The Clear Cost of a Second Passport

A citizenship by investment programme gives you a second passport, usually without needing to live in the country. A golden visa gives you residency first: a permit you hold, renew, and often maintain before any path to a passport. The right choice depends on whether you want a passport now or a place to live and a longer route to one.

Turkey grants citizenship for a 400,000 US dollar real estate investment held for three years, or 500,000 US dollars through other approved assets, with no residency or language requirement. The headline figure is only the start: government charges, legal fees, valuation, and currency conversion all add to the real total.

Grenada is the only Caribbean citizenship by investment country that holds a US E-2 treaty, which is why investors pair a Grenadian passport with a plan to run a business in the United States. But the E-2 visa is a separate, non-automatic application with its own rules, and Grenada expects a period of domicile before you qualify.

The cheapest CBI program is not always the lowest advertised contribution. Due diligence, government fees, family pricing, bank charges, and advisor fees change the real total.

Vanuatu is one of the few programmes that publishes its prices plainly: 130,000 US dollars for a single applicant, 150,000 for a married couple, 180,000 for a couple with two children, plus a 5,000 dollar financial intelligence due diligence fee. The harder question is what the passport does. Visa-free access to the Schengen area was fully suspended in February 2023 and then permanently removed by regulation, which changes the case for buying one substantially.

Vanuatu passport ranking pages can be useful starting points, but destination-country visa rules and institutional treatment can change quickly.

Most Portugal golden visa quotes show the investment and one government fee. The published AIMA table, in force since 1 March 2026, charges 842.80 euros to receive and analyse the application, 8,418.90 euros to grant the residence permit and 4,210.30 euros to renew it — and each of those applies per person, including family members. For a family of four the state fees alone run past 35,000 euros before any lawyer is paid.

Portugal golden visa fund searches are high-intent, but investors should review eligibility, fund costs, liquidity, risk, and legal fit before subscribing.

UAE golden visa cost varies by category, emirate, applicant profile, investment route, document work, medical checks, Emirates ID, and professional support.

The E-2 business plan has one job the regulations actually name: showing the enterprise is not marginal. A marginal enterprise cannot generate more than a minimal living for you and your family, and a new business must show the capacity to clear that within five years of your E-2 status beginning. Everything else in the plan supports two further tests, substantiality and develop-and-direct. Fees and rules below are from USCIS and the State Department and change without notice.

The EB-5 minimum is 1,050,000 US dollars, or 800,000 dollars for a targeted employment area or infrastructure project, and both figures face their first inflation adjustment for petitions filed on or after 1 January 2027. Filing fees changed direction in November 2025, when a court order sent EB-5 forms back to their pre-2024 amounts. Below that, the costs that decide the outcome are the ones attached to job creation and to what the regulations refuse to count as capital.

Golden visa cost has three layers that behave differently: the qualifying investment, the one-off government fees, and the charges that come back at every renewal. Portugal publishes an exact table — EUR 842.80 to lodge, EUR 8,418.90 to grant and EUR 4,210.30 to renew. Greece prices the property at EUR 800,000, EUR 400,000 or EUR 250,000 depending on where it sits. Dubai publishes a single all-in total of AED 9,884.75. Every figure below comes from the issuing authority's own schedule and was checked in September 2026.

The best citizenship by investment country depends on budget, family size, source-of-funds complexity, travel goals, program risk, and current official rules.

There are two honest answers, and they are four orders of magnitude apart. The passport booklet itself costs EC$150 for an adult and EC$75 for a child under 16, paid at the Treasury Department, with a two-week turnaround. Becoming a Dominican citizen so that you can be issued one costs from about USD 210,000 in government charges through the Citizenship by Investment Programme. The CBI fee schedule contains no passport line at all: it ends at a USD 500 certificate of naturalisation. Figures checked September 2026.

Dominica's fund route starts at a non-refundable USD 200,000 for a single applicant and USD 250,000 for a main applicant with up to three dependants. Every fee on top is set out in Schedule 1 of S.R.O. 8 of 2024: USD 7,500 due diligence for the main applicant, USD 4,000 per dependant, USD 1,000 processing per application, USD 1,000 per interview and USD 500 per certificate of naturalisation. A single applicant reaches about USD 210,000 in government charges and a family of four about USD 266,500. Checked against the CBIU and the Regulations in September 2026.

St Lucia is a major Caribbean CBI option with multiple routes. Cost comparisons should separate the official route from advisor and document costs.

Antigua and Barbuda often matters for family applications because family pricing can change the total-cost ranking.

Grenada's contribution route starts at a non-refundable USD 235,000 to the National Transformation Fund, and that single figure covers a main applicant, a couple, or a family of four. The fees on top do not: application, due diligence, processing and interview charges are levied per person. A single applicant lands near USD 244,000 and a family of four near USD 257,000 before an agent has invoiced anything. All figures are from the Investment Migration Agency Grenada's published schedule, checked September 2026.

St. Kitts and Nevis is one of the best-known CBI programs, but cost comparisons must use current official rules rather than older price memories.

On 29 April 2025 the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union held that Malta's investor citizenship scheme breached EU law. The route that sold Maltese, and therefore EU, citizenship for a payment is closed, and no quote for it is credible. Malta still operates a residence-by-investment programme with published costs: a 50,000 euro administrative fee, a government contribution of 30,000 or 60,000 euros depending on whether you buy or rent, and property at 375,000 euros or 14,000 a year.

Australia has no citizenship by investment programme and no price for a passport. It had an investor programme and it closed: the whole Business Innovation and Investment Program shut to new applications on 31 July 2024, and the Business Talent visa on 1 July 2021. What replaced them is the National Innovation visa, which is invitation-only, has no investment threshold at all, and costs AUD 6,235 for the main applicant. Citizenship then costs AUD 595 after four years of residence. Figures from the Department of Home Affairs, checked September 2026.

There is no Norwegian citizenship by investment programme, no golden visa, and no price. Money changes the answer in exactly one published way: an income above three times the National Insurance basic amount cuts the residence requirement from eight years in the last eleven to six in the last ten. That is earned income declared in a Norwegian tax settlement, not capital moved into the country, and it is the whole of the investment story. Figures below are from UDI and change without notice.

Austria is often marketed as citizenship by investment, but official guidance emphasizes citizenship requirements rather than a standard fixed-price CBI route.

A good comparison weighs total cost, due diligence, timeline, family economics, passport utility, and program risk.

Due diligence fees are one of the most important CBI cost lines because every adult applicant is reviewed separately and enhanced checks can change the budget.

Family CBI cost can rank programs differently from single-applicant cost because dependents, adult children, parents, and due diligence rows change the total.

Caribbean CBI comparisons should look beyond donation minimums and weigh total cost, family rules, due diligence burden, passport utility, and policy risk.

Source-of-funds preparation is often the difference between a clean CBI file and a slow, expensive, or rejected application review.

The E-2 visa has no official minimum investment. Officers judge whether your investment is substantial relative to the business you are buying or building, whether the funds are genuinely committed and at risk, and whether the business can grow beyond marginal income. In practice that makes the right number business-specific, not a fixed threshold, and it makes documentation as important as the amount.

The cheapest golden visa headline in Europe is Latvia at 50,000 euros through a company investment, but the lowest advertised number is not the same as the lowest real cost. Hungary, Greece, Portugal, Italy, Cyprus, and Malta cluster between 150,000 and 500,000 euros depending on route, and every one of them adds government fees, legal work, renewals, and family costs on top. Rank programs by total cost for your family and goal, not by the marketing number.

São Tomé and Príncipe launched its citizenship by investment program in 2025 under Decree-Law 07/2025, with a minimum contribution of 90,000 US dollars for a single applicant and 95,000 dollars for a family of two to four. That makes it one of the lowest headline prices in the market, but it is also one of the newest and least proven programs, so due diligence on the program itself matters as much as the price.

St Kitts and Nevis runs the longest-standing citizenship by investment program in the world, dating to 1984. Today it offers three main routes: a 250,000 dollar Sustainable Island State Contribution, a 250,000 dollar Public Benefit Option, and approved real estate from 325,000 dollars with a seven-year holding period. The program repriced sharply in 2023, so treat older figures and old marketing as obsolete and verify everything against the Citizenship by Investment Unit.

The E-2 treaty investor visa has six core requirements: you hold nationality of a treaty country, you have invested or are actively investing a substantial amount, the funds are at risk and committed, the business is real and operating rather than marginal, treaty nationals own at least 50 percent of it, and you are coming to develop and direct it. None of these is a paperwork formality; each one is a ground for refusal on its own.

The list of golden visa countries has shrunk and repriced. Spain, Ireland, and the UK have closed; Portugal and Greece removed or restricted their cheapest routes; and the survivors now cluster between 250,000 and 800,000 euros in Europe, with Latvia's 50,000 euro company route as the outlier. Outside Europe, the UAE's ten-year visa and a handful of investor residence programs carry the model. What separates the good ones is not price but what the permit actually leads to.

Nearly every guide on this topic says golden visas require health insurance. That is not quite true. Portugal's investor route is a notable exception that grants access to the national health service after approval, while Greece expects private cover and Schengen entry separately requires a minimum level of medical and repatriation cover. The requirement, the minimum sum insured, and whether travel cover is accepted all vary by country and by route.

Digital nomad visas are marketed on lifestyle and sold on paperwork. The real filter is the income test, and the gap between programmes is wide: Spain sits lowest of the major European routes, Portugal highest, and Greece in between while charging a government fee more than ten times Spain's. Thailand ignores income entirely and tests savings instead. Figures below were checked against published guidance and change without notice.

Greece requires roughly 3,500 euros a month in net income, rising by about 20 percent for a spouse and 15 percent for each child, plus private health insurance from a provider authorised in Greece and proof of accommodation. The initial residence permit fee is around 1,016 euros, which is high by European standards. From February 2026, applications must be made through a Greek consulate before travelling.

Article 15 of the Visa Code requires adequate and valid travel medical insurance with minimum coverage of 30,000 euros, valid throughout the territory of the Member States and covering the entire period of the intended stay. It must cover repatriation for medical reasons, urgent medical attention, emergency hospital treatment and death. The requirement most applicants fail is not the amount but paragraph 5: consulates must be satisfied a claim against the insurer would be recoverable in a Member State.

Searching for a UAE freelance visa returns one product where the system has two. A freelance or self-employment permit is permission to work. A residence visa is permission to live there, and they are issued by different bodies. The five-year Green Residence is the self-sponsored route freelancers actually want, and its published income test is AED 360,000 a year from freelance work across each of the previous two years — around 98,000 US dollars, which is well above what most people picture when they start looking.

Singapore assesses Employment Pass candidates in two stages, and the first is a hard gate: a candidate who misses the qualifying salary is ineligible regardless of how well they would have scored on COMPASS. The salary bar is indexed to age, starting at S$5,600 a month and reaching S$10,700 at 45 and above, with a higher scale in financial services. Both scales rise for new applications from 1 January 2027. Stage two is COMPASS, a 40-point framework in which a company with fewer than 25 local professionals banks 20 points automatically.

There is no Singapore golden visa, and the phrase misleads in a specific and expensive way. The only investor route is the Global Investor Programme, which starts at S$10 million, charges a S$20,000 non-refundable application fee, and grants permanent residence rather than a residence permit. Below that threshold Singapore sells no residence at any price: the routes are work passes, and they are graded on salary or on what your company has done. Figures below are from EDB, MOM, ICA, ACRA and IRAS and change without notice.

Most golden visa cost comparisons line up four headline investment figures and stop, which is how people end up budgeting for the wrong programme by tens of thousands of euros. Portugal charges 8,418.90 euros to grant a single permit and the same again for every family member. Greece charges 2,016 euros in total. Dubai publishes a fee list adding up to 9,884.75 dirhams. This golden visa cost comparison works from the published 2026 fee tables of AIMA, the Greek Ministry of Migration and Asylum, the Dubai Land Department and Residency Malta Agency, separates the money you may get back from the money you never see again, and runs the family arithmetic. Every figure is as published in 2026 and can change without notice.

Ask five agents how long citizenship by investment takes and you get five numbers, none of them sourced. The gap between the marketing answer and the real one is expensive: an approval that slips from four months to nine is another year in the tax position you were trying to leave, and a second round of police certificates that expire while you wait. This page collects what the units themselves publish about citizenship by investment processing time in 2026 — Grenada says three to four months, St Kitts and Nevis says three to six, and the other three Eastern Caribbean programmes publish nothing at all — then sets those figures against the reforms the OECS Heads of Government announced on 23 September 2025, which added biometric capture, a regional regulator and a US$200,000 floor to every file. We read each unit's own pages rather than an advisory brochure, and we mark clearly which numbers are official and which are planning estimates.

Nauru's contribution is USD 90,000 for a principal applicant until 31 December 2026, and USD 115,000 once the discount lapses. The fees on top are published line by line: USD 5,000 application, USD 6,000 due diligence, USD 1,200 in bank charges and USD 500 per passport. That puts a single applicant at USD 102,700 and a family of four at USD 115,700 in government charges. All figures come from the Naoero Program Office's own schedule, checked 8 September 2026.

Most pages quoting a Thailand Elite visa cost are written by agents paid to sell you one, and half of them still list packages the operator discontinued in October 2023. The five current tiers run from THB 650,000 to THB 5,000,000, roughly USD 19,700 to USD 151,540, and the cheapest of them is more than thirty times what the Thai Board of Investment charges for a ten-year visa that does more. We took the prices from Thailand Privilege Card Company Limited's own membership pages on 10 September 2026, worked out what each tier costs per year of validity, and marked every figure the operator does not publish.

Every page still quoting a Spain golden visa cost is pricing something that stopped existing on 3 April 2025, when the investor route was struck out of Spanish law by a statute about court reform. That matters if you were budgeting around EUR 500,000 of Spanish property, because the routes that replaced it test your monthly income rather than your capital, and one of them makes you a Spanish tax resident by design. We read the repeal in the Boletín Oficial del Estado, took the money tests from the 2024 immigration regulation and the February 2026 minimum-wage decree, and priced what is left for a single applicant, a couple and a family of four.

Ask three advisers what the Hungary golden visa cost is and you will get three answers, because most of them are still quoting a property route that was deleted from the statute before it ever opened. That matters when the gap between the two prices Hungarian law does recognise is EUR 750,000. We read the guest investor sections of Act XC of 2023 in the consolidated Hungarian text, took the charges from the Directorate-General's own published fee schedule, and priced the whole thing for a single applicant and for a family of four.

The Greece golden visa cost is advertised at EUR 250,000 on far more pages than it is true on, because that number now belongs to two narrow renovation routes rather than to the sea-view apartment in the photograph. Pick the wrong island and the gap between the price you were quoted and the price the law requires is EUR 550,000. We took the thresholds, the fees and the deadlines from the Greek government's own service registry entries, priced the transfer tax, notary and registry work that no brochure adds in, and checked what February's rewrite of the Migration Code actually did to the investor permit.

The Italy golden visa cost is quoted at EUR 250,000 almost everywhere, and that number is real. It is not, however, the qualifying bar: Article 26-bis of the Immigration Code asks the same EUR 250,000 startup applicant to prove they are the beneficial owner of EUR 1,000,000, available and transferable to Italy, before the committee will issue a nulla osta at all. That is a gap of three quarters of a million euro between the advertised price and the entry test, and almost none of the pages selling this route mention it. We read the statute as it stands in 2026, priced the visa, the permit and the card from the government's own fee decrees, and checked what the 2026 Budget Law did to the flat tax that most of these pages still quote at EUR 100,000.

The Cyprus golden visa cost is quoted as EUR 300,000 almost everywhere, and that figure is right as far as it goes: Regulation 6(2) of the Aliens and Immigration Regulations asks for exactly that, excluding VAT. Those two words are doing an enormous amount of work. On the residential route the tax on top is either EUR 15,000 or EUR 57,000, and what decides which is not the property at all but whether you actually move into it. We read the Tax Commissioner's VAT circular, priced all four investment categories against the Migration Department's own criteria, and checked which Cypriot transaction taxes still exist in 2026, because two of the ones competing pages still list were abolished.

The Malta golden visa cost is quoted almost everywhere as a EUR 28,000 or EUR 58,000 contribution on top of a EUR 40,000 administration fee, with property from EUR 300,000 in Gozo. Every one of those figures has been repealed. Two legal notices, one in force from 1 January 2025 and one made in July 2025, replaced the property thresholds, the fee schedule and the rules on who counts as a dependant. The programme now asks EUR 99,000 that you never see again before a single euro of property, and the rewrite left the rental route almost exactly where it was while making the purchase route EUR 29,000 dearer. We read both legal notices and the consolidated regulations rather than the brochures, and totalled the same household three ways.

The Latvia golden visa cost is quoted almost everywhere as EUR 250,000 of property plus a 5 per cent payment to the state, or EUR 280,000 parked with a Latvian bank. Both routes stopped taking new applicants on 15 September 2026, when a new Immigration Law came into force. What is left is a EUR 50,000 share-capital route with a EUR 10,000 payment on top, and a EUR 150,000 route into a state-established investment fund that the migration authority says has not been set up yet. We priced both survivors against the published state duties, and found the official pages still describing the closed ones.

The Ireland golden visa cost is still quoted across the web as EUR 1 million into an Irish enterprise, or EUR 500,000 as a philanthropic endowment. Neither is buyable. The Immigrant Investor Programme stopped taking applications at close of business on 15 February 2023, and the only investment-linked residence route still open to a new applicant is the Start-up Entrepreneur Programme, which asks for EUR 50,000 of funding and a EUR 350 application fee. We priced what is left against the Department of Justice's own published fees, and found the Department's own IIP page still inviting applications and quoting its bank details more than three years after the programme closed.

Search the UK golden visa cost and you get quoted GBP 2 million, because that is what the Tier 1 (Investor) visa asked for. Nobody has been able to buy it since 4pm on 17 February 2022, and on 17 February 2026 the extension window shut on the people who already held one. What is left is a set of ordinary work routes carrying ordinary Home Office fees, and almost no page ranking for this query prices them. We took the Home Office's own fee table of 8 April 2026, the Tier 1 (Investor) caseworker guidance at version 20.0 and the current Immigration Rules, and costed every route a new applicant can actually file today.

Every page ranking for the Germany golden visa cost tells you to budget somewhere between EUR 360,000 and EUR 512,000. Not one of them cites a German source for that number, because there is no German source: Germany has never had a golden visa, and the residence permit people mean when they search for one has had no minimum investment since 2012. What Germany does have is a published price list, and it is startling. The entire state bill for a founder, a partner and one child over three years comes to roughly EUR 763. We took the fee regulation, the Residence Act, the company law, the commercial register fee schedule and Berlin's own fee sheet, and costed every line a real applicant pays.

The US Gold Card cost is advertised as $1 million. The real figure for one person is $1,015,000, because a $15,000 processing fee is payable before anyone looks at your file, and neither amount comes back. What it buys is not a new visa. Executive Order 14351 makes the gift evidence of eligibility for EB-1 and EB-2 visas that already existed, already have annual caps and already have a 7 percent per-country limit. In a court filing this year the Department of Homeland Security said Gold Card petitions will not necessarily be adjudicated faster than anybody else's. We priced every line from the order, the Federal Register and the statute.

The New Zealand golden visa cost splits into two numbers that most pages merge into one. Government charges are NZ$27,470 for the whole family, and the investment is NZ$5 million held for three years on the Growth category or NZ$10 million held for five on Balanced. What makes it unusual is the third number: 21 days. That is the total time a Growth investor must spend in New Zealand across the entire three-year investment period, which is the lightest presence requirement of any major investor visa. We priced every line from Immigration New Zealand's own fee and levy table, the operational instructions, the Land Information New Zealand consent guidance published in March 2026, and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment quarterly report released in September 2026.

Almost every page ranking for Panama golden visa cost is counting down to a deadline that no longer governs anything. The claim is that the US$300,000 property threshold expires on 15 October 2026 and jumps to US$500,000 — but the decree that deadline was read out of was repealed on 16 September 2026, when Executive Decree 17 replaced Decree 722 of 2020 outright. What replaced it is not a single number. It is a split: US$300,000 still qualifies on a new, first-sale property bought from the developer, while a resale property now costs US$500,000, and the only live date left in the calendar is 16 March 2027. We pulled Decree 109 from the Ministry of Commerce and Industries' own site to find where the phantom deadline came from, priced every route, itemised the government fees, and totalled the bill for a family of four.

Search the Indonesia golden visa cost and you will be told it is US$350,000, or US$2.5 million if you want to run a company. Both figures are real, and both come from the same two paragraphs of a 2023 press release that every guide has been copying since. The Directorate General of Immigration's own visa list tells a different story: twelve separate visa indices carry the Golden Visa badge, the cheapest of them asks US$25,000, and one of them asks for no investment at all beyond a deposit you keep in your own bank account. We went through all twelve official index pages one at a time, pulled the itemised government fee from each, converted it at Bank Indonesia's published rate for 8 October 2026 rather than at whatever the rupiah was worth when the last guide was written, and then checked the ministry's own issuance data to see which of these routes anybody is actually using.

Nobody in the Malaysian government uses the phrase golden visa, which is why the Malaysia golden visa cost you find online is usually two numbers from two different programmes, added together by somebody who never opened either fee table. There are in fact two: Malaysia My Second Home, run by the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture in four categories from a USD 32,000 fixed deposit up to USD 1 million, and the Premium Visa Programme, run by the Immigration Department, where the participation fee alone is RM 200,000. We priced both from the government's own pages and PDFs, converted every ringgit figure at Bank Negara Malaysia's published middle rate for 9 October 2026 rather than at a rate nobody names, added the two charges every competing guide leaves out, and then checked the fee schedule against the revenue the minister reported to Parliament. The arithmetic reconciles to within RM 3,000.

Mauritius has launched a visa it actually calls the Golden Visa, and the first thing almost every page about it gets wrong is the arithmetic. The Mauritius golden visa cost is reported everywhere as USD 1 million, which is the investment you give a written undertaking to make within twelve months — not a fee, not a payment to anybody, and not due on the day you apply. The government charges nothing at all for this one: the Economic Development Board's own guidelines say "No processing fee applicable", while the cheaper permits this visa sits above each carry a USD 1,000 statutory fee and, since 1 December 2025, a USD 50 non-refundable application fee that no comparison table we found shows. We priced all seven routes from the EDB's August 2026 guidelines and the government residency portal, read the Finance Act 2026 to see what Parliament actually enacted, and converted every rupee figure at the Bank of Mauritius middle rate for 12 October 2026.

Every page that quotes a Switzerland golden visa cost is pricing something that does not exist. There is no Swiss residency-by-investment programme, no application fee, and nothing to buy: what the market calls the Swiss golden visa is a residence permit granted at a canton's discretion to someone who agrees in advance to pay that canton a large amount of tax every year. The figure the consultancies circulate — we found CHF 421,700, 429,000, 434,700, 435,000 and 450,000 across the first page of results — is not even a price. It is a minimum taxable base, and the tax on it is a fraction of it. We read the figure out of the federal statute as amended for 2026, pulled the minimum base from eight cantons' own factsheets and the federal tax administration's cantonal sheets, and found the canton whose government published the arithmetic that converts a base into an actual bill.

Canada has never run a golden visa, and in 2026 almost every route the term was used to describe is shut. What is still open is Québec's investor programme, and its price is published: a CAD 1,000,000 five-year investment that comes back without interest, a CAD 200,000 contribution that does not come back at all, and a CAD 18,241 review fee for 2026. We read those figures out of the Québec government's own conditions and fee pages, pulled the federal charges from IRCC's fee list, and then did the arithmetic nobody else publishes — what the interest-free million actually costs over five years at the Government of Canada's own bond yield.

Saudi Arabia does not sell a golden visa. It sells Premium Residency, and since January 2024 it sells seven versions of it: two you can simply buy, at SAR 800,000 once or SAR 100,000 a year, and five tied to a talent, investment or property test that carry a far smaller product fee. We priced all seven from the Premium Residency Center's own published law, the Saudi Press Agency announcement that launched the five new products, and the Ministry of Media's entry for the two older ones — then did the arithmetic nobody publishes: the year at which paying once beats paying annually, and what the work-permit rule introduced in June 2026 adds to every one of them.

The Bahrain golden visa cost question has two answers and almost every page online gives only one of them. The permit itself costs BHD 305 — a BHD 5 application fee and a BHD 300 issuance fee, about USD 811 at the dinar's peg — which makes it one of the cheapest long-term residence permits any government sells. The qualifying route is the expensive part, and in November 2025 the property threshold fell 35%, from BHD 200,000 to BHD 130,000. We priced both halves from Bahrain's own Golden Residency portal and NPRA's service page, worked out what the cut actually saves, and checked the three claims the advisory pages keep repeating that the official text contradicts.

The Oman golden visa cost splits into two numbers that do not agree with each other, and most pages ranking for this phrase publish only one of them. Oman's own investment agency puts the threshold at OMR 200,000 — about USD 520,160 at the rial's fixed peg — across seven routes. Big-four and law-firm summaries written months later still say OMR 500,000 for ten years and OMR 250,000 for five. We traced both figures back to the documents that state them, checked which permit fee has an official source behind it, and found the cost almost nobody prices: roughly 56,000 people have applied, and on the last government figures not one approval had been issued.

The Egypt citizenship by investment cost gets quoted four different ways by four different advisers, and the reason is not carelessness. Egypt cut its thresholds by prime ministerial decree in March 2023, and the English-language programme document still published by the government's own investment authority lists the amounts that decree replaced: USD 500,000 for property where the current figure is USD 300,000, and USD 400,000 for a project where it is now USD 350,000 plus a further USD 100,000. We read both schedules side by side, traced every figure to the decree or government report that states it, and worked out what the refundable deposit route actually gives back after the pound's 2024 float. On the cheapest route the state keeps USD 250,000 permanently, and the application fee is USD 10,000 on top.