Hardly ever pushes anyone out: 100 out of 100 for pressure on newcomers. But the state does not publish how many people it refused to let in.
The place interval 1-4 shows where the country lands when the data is nudged and the index is recalculated. One place of difference in the table means nothing; a difference of a league means something.
The thin mark on each bar is the average across 97 countries
The strongest category here is Pressure on newcomers: 100 out of 100, against a 97-state average of 65.2. The weakest is Path to citizenship: 63 against 57.1. Above the world average: 7 out of 7.
The European Commission report for the period found no case of pressure on legal residents: management of legal migration was rated «broadly satisfactory». Law No 79/2021 says it plainly: unemployment is not grounds to annul a permit until it exceeds three months in a year (six, if the person has lived in the country for more than three years), and financial difficulty is not grounds for a self-employed person. The single Leje Unike permit is issued online through the e-Albania portal, and since April 2026 the temporary permit is issued on the day you apply and stays valid while the case is decided. A self-employed person pays 0% income tax until turnover passes 14 million lek; the relief runs to the end of 2029.
DownsideThe state does not publish refusal statistics. Under our rule the refusal rate indicator scores 25 out of 100 for that, and it drags agency processing down.
About first placeIt cannot be read as sole leadership. Australia has the same place interval, and the intervals of New Zealand and Kyrgyzstan overlap it. The difference between first and fourth place is not significant in our data, and we are the ones saying so.
All 97 states are calculated for one applicant: 35 years old, income of $2,500 and $3,856 a month before tax, passport not counted, the most accessible route that is actually in use.
Your passport, your income and your family do not change the table. They change which of its lines apply to you. A different income makes entry read differently, a family makes the family category read differently, and your passport makes everything read differently.
97 states, 26 indicators, seven categories, 2,522 scores. Every score has a source and a source class: primary means the texts of laws and government portals; reliable secondary means reports by international organisations, tax reviews by audit firms and specialist legal publications; weak means community posts and single secondary sources. The classes add up to a confidence level for the country, and a country with low confidence gets neither a score nor a place.
Every indicator is scored against a fixed ruler, not against its neighbours. Adding new countries therefore does not move the old ones, and a change in a score means a change in policy and nothing else.
A high place does not mean a good country. It means one thing: the state machine treats newcomers predictably and by the rules. Living there may be expensive, dull or hot; that is not our question.
We make mistakes and we will go on making them: policy changes faster than any database. Our answer is not a pose of infallibility but a visible trail of corrections. Every correction is published: what it was, what it became, the source and the reason for the error. The corrections log opens with the second issue, together with the first block of changes.
