed automatic renewal, family including parents, six years of threshold stability. Drag: 90 days of presence a year - the only programme in the top three that asks you to actually be there. |
| 2 | Panama | 84 | 7 of 7 | Permanent residency from day one, roughly six weeks to permit, 3.3% true cost, and a record of nothing but softening. Drag: narrower family scope - no parents. |
| 3 | UAE - Dubai | 83 | 7 of 7 | Fastest permit in the set at 15 days, zero presence requirement, broad family scope, clean stability record. Drag: threshold near the top of the set, and no permanence product at any price. |
| 4 | Oman | 78* | 5 of 7 | Perfect family score and an entirely expansionary rule record, including a new zero-minimum owner permit. *Renormalised: presence and true cost are unresolved. If the reported 180-day rule is real, this position does not hold. |
| 5 | Greece | 71 | 7 of 7 | EUR 250,000 carve-out entry, zero presence, the widest family scope in the EU set. Drag: three severe rule events - the worst stability record of any programme still open. |
| 6 | Cyprus | 68 | 7 of 7 | Permanent status from day one, near-zero presence. Drag: 19% true cost once VAT is counted, and a termination bill that lapsed with the April dissolution but can be re-tabled. |
| 7 | Mauritius | 65 | 6 of 7 | Ownership-tied permit with no renewal cycle to manage. Drag: a 20% round-trip cost since the duty doubled on 1 July 2026 - see the finding below. |
| 8 | Malta | 63 | 6 of 7 | Permanent status and four-generation family scope, the broadest in the set. Drag: 26% sunk cost, the most expensive seat measured, and a record of retroactive repricing. |
| 9 | Turkey | 47* | 5 of 7 | The lowest entry price in the set. Drag: a 1 to 2 year permit, no dependant coverage in the usual sense, and a threshold hiked between 2.7 and 4 times inside the measurement window. *Renormalised. |
| 10 | Indonesia | 44 | 6 of 7 | Zero presence requirement is its one strong cell. Drag: a USD 1,000,000 threshold that is an outlier in this set, roughly 16.5% true cost, and thin family provisions. |
Scores marked * are renormalised over the criteria that could be answered, and are not directly comparable to full-data scores. Every figure behind every cell sits on that programme's profile with its source and access date. Latvia and Hungary are excluded from the scored set and appear in the Closed Routes appendix.
Three findings
1. Mauritius doubled its duty and its own government did not say so
On 1 July 2026 Mauritius doubled the registration duty applying to these purchases, taking the round-trip government take to roughly 20% of the purchase price. Sixteen days later, when we checked, the investment authority's own published PDFs still displayed the superseded rate.
A buyer relying on the official document on the official website on the day they budgeted would have been out by roughly a tenth of their purchase price. Nothing was hidden and nobody was misled deliberately - the document simply had not been updated. That is the ordinary condition of this category, and it is the reason this Index exists.
2. It was not an isolated case - it happened in three of ten
We did not go looking for this. It emerged from routine verification, and by the time Edition 1 froze, three of the ten programmes had an official source that was wrong, stale or unreachable at the moment we checked it:
| Mauritius | The authority's own PDFs still showed the pre-1-July duty rate more than two weeks after it changed. |
| Latvia | Parliament adopted a new Immigration Law on 20 August 2026 removing the property route. Days later the national legislation portal was still serving the superseded law as the text in force. |
| Qatar | The government service portal returned an error on the relevant page and a maintenance notice across the domain. The rule was only confirmable because the law itself and the sector regulator publish independently. |
Three in ten is not an accusation of bad faith. It is a measurement of how much weight a single official page can carry, and the answer is: less than buyers assume. Every figure in this Index therefore carries the source it came from and the date we read it, so that a reader can check whether the ground has moved since.
3. The most basic question is unanswerable for two programmes
Eight of the ten programmes require zero days of physical presence. Qatar requires 90 days a year, confirmed this month from the law itself. For Turkey and Oman, we could not establish the presence requirement from any official source at all - and in Oman's case the programme's own operational partner states 180 days a year while the ministry, the portal and every professional summary are silent.
"How long must I live there" is the first question anyone asks. That it cannot be answered for two of ten programmes, from any authoritative source, is itself the finding. We publish it as unresolved rather than picking the likelier answer.
How the scoring works
Seven criteria, each scored 0 to 10, combined on published weights:
| Criterion | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Capital threshold | 20 | The minimum qualifying investment, normalised across the set. |
| Family scope | 20 | Who comes with you - spouse, children and their age treatment, parents, and whether on equal terms. |
| True total cost | 15 | Government take on top of the headline threshold, as a percentage of price. |
| Presence requirement | 15 | Days per year you must physically be there. Zero scores 10. |
| Time to permit | 10 | Calendar days from application to permit, labelled statutory, advertised or reported. |
| Term and permanence | 10 | Length of the grant, the renewal burden, and whether any path beyond it exists. |
| Rule stability | 10 | Severe events between 2020 and 2026 - closures, revocations, threshold hikes, retroactive repricing. |
The weights are an editorial judgement and we publish them rather than bury them: entry price and family scope carry double the weight of speed or term, because those are the two things buyers in this market are actually deciding between. Disagree with the weighting and you can re-derive any programme's score yourself, because every underlying fact is published on its profile. That is the design. Full methodology.
The composite is the secondary artefact. The primary output is the verified fact on each profile, with its source and access date. The ranking is a convenience built on top, and if the two ever disagree, the facts win.
FX is fixed to a single date. Thresholds are normalised at the euro-dollar rate of 21 August 2026. We re-ran the scoring at that rate against the July research rate: the three euro-denominated thresholds move by roughly 2.6%, which shifts their composites by under 0.03 points and changes no position in the table. The closest gap in the ranking, Panama and the UAE at one point apart, is between two dollar-pegged programmes that currency movement cannot separate.
What changed while we were checking
Latvia closed. On 20 August 2026 the Saeima re-voted, 60 to 26, and adopted a new Immigration Law in which property is not among the grounds for a residence permit. The President had proposed retaining the route but restricting it to NATO, OECD and EEA nationals; that compromise was put to the floor and lost, as did a separate attempt to reinstate a five-year permit at EUR 300,000. A fund-investment route replaced it, which is not property-linked and therefore outside what this Index measures. Latvia moves to Closed Routes and the scored set is ten rather than eleven.
Cyprus survived. The termination bill tabled in April never became law - parliament dissolved before it reached the floor and it does not appear on the new parliament's agenda. We record its fate as lapsed rather than defeated, because no source states the outcome in terms. The party that tabled it returned as the second largest, so the risk is live rather than gone, and Cyprus keeps its stability adjustment.
Qatar's presence rule held. It was the most consequential cell in the edition: the top-ranked programme's only real drag rested on an archived 2023 page. It is now confirmed from Cabinet Decision 28 of 2020 itself, shown as in force on the state legal portal, and corroborated by the real estate regulator for both investment tiers. The newest amendment to that instrument, from May 2026, leaves the clause untouched.
Edition 2 - Q4 2026
The next edition re-runs every criterion and adds programmes as they qualify for measurement. Standing watch items: whether Cyprus's termination bill is re-tabled in the September session, whether Oman's presence requirement is ever stated officially, and whether Latvia's fund route settles into something this Index should track. Methodology is public and fixed between editions.
Basis and sources
Edition 1 rests on an adversarial verification pass completed 17 July 2026 over approximately 100 load-bearing cells, in which four claims were refuted and corrected, followed by freeze checks on 22 August 2026 covering Cyprus, Latvia and Qatar. Every programme profile carries its own numbered primary sources with access dates: Qatar, Panama, UAE, Oman, Greece, Cyprus, Mauritius, Malta, Turkey, Indonesia.
The Property Residency Index is an independent research publication. Index data and rankings are never for sale, and no programme, government or intermediary pays for inclusion or position. This is general information, not legal, tax or immigration advice - confirm the current position with the relevant authority before acting on any figure here.