Residence Policy Index · Issue No 1 · August 2026

Malta

Working for anyone other than the employer named on the permit is explicitly forbidden, and those who miss the deadline after losing a job are deported.

63place of 97
57out of 100
CLeague
54-68place interval
Place among 97

Malta on the common scale

573050658090
Each tick is a country, all 97 on one scale. The bands are leagues, the bold tick is Malta

The place interval 54-68 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 processing53
Pressure on newcomers40
Status security44
Access to entry74
Path to citizenship77
Family rights65
Settling in56

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

The strongest category here is Path to citizenship: 77 out of 100, against a 97-state average of 57.1. The weakest is Pressure on newcomers: 40 against 65.2. 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.