Family rights are 100 out of 100 and path to citizenship is 27: eight years to permanent status as a baseline, nine to citizenship, all of it on top of a Danish exam at B2.
Denmark is a country of contrasts. It openly courts workers: shortage lists are live and updated twice a year, applications are online, and there is no queue for biometrics, which you give within 14 days. A worker's family gets some of the best terms in Europe: a spouse works without a separate permit, no financial guarantee is required, the family decision has a two-month target and school is free. Workers face no mandatory integration courses, and Danish lessons are free and voluntary.
Settling down, though, is hard. Permanent residence takes eight years as a rule, citizenship nine, on top of a B2 Danish exam, a citizenship test and years without social assistance. The general family reunification route, when the sponsor is a Danish citizen or permanent resident, is among the strictest in the EU: the 24-year rule, an attachment test, a bond of about DKK 57,000 and language tests for the spouse. The agency also misses its own target: Positive List cases take about two months instead of one. Refusal rates for work schemes are not published.
Pressure on legal workers comes through enforcement. The immigration agency SIRI runs on-site inspections, since 2025 with wider access to documents, and violations go to a revocation team. An employers' association warns that an employer's payslip error can mean a DKK 10,000 fine and the loss of the worker's permit, with no de minimis threshold. Rules are not tightened retroactively: the higher 2026 thresholds apply only to new applications, and a permit can be renewed even if the occupation has since left the list.
If you lose your job through no fault of your own, you can get a six-month job-seeking permit, but you may not work during that period, and you must apply no later than two days after your employment ends, counting the notice period. Once you find a new job, you can start it as soon as you apply for the new permit, without waiting for a decision. Day to day, everything runs on the CPR number: municipal registration needs a real address, banks rarely open an account without a CPR, and the first weeks feel like a loop between housing, number and account.
The index score ignores nationality. This is what changes for citizens of specific countries.
No visa for short stays of up to 90 days within 180, as in the rest of the Schengen area. Living and working requires the same permits as for everyone.
No permit needed: EU free-movement rules give the right to live and work.
Under the Nordic common labour market agreement they live and work in Denmark without a work or residence permit.
Denmark does not apply EU temporary protection and runs its own Special Act instead. Permits under it are extended automatically until 17 March 2027. Men aged 23-59 subject to mobilisation get a permit only with documented exemption from military service. In September 2026 the government also proposed refusing permits to people from less war-affected regions of Ukraine.
When we checked on 9 August 2026 we found no direct nationality-based restrictions. For Russian citizens the EU visa facilitation agreement has been suspended since September 2022, so applying from Russia is costlier, slower and harder, including on the work route.
The place interval 33-52 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 Family rights: 100 out of 100, against a 97-state average of 72.2. The weakest is Path to citizenship: 27 against 57.1. Above the world average: 3 out of 7.
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.
The agency's target is one month, up to three if documents are requested. In practice Positive List cases take about two months; a worker's family has a two-month target.
Hardly. There is no digital nomad visa; what remains is Start-up Denmark, where an expert panel must approve your business plan and only about 75 permits are issued a year.
DKK 6,810 (≈€915) for a work permit and DKK 8,490 per family member. A family of three applying once pays DKK 23,790 (≈€3,200).
Yes. After an involuntary job loss you get six months to look for work without the right to work, but you must apply within two days of your employment ending. Permits can be revoked for breaches of conditions, including an employer's payroll errors.
Permanent residence after 8 years as a rule, or 4 if every extra condition is met. Citizenship after 9 years of residence with B2 Danish and a citizenship test; dual citizenship is allowed.
Workers are: decisions are predictable, in about two months, and a worker's family gets full rights. Staying for good is hard: permanent residence and citizenship are among the furthest away in our sample, and general family reunification is among the strictest in the EU.
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.