The result is calculated for one entry route. Take another one and you get a different country.
between leaguesThe 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.
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.
