A work licence is not extended beyond 63 months from the day of first arrival. After that, you leave.
For a foreigner with no right of return, Israel is narrowly open: only to highly paid specialists invited by an employer, and only for a while. The threshold of two average salaries, ₪27,132 a month (≈$7,350), rules out most mid-level professionals, and after 63 months of work you must leave, because there is no path to permanent residence or citizenship for such a worker.
Status rests on a single employer. The B/1 visa lets you work only for the employer who applied; moving to another means the full process again. If you lose your job you must leave: the employer reports to the authorities within 7 days, and you may stay at most 30 days, and only while the visa is still valid. A 90-day job search window exists only for expert chefs. Since 2026 the higher salary threshold also applies to renewals, with no transition.
There is pressure on legally working foreigners, and it is targeted. A government decision of 9 December 2024 and regulations from March 2025 shut work visas for foreign staff of international humanitarian organisations: more than 60% of those expats were left with expired visas, and in January 2026 licences of 37 organisations were revoked. The Entry Law lets the minister cancel a visa without having to give reasons. We found no campaigns against ordinary experts.
Bureaucracy is heavy. The employer handles the first filing, but renewals and status changes go through Interior Ministry offices by appointment, where free slots are lacking for weeks or months; people live for months with an expired visa in limbo. In January 2026 processing of industrial workers' visas was suddenly suspended while the function moved to a new unit. The ministry does not publish refusal statistics.
An expert can bring family only if the profession usually requires a higher academic degree. The spouse gets a B/2 tourist visa and cannot work; children attend state school under the compulsory education law. There are no language exams for a work visa, and opening a bank account involves friction.
The index score ignores nationality. This is what changes for citizens of specific countries.
Only they can get the B/5 investor visa, under a bilateral treaty of friendship, commerce and navigation.
Under the Law of Return they get citizenship almost at once, bypassing the work visa, the 63-month cap and everything on this page. This applies whatever passport they hold.
Entry and status are possible only with a separate Interior Ministry permit.
We found no special nationality restrictions on the expert visa: the threshold, the procedure and the 63 months are the same as for everyone.
The place interval 93-96 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 Settling in: 80 out of 100, against a 97-state average of 69.5. The weakest is Path to citizenship: 20 against 57.1. Above the world average: 2 out of 7.
The main route is the «foreign expert» visa, with a salary of at least twice the national average: 27,132 shekels a month before tax from January 2026. The procedure contains an explicit limit: the licence is not extended beyond 63 months from the day of first arrival. The length of your life in the country is set in advance.
There is no path to permanent status for someone who is not repatriating. Citizenship requires the right to live in the country permanently, and a foreign expert never acquires that right. You may work only for the employer who filed the hiring application; there is no simplified transfer between employers. Family members cannot work: a spouse receives a tourist visa. An exception is made for spouses of specialists in high technology, but that is a separate privileged category.
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 procedure sets 21 working days for initial review and usually 30 working days for the committee decision; security checks have no deadline. In practice it takes 60-90 days from permit to visa, up to half a year when busy.
Practically no. An Israeli employer requests the expert work visa, and there are no visas for freelancers, the self-employed, entrepreneurs or remote workers; study is the remaining option.
An application fee of ₪1,200 per worker and an annual permit fee of ₪1,420. We found no official tariffs for the visa itself or for family visas, so we give no total.
Yes. If you lose your job you must leave, staying no more than 30 days and only within the visa's validity. The minister may cancel a visa without giving reasons, and since 2026 renewals are refused when the salary is below the new threshold.
Not on a work visa: the licence is not extended beyond 63 months, and the nationality law requires the right of permanent residence and giving up your previous citizenship. Permanent residence is possible through marriage to a citizen or on humanitarian grounds.
Without the right of return a foreigner is a temporary guest: entry only for the highly paid, status tied to one employer, a 63-month cap. Interior Ministry bureaucracy is heavy, and in 2024-2026 aid workers' visas were not renewed on a mass scale.
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.