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 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.
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.
