100 points for both path to citizenship and family. Only Armenia has the same combination. But the door is closing.
between leaguesThe place interval 4-10 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.
Between leaguesThe league holds in fewer than half of the recalculations. Read this country as sitting between two leagues, not as a member of the upper one.
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: 56 against 65.7. Above the world average: 6 out of 7.
Express Entry leads straight to permanent residence, skipping the intermediate work visa, and few places are built that way. The right to a bank account is written into law, school is free, there are no integration exams, and language courses are free and voluntary.
DownsideAccess to entry scores 56, and it is falling. Work permit issuance is down 37% for 2026 and study permits down 49%, with a moratorium on low-paid streams. Twice in 24 months the rules changed retroactively: in March 2025 bonus points for a job offer were removed, including for people who had already filed a profile, and in March 2026 law C-12 came into force, giving the cabinet the power to cancel and suspend applications.
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.
