Residence Policy Index · Issue No 1 · August 2026

Denmark

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.

41place of 97
63out of 100
CLeague
33-52place interval
Place among 97

Denmark on the common scale

633050658090
Each tick is a country, all 97 on one scale. The bands are leagues, the bold tick is Denmark

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.

League CDepends on your route50-64 pointsThe most crowded league and the most deceptive. The outcome depends on which door you come through, in which year, and who handles your case. Most of the favourites of where-to-move lists live here.
What the score is made of

Seven categories

Agency processing58
Pressure on newcomers62
Status security75
Access to entry58
Path to citizenship27
Family rights100
Settling in62

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.

Where the index stops answering

This score was not calculated about you

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.

Nearby in the table

Neighbours by place

How this is calculated

Method and sources

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.