Passports for sale.
Some countries sell citizenship, and with it a passport, to anyone who can pay. For a handful of small islands it has become one of the biggest sources of government money. Here are the programmes and numbers we have collected so far, where each one comes from, and how far to trust it. It is not yet everything those documents contain: what we have and haven't extracted is listed on GitHub.
Looking for golden visas? See residence by investment →
All the numbers, sources and downloads in the data portal →
- 33,042
- numbers about citizenship programmes
- 611
- documents and articles behind them
- 44
- citizenship programmes
- 35
- countries
44 ways to buy a passport
Lowest price: the minimum one person invests or donates on the main route today (or when it closed), before fees, checked by hand against the rules; tap or hover on a price for how it was chosen. Numbers: figures published about the programme (applications, approvals, money raised…). Rules: prices and conditions over time, from the laws. Click a country for everything we have on it.
What changed most recently
Price, applications and money, side by side
Each figure is the latest yearly one we have, so years differ between programmes, and so do the measures (one country counts applications, another visas issued): the small print says which. Prices and money stay in each programme's own currency. We don't convert them, because the data holds no sourced exchange rates; sorting by an amount groups currencies.
Where sources disagree, the line follows the most official figure for each year (a ring marks years where official sources differ by more than 2%). Every alternative is one click away.
Seven things this data tells you
of Dominica's whole economy came from selling citizenship in budget year 2024/25. In budget year 2012/13 it was 3.8%.
St Kitts and Nevis took in EC$669 million from passports in 2022, then EC$244 million in 2024 after it tightened its rules, and an estimated EC$124 million in 2025.
is what the five islands now charge for the cheapest route, after years of undercutting each other. They agreed a minimum price in 2024.
of applications were turned down in 2024 in Antigua and Barbuda and in St Kitts and Nevis. Same product, very different checks.
is how far official figures for Dominica's passport income in one year, 2016/17, drift apart, depending on who published them and when.
decisions on visa-free travel, from Canada to the EU, the UK and the US. Europe has now asked the islands to shut their programmes by June 2028.
homes were sold to foreigners in Turkey in 2022, when a US$250,000 flat bought citizenship. After the price went up, it was 21,534 in 2025.
Who buys a passport
Russians are not in the EU's list. All five islands stopped taking Russian applications in 2022, but Grenada still processed about 2,300 that were already pending, in 2024. Every Iranian applicant counted here applied to Dominica.
European Commission, 7th visa suspension report (2024), from each island's top five nationalities
European Commission (2025)
Where buyers from one country go
From sugar to passports
Sugar: UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Passport income: St Kitts budget documents and Director of Audit reports. Official yearly figures start in 2016. Sugar figures are background, tied to no programme, so they are not in this page's counts or downloads (they are in the full dataset).
A race to the bottom, then a truce
Cheapest donation for one applicant, from each country's rules. Antigua's early prices were set in EC$ and are converted at the fixed rate of EC$2.70 per US$. Click a point to read the rule.
How a sugar island ended up selling passports, who buys them, and what happens when Europe says no. Written from this data, in the newsletter.
Every number, and where it comes from
When each programme opened and closed
Loading events…
2 programmes have no start date recorded, so they aren't drawn
Austria (Citizenship for special interest), Vanuatu (1990s passport sales).When the world pushed back
All 33,042 numbers about citizenship programmes
Uncertain numbers, fully documented
Every number is labelled
- Final figure (26,939) · The official number for a period that's over.
- Early figure (345) · An official number that may still be revised.
- Calculated by us (12) · Calculated by us from official records: a plain sum of the source's own rows, not a number printed in it.
- Estimate (662) · An estimate, often by the IMF, of what happened.
- Reported (940) · Passed on by someone else, such as a newspaper or the EU quoting a government.
- Claim (168) · Said by someone with a stake, such as a minister, without published data behind it.
- Forecast (2,351) · A prediction for a period that wasn't over yet.
- Budget target (1,625) · What the government planned to collect, not what it got.
Every number was checked
- Not complete yet. We have not yet extracted every table from every document we store. Each document has a status (not reviewed, partial, complete) in the coverage file, and gaps are listed as to-dos.
- One dataset, two pages. Citizenship and residence programmes are kept in the same tables, with the same documents and checks; this page shows only citizenship programmes. Figures about immigration in general, or background such as sugar exports, belong to no programme and are counted on neither page.
- Stored documents. Across the whole dataset we keep copies of 1,706 official documents, so every quote can be checked against the exact file we read, even if the original disappears.
- Quotes found. Each number comes with a short quote from its source, and we checked that 113,862 quotes across the dataset appear in the stored document.
- Read twice. A second, independent reader went back to the documents for 40,036 numbers without seeing ours. Where the two disagreed, we checked the page by hand.
- What's missing. Dominica publishes no counts of applications or new citizens at all. Money paid to property developers, rather than to governments, is almost never published.
Free to use, with credit
Download citizenship by investment
- Every citizenship programme CSV · 45 rows
- Their prices and rules CSV · 2,096 rows
- Every number on this page CSV · 33,042 rows
- Their timeline CSV · 700 rows
- The documents they cite CSV · 611 rows
Same columns as the full dataset; every row keeps its source id, which the documents file explains. The programmes file also has one id that only group figures covering several schemes, which the count above leaves out.
The full dataset
- In the data portal: search, filter and download every table, each row with its source, page and quote
- Every number, both kinds and context CSV
- Every document CSV
- The timeline CSV
- Prices and rules CSV
- Everything on GitHub, including the stored documents
Credit
Free to use for anything, including commercially, under CC BY 4.0. Please credit “Oscar Leo, oscarleo.com” and link to this page, and cite the original source of any number you use.
Found a mistake?
Or have a document we don't? Open an issue on GitHub with the source and page. Data last updated 2026-10-14.
Looking for golden visas? See residence by investment →
How a sugar island ended up selling passports, who buys them, and what happens when Europe says no. Written from this data, in the newsletter.