UK Golden Visa Cost 2026: The Route Closed in 2022

Key takeaways

There is no UK golden visa to buy in 2026, so there is no price. The Tier 1 (Investor) route closed to all new initial applications from 4:00pm on 17 February 2022. The caseworker guidance is blunt about what happens if you try anyway: any initial application made after that moment must be recorded as void and the fee refunded.

The second deadline has now passed too, and most pages have not caught up. Existing Tier 1 (Investor) holders had to file any extension before 17 February 2026. That date is behind us. The route is now a settlement-only scheme for people already inside it, and paragraph 245EF of the Immigration Rules gives them until 17 February 2028 to apply for indefinite leave to remain.

The cheapest route with an investment flavour costs GBP 1,357, not GBP 2 million. An Innovator Founder application from outside the UK is GBP 1,357 per person on the Home Office fee table in force from 8 April 2026, plus GBP 1,000 to the endorsing body. There is no published minimum investment on that route at all; the endorsing body decides whether your funding is enough.

The healthcare surcharge is the line that moves the total, and comparison pages leave it out. It is GBP 1,035 a year for each adult and GBP 776 a year for each applicant under 18, paid up front for the whole grant. On a three-year Innovator Founder visa for two adults and a child, that alone is GBP 8,538 before a single application fee.

Settlement is where the real money sits. Indefinite leave to remain costs GBP 3,226 per person from 8 April 2026, so a family of three pays GBP 9,678 in one sitting, plus GBP 50 each for the Life in the UK test. Naturalisation afterwards is a separate GBP 1,709 per adult and a GBP 130 ceremony fee.

On this page

This guide starts with why the search term has no price attached to it in 2026, then sets out what the closed route actually cost and the two deadlines that still run inside it, prices the routes a new applicant can file from the Home Office's own fee table, totals three years of the realistic route for a family of three, deals with the GBP 5 million scheme that keeps being reported but does not exist in the Rules, and finishes by comparing Britain with the European programmes you can still buy. This site's renderer does not emit heading anchors, so the list below is a map rather than a set of jump links.

• UK golden visa cost in 2026: there is nothing to buy
• What GBP 2 million bought, and the two dates that still run
• What is open now, priced from the Home Office's own fee table
• Three years on Innovator Founder, costed for a family of three
• Two things that could change this, and neither is in the Rules yet
• Where the UK sits against routes you can actually buy
• Related guides on Domicila

UK golden visa cost in 2026: there is nothing to buy

If you are pricing a UK golden visa cost in 2026, the honest answer is that Britain never had one under that name and no longer has the thing the name pointed at. The search term covered the Tier 1 (Investor) visa, and the Home Office's own caseworker guidance opens with the closure: from 4:00pm on 17 February 2022 the route is closed to all new initial applications for entry clearance or leave to remain, switching into it from another route included. That single fact is worth more than any fee table, and it is the fact most pages ranking for this query bury under a quote form.

The time of day is not a flourish. An application filed at 3pm on 17 February 2022 was inside the window; one filed at 5pm was not, and the guidance instructs caseworkers to record it as void and refund the fee. The version of that guidance published as we write is 20.0, so this is not a stale document that nobody has revisited.

What the closure did not do is create a replacement. Britain has work routes that investors use, but none of them price residence as a product, and the distinction matters enough that we wrote a whole guide on citizenship by investment vs golden visa. The table below is the short version for the UK specifically.

What GBP 2 million bought, and the two dates that still run

Because the GBP 2 million figure is still quoted at you, it is worth setting out accurately once with its status attached. To score the required 75 points an applicant needed money of their own, under their own control, held in a regulated financial institution and disposable in the UK, of not less than GBP 2 million, and a UK regulated bank account opened for the purpose of investing it. The money then had to go into share capital or loan capital in active UK companies, and stay there.

The part that made the route attractive to the very wealthy was the accelerated settlement ladder, which is still the reason people search for it. Investing more bought a shorter qualifying period, and the guidance sets the tiers out explicitly for anyone who entered under the rules in force from 6 November 2014.

For the people already inside the scheme, two dates govern what is left of it, and this is where almost every competing page is either vague or wrong. One page ranking on page one of this query gives 5 April 2025 as the final settlement deadline in one section and 17 February 2028 in another. The Rules are not ambiguous: paragraph 245EF says the application must be made before 17th February 2028.

Settlement on the closed route is not automatic either. The applicant must have maintained the investment throughout the qualifying period, have been absent from the UK for no more than 180 days in any 12 calendar months, and meet the knowledge of language and life requirement under Appendix KoLL unless they are under 18 or 65 and over. If you hold one of these visas, the operative fact is that the extension door is shut and only the settlement door is open.

What is open now, priced from the Home Office's own fee table

Here is where this guide differs from the pages competing for the term: every figure below comes from the Home Office fee table in force from 8 April 2026, not from a consultancy's estimate. Two of the three pages we checked on the first page of results for this term carry no Home Office fee at all, and one tells the reader to ring the firm for current figures.

The endorsement is the real gate on the Innovator Founder route, not the money. GOV.UK requires the business idea to be new, innovative, viable, scalable and endorsed by an approved body before the Home Office looks at anything, and you meet that body again at 12 months and 24 months at GBP 500 a time. The visa can be cut short if the endorsement is withdrawn.

Note what is missing from that route: a minimum investment. The old Innovator visa asked for GBP 50,000 and the Innovator Founder replacement dropped it, so GOV.UK's own page now says only that you must prove to your endorsing body that you have enough funding and where it came from. Anyone quoting you a fixed UK investment threshold in 2026 is quoting a rule that no longer exists.

The personal-savings test is separate and small: GBP 1,270 held for 28 consecutive days, plus GBP 285 for a partner, GBP 315 for a first child and GBP 200 for each additional child. English is required at B2 on the CEFR scale, which is a level higher than most work routes ask for, and that catches people who assumed a business visa would not be tested at all.

Three years on Innovator Founder, costed for a family of three

Headline fees are not what anyone actually pays, so we ran the numbers for the case most readers are in: a main applicant, a partner and one child under 18, applying from outside the UK for the initial three-year grant. Every line is a published government charge or a published endorsing-body charge, and none of it includes lawyers, accountants or the business itself.

Two things stand out. The healthcare surcharge is GBP 8,538 of a GBP 14,609 three-year bill, which is more than the application fees and the endorsement combined, and it is the line that comparison pages omit most often because it is charged by year of grant rather than per application. And settlement costs more in one sitting than the entire first three years of visas.

British citizenship, if you want it, is a further step with its own price list: GBP 1,709 for naturalisation per adult and GBP 130 to arrange the ceremony, on top of the GBP 3,226 already paid for settlement. That is roughly GBP 5,065 per adult across the two stages before any advice is bought. The comparison worth making is with the EB-5 route in the United States, where the government filing fees are smaller and the capital requirement is the entire cost.

If your reason for looking at Britain was a business rather than a passport, the cheaper honest comparison is a US route: our E-2 visa business plan guide covers the treaty route that has no minimum investment either, and is judged on substantiality rather than a threshold. Neither country sells residence; both sell a process.

Two things could change this, and neither is in the Rules yet

The first is a reported new investor route. Since 2025 the immigration and private-wealth press has carried repeated accounts of an invitation-only scheme requiring around GBP 5 million into priority sectors such as artificial intelligence, clean energy and life sciences, with property excluded and a shortened path to settlement. We looked for it where it would have to appear, and it is not there: the statement of changes to the Immigration Rules published on 3 September 2026, HC 584, introduces no investor or residence-by-investment route, and does not touch the Innovator Founder or Global Talent rules either.

Treat that as a proposal being briefed, not a product. Nothing in it is buyable, no fee has been set, no endorsing body exists, and an invitation-only scheme by definition cannot be applied for. If a firm offers to prepare your application for it today, they are selling you a place in a queue for something that has no published criteria.

The second is the opposite risk, and it points at the numbers in our table above. The government consulted on an earned settlement model that would raise the default qualifying period for indefinite leave to remain from five years to ten for most migrants. That consultation closed in February 2026. As of the 3 September 2026 statement of changes, no government response has been implemented in the Rules and the existing qualifying periods still apply, including the three-year route to settlement on Innovator Founder.

Our view is that the three-year figure is the least durable number in this guide. A cost projection that assumes settlement at year three is sound today and could be wrong for anyone who applies after the response lands. If you are modelling a decade in Britain, model the surcharge for longer than you expect to pay it — at GBP 1,035 an adult per year, four extra years for two adults is GBP 8,280 that is not in anyone's comparison table.

Where the UK sits against routes you can actually buy

Set against Europe's surviving programmes, Britain is not expensive so much as a different product: low government fees, no capital threshold, and a business you have to genuinely run in front of an endorsing body twice a year. The thresholds below are the published figures from our own country guides; confirm any of them at source before committing, because several changed terms in the last eighteen months.

Read the threshold column against the last one. Ireland is the closest match in shape, having killed its own investor programme in 2023 and kept an entrepreneur route behind it, and Spain is the closure Britain's most resembles in reasoning. Greece and Portugal still sell residence as a product for a quarter of a million euros and up, which the UK has not done since 2022 and shows no sign of doing again.

Our honest read is that Britain belongs on a shortlist for one profile: a founder with a genuinely innovative, scalable business who wants to build it in the UK and would pass an endorsing body on the merits. For a passive investor the search term is a dead end, and the useful move is to price the programmes that are open rather than to wait for a scheme that exists only in press briefings. Our golden visa cost comparison is where that pricing lives.

Related guides on Domicila

If Britain has ruled itself out, these are the comparisons that do the most work next:

• Golden visa cost comparison — Europe's surviving programmes on published 2026 fee tables
• Golden visa countries — what is still open, and what closed in the last two years
• Cheapest golden visa — why the lowest advertised threshold is rarely the lowest real bar
• Ireland golden visa cost — the other closure that kept an entrepreneur route behind it
• Spain golden visa cost — the closure the UK's most resembles
• Golden visa health insurance requirements — the cover most programmes demand, priced
• Citizenship by investment vs golden visa — residence and a passport are not the same purchase