The result is calculated for one entry route. Take another one and you get a different country.
between leaguesOn paper Taiwan is open to foreign professionals: a low entry bar, no mandatory integration courses or language tests for residence or permanent residence, family members apply together with the worker with no waiting period, and children with an ARC attend state school (taught in Chinese). Since 1 January 2026 amendments to the Foreign Talent Act have only eased the rules, and the nomad visa is now issued for up to two years. We found no retroactive tightening of the work route in the past two years.
Keep in mind that Taiwan's best terms belong to the Gold Card, not the ordinary work visa. The Gold Card gives an open work permit, permanent residence after 3 years and an immediate right to work for a spouse, but it requires a salary of NT$160,000 (≈$5,300) a month or exceptional qualifications. On an ordinary ARC your status is tied to your employer: a new employer files a new permit, then a new ARC follows. A spouse needs a separate Ministry of Labor permit under a simplified procedure.
If you lose your job, you can apply before your ARC expires for an extension of stay to look for work: 6 months, renewable once, up to a year in total, without leaving the country. You may not work during that time until a new employer gets a permit. If you miss the deadline you lose your basis for staying, and the law gives 10 days to leave.
The state does not publish refusal statistics. Pressure on residents in the past two years has hit one group under a separate legal regime (details in the passport section below); we found no campaigns against other legally resident foreigners. Day to day, the friction is with banks: opening an account can take half a day, and credit cards are often refused without a guarantor. Since 4 June 2026 the One-Stop Banking programme has covered 6 banks and 17 branches, with credit cards without a guarantor. There is no separate address registration: you simply notify the immigration agency of a move within 15 days.
The index score ignores nationality. This is what changes for citizens of specific countries.
Visa-free for up to 90 days. The digital nomad visa is available. Work follows the same employer and ARC route as for everyone.
PRC nationals fall under a separate law, and Hong Kong and Macau under yet another regime; nothing above applies to them. This is where recent pressure has concentrated: about 12,000 people from the PRC had to prove by 30 June 2025 that they had given up PRC household registration, and from March 2025 to January 2026 spouses from the PRC had their status revoked over public statements.
No visa-free entry: Ukraine is not on Taiwan's foreign ministry list, so the digital nomad visa is not available. Work and residence follow the standard employer route.
No visa-free entry: neither country is on Taiwan's foreign ministry list as of July 2026, and the trial visa waiver for Russian citizens ended on 31 July 2022. The digital nomad visa, open only to visa-exempt nationalities, is therefore closed to them. The employer route is the standard one: we found no other nationality restrictions.
The place interval 4-10 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.
Between leaguesThe league holds in fewer than half of the recalculations. Read this country as sitting between two leagues, not as a member of the upper one.
The thin mark on each bar is the average across 97 countries
The strongest category here is Access to entry: 100 out of 100, against a 97-state average of 65.7. The weakest is Pressure on newcomers: 62 against 65.2. Above the world average: 6 out of 7.
100 out of 100 for access to entry, 90 for settling in, income tax of 7.6% on $2,500 a month, and a diploma accepted without extra recognition.
But we score the ordinary resident work card, and on that one the tie to the employer is real: a new employer obtains a new labour ministry permit, then a new card is filed for and the old one is annulled. A spouse gets a dependant card, but the right to work does not come with it; a separate permit is needed.
Downside50 out of 100 for statuses revoked retroactively. Since 2025 at least five cases have been documented of spouses from mainland China losing legal status over things they said.
NoteTaiwan sits exactly on the border of leagues A and B, and should be read as a country between two leagues.
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.
On paper: 7 working days for the work permit online, 10 working days for the resident visa and 5-10 working days for the ARC. In practice the whole route takes 4-8 weeks.
Not through the usual route: the employer applies for the work permit. The digital nomad visa lets you live there for up to two years with an income of $40,000 a year, but you cannot work locally on it and it does not lead to long-term status.
About NT$1,000 per year of ARC validity, NT$500 for a reissue; the work permit (NT$1,000-3,000) is paid by the employer. About NT$5,000 (≈$160) per adult over five years: one of the cheapest countries in our sample.
After losing your job you can extend the ARC to look for work for 6 months and then 6 more, but you may not work during that time. If you do not apply before the ARC expires, the permit is revoked and you get 10 days to leave.
Permanent residence (APRC) after 5 years with at least 183 days a year and an income above twice the minimum wage; 3 years for Gold Card holders. Citizenship after 5 years: a simple language test or 200 hours of classes, and giving up your previous citizenship.
The state wants skilled workers: rules have only eased in the past two years, there are no integration exams and families move together. The weak spots: status tied to the employer, unpublished refusal statistics and banks that are not always ready for foreigners.
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.