The only country of the 97 where, after losing your job, you may work for six months rather than merely look for work.
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 Path to citizenship: 100 out of 100, against a 97-state average of 57.1. The weakest is Access to entry: 59 against 65.7. Above the world average: 6 out of 7.
180 consecutive days after losing your sponsor and up to 365 days in total. During that time you may work for other employers or for yourself. Nowhere else in the index does income survive that moment: everywhere else you may look for work but not work. Beyond that, the country simply stays out of your way: a bank account opens online before you even arrive, there is no compulsory address registration and no integration exams. Path to citizenship is scored at 100 out of 100.
DownsideAccess to entry scores 59. There is no visa for remote work or for the self-employed at all; you get in only through an employer, through points or through study. The salary threshold for the main work visa is A$79,423 a year from 1 July 2026, and an applicant on $2,500 a month does not clear it.
A warningIn January 2026 a new law added grounds for cancelling visas that are already in force.
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.
