Residence Policy Index · Issue No 1 · August 2026

Kuwait

Status security 6 out of 100, path to citizenship 7, family 15. The worst result in the index.

red flag
97place of 97
33out of 100
DLeague
97-97place interval
Place among 97

Kuwait on the common scale

333050658090
Each tick is a country, all 97 on one scale. The bands are leagues, the bold tick is Kuwait

The place interval 97-97 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 DYou are a guest herebelow 50 pointsThe state is not building you a future and, to its credit, usually does not hide it. You can come and work; you cannot count on permanent status, full family rights or protection when you lose your job.

Red flagOne of the three core categories, how the agencies work, pressure on newcomers or the reliability of status, has fallen below the critical mark. The score is capped: a disaster in the core is not cured by comforts at the edges.

What the score is made of

Seven categories

Agency processing37
Pressure on newcomers48
Status security6
Access to entry42
Path to citizenship7
Family rights15
Settling in72

The thin mark on each bar is the average across 97 countries

The strongest category here is Settling in: 72 out of 100, against a 97-state average of 69.5. The weakest is Status security: 6 against 57.9. Above the world average: 1 out of 7.

The close-up

What sits behind the score of Kuwait

There is no permanent residence, and the new law went the other way, capping work residence at five years. For the first three years you can move to another employer only with their consent and for a separate fee. From 1 July 2025 the exit permit was reinstated for the entire private sector: you can leave the country only with your employer's knowledge.

Decree 114/2024, whose regulation has been in force since 23 December 2025, gives no grace period at all once a residence permit has expired. That is what collapsed the renewal waiting indicator from 100 to zero and earned the country a red flag.

UpsideThere is no income tax.

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.