You cannot file on your own: the law requires a Panamanian lawyer and your personal attendance.
Panama welcomes people who bring money or work remotely, but it protects its job market. The Labour Code requires at least 90% of a company's ordinary staff to be Panamanian, caps foreign specialists at 15%, and obliges employers to replace a foreign specialist with a Panamanian within 5 years. About 56 professions, from medicine and law to accounting, architecture and teaching, are closed to foreigners, because professional bodies require Panamanian citizenship.
Delivery is slow and costly. You cannot file on your own: the law requires a Panamanian lawyer and an in-person appearance, and biometrics were added in 2025. The law promises a decision within 60 working days and even treats silence as approval, but in practice people wait 4-6 months, and in late 2025 overloaded offices held cases for up to a year. The migration service does not publish refusal statistics.
We found no pressure on legal foreign residents. The harsh practices documented by HRW and a UN special rapporteur in 2025 concerned transit migrants and people expelled from the US, not residents. In the other direction, since January 2025 renewals can be filed even with an expired status. The law gives a closed list of grounds for cancelling residency.
Your status survives losing a job: the residency itself runs its two years. But the right to work ends at once with the employment contract, and switching employers means amending the permit at the Labour Ministry within 15-30 working days, before which you may not work for the new employer. A spouse gets dependant residency with no right to work and can only work through a general permit inside the same quota.
Two everyday traps. You must report a change of address to the migration service within 30 days, or pay a $100 fine; a repeat can cancel your residency. Since the Panama Papers, banks ask for reference letters and proof of funds, opening an account takes weeks or months, and unexplained refusals are common.
The index score ignores nationality. This is what changes for citizens of specific countries.
The US is on the Friendly Nations list: two years of provisional residency, then permanent. A Labour Ministry work permit is still required, and the quota and closed professions still apply.
These include EU countries, the UK, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Israel, Singapore, Serbia, Montenegro and several Latin American states. They get the "2 years provisional, then permanent" path. Taiwan was removed from the list in 2021.
Ukraine is not on the Friendly Nations list. The path is the one for everyone outside it: work residency inside the 10% quota and up to 6 years of temporary status before permanent residency. Panama is not in the EU, so EU temporary protection does not apply.
Russia is not on the Friendly Nations list. That leaves the general work route inside the 10% quota: timelines and status security are the same, but temporary status is renewed for up to 6 years before you can apply for permanent residency. Banks add friction for citizens of sanctioned countries.
Belarus is not on the Friendly Nations list: the same general work route inside the quota and up to 6 years of temporary status before permanent residency.
The place interval 23-39 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 Status security: 88 out of 100, against a 97-state average of 57.9. The weakest is Agency processing: 35 against 48.7. Above the world average: 5 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.
By law the migration service decides within 60 working days and the Labour Ministry issues the work permit within 40. In practice it takes 4-6 months in 2026, and up to a year in busy periods.
Not to work for the Panamanian market: you need an employment contract and a Labour Ministry permit. Without an employer there is the remote worker visa ($36,000 a year, 9 plus 9 months), but it does not lead to residency, and your own business requires $160,000 or more.
Direct payments to the state: $250 to the Treasury and an $800 refundable repatriation deposit per applicant. We found no official table of other charges; the lawyer is mandatory and paid separately.
Losing your job does not revoke residency, but the right to work goes with the contract. Residency can be cancelled for a sham marriage, false documents, a security threat or repeatedly failing to report an address change.
Permanent residency after 2 years of provisional. Citizenship 5 years after permanent, about 7 years in all: an exam on history, geography and civics, Spanish, and giving up your previous citizenship.
The state leaves legal residents alone: we found no campaigns against them. But the job market is closed by quotas and a list of professions, everything goes through a lawyer, and processing takes about twice the legal time.
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.