The Golden Visa Shift

Updated October 2026: what is new

• Portugal's total rose again in 2025.AIMA's annual report, published on 22 September 2026, counts 2,685 investment residence permits plus 3,967 family permits in 2025, 6,652 in all against 4,990 in 2024, the highest total we can document, with no property route open in either year.
• Greek demand keeps falling and the queue is shrinking. The ministry's August 2026 release shows 3,426 new applications from January to August 2026 against 5,343 in the same months of 2025, and 28,681 files pending, down from 33,051 in May.
• Cyprus still publishes no annual figures, and on 24 September 2026 its deputy migration minister said a tightening is being prepared.
• Spain has one new data point: 1,037 property visas issued in 2024, on a measure that cannot be set beside the older series.

All figures on this page were checked against their sources on 8 October 2026.

What changed, and when

In eighteen months, southern Europe went from three property-linked golden visas to one and a half. The sequence matters, because every cutoff created its own rush:

• 7 October 2023. Portugal removes property purchase and plain capital transfer from its golden visa (Mais Habitacao). Investment funds at EUR 500,000 become the main remaining route.
• 8 April 2024. Spain's prime minister announces the end of the Spanish golden visa, citing housing-market pressure.
• 1 September 2024. Greece raises its thresholds (Law 5100/2024): EUR 800,000 in Attica, Thessaloniki and the large islands, EUR 400,000 elsewhere, with a EUR 250,000 route left for commercial-to-residential conversions and listed-building restorations.
• 3 April 2025. Spain's scheme closes (Ley Organica 1/2025, published 2 January 2025). Applications filed before the deadline keep their rights; renewals continue.
• 24 September 2026. Cyprus's deputy migration minister tells the House audit committee that tightening of the golden visa is being prepared ahead of Schengen entry; no new threshold or date has been announced.

That leaves Greece and Cyprus as the two places in southern Europe where buying property still leads to a residence permit, exactly the situation our country guides cover in detail.

Where the applications went

New investor residence permits issued per year, main applicants. Cyprus publishes no annual statistics at all, which is itself a finding; see the method notes below.

Greece: Ministry of Migration and Asylum, Legal Migration Appendix B (2024 to 2026 releases), with 2021 and 2022 via Balkan Insight. Portugal: SEF figures via IMI Daily, then AIMA's annual reports for 2024 and 2025. Spain: ministry data via Idealista News and The Objective. Full source list below.

Three things stand out. First, Greece nearly doubled its issuance in 2025: 8,879 new investor permits against 4,536 in 2024, a 96 percent jump recorded in ministry data (later releases revise 2025 up to about 9,017). Part of that is catch-up rather than new demand: applications actually fell 25 percent in 2025 (7,021 filed against a record 9,372 in 2024, in the ministry's August 2026 release), and 2026 is lower still, with 3,426 applications from January to August against 5,343 in the same months of 2025, a drop of about 36 percent by our calculation (the 2025 months come from the December 2025 release). Issuance has stayed high, 6,751 new permits from January to July 2026, and the queue is shrinking: 28,681 files were pending at the end of August 2026 (7,686 investor and 20,995 family files), down 13 percent from 33,051 in May. The rush came in 2024, ahead of the September threshold increase; 2025 was the year the paperwork caught up, and 2026 is the year the queue starts to clear.

Second, Portugal lost the property route but not the demand. AIMA's annual report for 2025, published on 22 September 2026, counts 2,685 investment residence permits and 3,967 family permits, 6,652 in total, up from 2,081 and 2,909 (4,990) in 2024: main applicants rose 29 percent and family permits 36 percent. Both years are full years without real estate, so the money moved from apartments to EUR 500,000 investment funds rather than leaving. A closed route is not the same as a closed door. Earlier coverage described 2024 as up 72 percent on 2023, but AIMA's 2023 report gives 2,901 permits without saying clearly whether family permits are included, so we no longer compare 2024 with 2023. No 2026 year-to-date figure exists yet.

Third, Spain's run ended with a sprint. The scheme issued 14,576 visas through the property route between 2013 and 2023, accelerating from 997 in 2021 to 3,270 in 2023. After the April 2024 announcement, intermediaries reported application volumes tripling in June 2024 and US applications in Madrid up 200 percent after the closure law was published; those last figures come from a migration firm rather than the ministry, so treat them as indicative. Spain still has no consistent public series for 2024. The one count we found is 1,037 property visas issued by the Foreign Ministry in 2024, reported from a transparency resolution; it covers visas rather than the authorisations in the older series (the same data puts the 2013 to 2024 total at 7,309, against 14,576 for 2013 to 2023 in the other series), so we do not chart the two together. Nothing official has been published for 2025.

The attention outlived the schemes

We pulled monthly search volumes for the four scheme names across the UK and US markets, 2018 to 2026, from Ahrefs. Average monthly searches per year, both markets combined, rounded:

The counterintuitive finding: search interest in "spain golden visa" is higher in 2026, with the scheme dead, than it ever was while the scheme existed. The single biggest month in the whole series is April 2024, the announcement month, at roughly 11,200 searches. Closure headlines created more curiosity than the visa itself ever did, and much of that demand now lands on pages explaining what replaced it.

Portugal shows the same pattern a year later: its peak month is February 2025, sixteen months after property was cut, at roughly 22,500 searches. Greece is the only scheme cooling off: from about 4,400 average monthly searches in 2025 to about 3,100 in 2026, consistent with higher thresholds and a visible backlog taking the shine off. Cyprus, starting from almost nothing, has roughly tripled since 2022, which matches its position as the quiet second property option left standing.

The search series was not refreshed in the October 2026 update: it is the 1 September 2026 pull, and its last month (September 2026) is an Ahrefs estimate rather than a completed month.

What this means if you are buying

• Greece still links property to residence, but at EUR 400,000 to 800,000 in most places people actually want to buy, and with 28,681 files still in the queue at the end of August 2026 (33,051 in May) you should plan for processing time, not around it. Our Greece guide has the full cost picture.
• Cyprus keeps the lowest threshold (EUR 300,000 under Regulation 6(2)) and a processing time of two to three months, which is among the fastest in Europe, though a tightening ahead of Schengen entry is being prepared. See the Cyprus guide.
• Portugal no longer rewards a property purchase with residence. If you are buying there, buy for the house, the rental market or the life, not the passport; the Portugal guide covers what a purchase actually costs.
• Spain is closed for new applications; only pre-deadline files and renewals continue. Buying in Spain is now purely a property decision, with the 90-day Schengen rule for non-residents.

Key figures, sources and check dates

Method and sources

Greek figures come straight from the Ministry of Migration and Asylum's monthly Legal Migration reports, Appendix B (published at migration.gov.gr/en/statistika), read in the December 2024, December 2025, January 2026, May 2026 and August 2026 releases. The ministry counts permits two ways: by month of decision (used for permits issued per year) and by year of filing (used for applications and pending files). It revises recent months upward in later releases, so the newest months are floors; we quote each figure with the release it comes from. Earlier Greek years: GTP (13 Feb 2025), Kathimerini as summarised by International Investment (2026), and Balkan Insight (2023) for 2021 and 2022. Portugal: AIMA's Relatorio de Migracoes e Asilo for 2023, 2024 and 2025 (the 2025 edition was published on 22 September 2026), IMI Daily (8 Jun 2025, citing AIMA figures reported by Bloomberg) and the Movingto statistics page for SEF-era years; the Bloomberg total for 2024 was 4,987 against 4,990 from adding AIMA's two lines. Spain: Idealista News (4 Apr 2025), The Objective (24 May 2025) and KPMG flash alert 2025-008 for the closure mechanics. Cyprus: IMI Daily (16 Apr 2026, citing data presented to parliament) and Cyprus Mail (24 Sep 2026). Search volumes are a Tregie analysis of Ahrefs monthly volume history, UK and US markets combined, pulled 1 September 2026 and rounded to the nearest hundred.

Known gaps, stated rather than papered over: Cyprus publishes no annual application or issuance statistics, only cumulative totals (7,088 main-applicant permits since 2013; 28,660 including family members since 2014; about 12,000 permits now under review; the deputy minister's oral estimate of about 1,500 in the last two years; these count different things and are not a series); Portugal has no 2026 year-to-date figure and its 2023 total is ambiguous; Spain has no consistent 2024 series and nothing for 2025; the Greek ministry has not yet published the September 2026 tables. Where a figure comes from a commercial migration firm rather than a ministry, the text says so.

Cite this study as: Tregie, The Golden Visa Shift, updated October 2026, https://tregie.com/en/golden-visa-shift. Journalists are welcome to reuse the tables with attribution; for the underlying series or questions, use the contact page.