The EU Blue Card protects you here when you lose your job, because that is the main route. In Greece the same directive does not.
The state is recruiting: labour is short, a January 2026 bill raises the cap on foreign staff by 5 percentage points for all employers, and seasonal hiring quotas are growing. We found no campaigns against legal foreign residents and no retroactive revocations, and the June 2026 amendments improved workers' position. There are no mandatory integration courses, the language matters only for citizenship, children attend state school for free, and the family can join at any point while the card is valid.
The weak spot is delivery. The state does not publish refusal statistics. There is no end-to-end online filing: first a D visa at a consulate, then an in-person application at the Migration Directorate. Recognising a degree through NACID takes 1-2 months, and a spouse needs a separate permit from the Employment Agency to work, though under a simplified procedure.
If you lose your job, the Blue Card keeps your status: up to three months without work is no ground for revoking the card, and after 24 months on the card you get six months to find a new job. The condition: register with the Employment Agency within 7 working days and notify the Migration Directorate within 7 days. This protection belongs to the Blue Card: under the ordinary single permit, the 2025 version of the law ended the right of residence on the day the contract ended, and the June 2026 amendments introduced 3-6 months of protection for it too. For the first 12 months a Blue Card holder can change employer only with permission; after that, in practice, a new application is filed.
Day to day, the friction is with banks. With a residence permit and a personal number you can open an account, but customer-check fees of €100-500 are not refunded if you are refused, and a refusal cannot be appealed; without a permit most banks will not open accounts for non-EU citizens. Address registration is mandatory and a condition of the permit, but doable.
The index score ignores nationality. This is what changes for citizens of specific countries.
No visa for up to 90 days within 180, as in the whole Schengen area. To live and work, the same Blue Card route as everyone else.
No permit needed: EU free movement rules give the right to live and work.
EU temporary protection is extended to 4 March 2028. Since 31 July 2026 new applicants must show they left in line with their military obligations; people who already hold the status are not affected.
We found no nationality restrictions in the Blue Card rules. The restriction is at banks: some of them refuse to open accounts for Russian citizens.
We found no nationality restrictions in the Blue Card rules: the threshold and procedure are the same as for other non-EU citizens.
The place interval 6-15 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 Agency processing: 53 against 48.7. Above the world average: 7 out of 7.
This is the clearest example of how the whole index works: it is not about the country, it is about the route you enter by. The same European directive gives protection when you lose your job: three months, six with longer service. In Bulgaria the Blue Card is the main route, and the indicator scores 100. In Greece the main route is a different one, an ordinary permit with no such rule at all, and the score there is 50.
The Bulgarian Blue Card threshold is noticeably lower than the western European one, IT roles can be entered on experience without a degree, income tax is 10%, and there is no separate financial threshold for family reunification: the card holder's salary covers it.
DownsidePath to citizenship scores 63. Citizenship is possible only five years after obtaining permanent status, that is, roughly ten years after arrival, and citizens of non-EU countries are usually required to renounce their previous citizenship.
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.
On paper the chain of decision, D visa and card takes about 2.5-3 months; in practice 3-4 months, or 5-6 with complications. Waiting for a consulate appointment comes on top.
Yes. Since 20 December 2025 there is a digital nomad visa with a threshold of about €31,000 a year, and a freelance route also exists. Both cost more than the main route, and nomad visa practice is still new.
The fee for a first Blue Card is about €55 (110 leva in the Migration Directorate tariff). We found no official rates for renewal, the card or the D visa, so we give no full total.
On a Blue Card, up to three months without work does not cost you the status, and after two years on the card you get six months to find a job, provided you register and notify the Migration Directorate on time. We found no retroactive revocations.
Permanent residence after five years of continuous residence. Citizenship five years after that, about ten in total, giving up your previous citizenship; you need basic Bulgarian and a 20-question test with a pass mark of 12.
The state wants newcomers: caps on foreign hiring are rising, there are no campaigns against legal residents and no mandatory integration courses. What gets in the way is unpublished refusal statistics, consulate queues for the D visa and strict bank checks.
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.
Checked 01/10/2026. Facts come from the country's index card and official websites.
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.