Passports for sale.
Some countries sell citizenship to anyone who can pay; many more sell the right to live there. For a handful of small islands it has become one of the biggest sources of government money. Here are the programmes and numbers we have collected so far, where each one comes from, and how far to trust it. It is not yet everything those documents contain: what we have and haven't extracted is listed on GitHub.
- 129,263
- numbers
- 1,555
- documents and articles
- 171
- programmes
- 100
- countries
171 ways to buy a passport or a place to live
Lowest price: the minimum one person invests or donates on the main route today (or when it closed), before fees, checked by hand against the rules; hover for how it was chosen. Numbers: figures published about the programme (applications, approvals, money raised…). Rules: prices and conditions over time, from the laws. Click a country for everything we have on it.
What changed most recently
Where sources disagree, the line follows the most official figure for each year. Every alternative is one click away.
Eight things this data tells you
of Dominica's whole economy came from selling citizenship in budget year 2024/25. In 2008 it was 0%.
St Kitts and Nevis took in EC$669 million from passports in 2022, then EC$244 million in 2024 after it tightened its rules, and an estimated EC$124 million in 2025.
is what the five islands now charge for the cheapest route, after years of undercutting each other. They agreed a minimum price in 2024.
of applications were turned down in 2024 in Antigua and Barbuda and in St Kitts and Nevis. Same product, very different checks.
is how far official figures for Dominica's passport income in one year, 2016/17, drift apart, depending on who published them and when.
decisions on visa-free travel, from Canada to the EU, the UK and the US. Europe has now asked the islands to shut their programmes by June 2028.
homes were sold to foreigners in Turkey in 2024-11-20, when a US$250,000 flat bought citizenship. After the price went up, it was 2,541 in 2025-12.
Who buys a passport, and who buys a place to live
Russians are not in the EU's list. All five islands stopped taking Russian applications in 2022, but Grenada still processed about 2,300 that were already pending, in 2024. Every Iranian applicant counted here applied to Dominica.
European Commission, 7th visa suspension report (2024), from each island's top five nationalities
European Commission (2025)
AIMA, Portugal's migration agency (2025 report)
US State Department, Report of the Visa Office 2024
From sugar to passports
Sugar: UN Food and Agriculture Organization. Passport income: St Kitts budget documents and Director of Audit reports. Official yearly figures start in 2016.
A race to the bottom, then a truce
Cheapest donation for one applicant, from each country's rules. Antigua's early prices were set in EC$ and are converted at the fixed rate of EC$2.70 per US$. Click a point to read the rule.
How a sugar island ended up selling passports, who buys them, and what happens when Europe says no. Written from this data, in the newsletter.
Every number, and where it comes from
When the world pushed back
All 129,263 numbers
Uncertain numbers, fully documented
Every number is labelled
- Final figure (86884) · The official number for a period that's over.
- Early figure (29353) · An official number that may still be revised.
- Estimate (1159) · An estimate, often by the IMF, of what happened.
- Reported (2294) · Passed on by someone else, such as a newspaper or the EU quoting a government.
- Claim (250) · Said by someone with a stake, such as a minister, without published data behind it.
- Forecast (3502) · A prediction for a period that wasn't over yet.
- Budget target (1777) · What the government planned to collect, not what it got.
Every number was checked
- Not complete yet. We have not yet extracted every table from every document we store. Each document has a status (not reviewed, partial, complete) in the coverage file, and gaps are listed as to-dos.
- Stored documents. We keep copies of 1550 official documents, so every quote can be checked against the exact file we read, even if the original disappears.
- Quotes found. Each number comes with a short quote from its source, and we checked that 106,521 of them appear in the stored document.
- Read twice. A second, independent reader went back to the documents for 23459 numbers without seeing ours. Where the two disagreed, we checked the page by hand.
- What's missing. Dominica publishes no counts of applications or new citizens at all. Money paid to property developers, rather than to governments, is almost never published.
Free to use, with credit
Download
- Every number CSV
- Every document CSV
- The timeline CSV
- Prices and rules CSV
- Everything on GitHub, including the stored documents
Credit
Free to use for anything, including commercially, under CC BY 4.0. Please credit “Oscar Leo, oscarleo.com” and link to this page, and cite the original source of any number you use.
Found a mistake?
Or have a document we don't? Open an issue on GitHub with the source and page. Data last updated 2026-10-11.
How a sugar island ended up selling passports, who buys them, and what happens when Europe says no. Written from this data, in the newsletter.