The Golden Visa Shift
Portugal cut property from its golden visa in 2023. Spain closed its scheme outright in 2025. The official issuance figures and five years of search data show where the demand went, and where it did not.
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.
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.
| Year | Greece | Portugal | Spain | Cyprus |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 1,525 | 865 | 997 | no annual data |
| 2022 | 2,767 | 1,281 | 2,017 | no annual data |
| 2023 | 4,231 | not published | 3,270 | no annual data |
| 2024 | 4,535 | 2,081 | not published | no annual data |
| 2025 | 8,879 | not yet published | closed 3 April | no annual data |
Greece: Ministry of Migration and Asylum figures via GTP, Kathimerini and Balkan Insight. Portugal: SEF and AIMA figures via IMI Daily and Movingto. Spain: ministry data via Idealista News. Full source list below.
Three things stand out. First, Greece nearly doubled its issuance in 2025: 8,879 new investor permits against 4,535 in 2024, a 96 percent jump recorded in ministry data. Part of that is catch-up rather than new demand: applications actually fell 25 percent in 2025 (7,025 against a record 9,289 to 9,382 in 2024), and the ministry was still sitting on 33,051 pending files in May 2026. The rush came in 2024, ahead of the September threshold increase; 2025 was the year the paperwork caught up.
Second, Portugal lost the property route but not the demand. In 2024, its first full year without real estate, Portugal issued 4,987 permits including family members, up 72 percent on 2023 and above its previous record from 2017. The money moved from apartments to EUR 500,000 investment funds. A closed route is not the same as a closed door.
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 never published a clean 2024 total.
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:
| Search term | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| portugal golden visa | 7,000 | 9,200 | 7,600 | 15,600 | 12,600 |
| spain golden visa | 2,000 | 2,700 | 6,100 | 7,800 | 9,300 |
| greece golden visa | 1,300 | 2,000 | 3,000 | 4,400 | 3,100 |
| cyprus golden visa | 300 | 400 | 630 | 960 | 870 |
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.
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 33,051 files in the queue as of May 2026 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. 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.
Method and sources
Issuance figures are ministry statistics as reported by the outlets that carry them: Greece via GTP (13 Feb 2025), Kathimerini as summarised by International Investment (2026), the ministry's May 2026 Appendix B tables via Movingto, and Balkan Insight (2023) for 2021 and 2022; Portugal via IMI Daily (8 Jun 2025, citing AIMA figures reported by Bloomberg) and the Movingto statistics page (updated 14 Aug 2026); Spain via Idealista News (4 Apr 2025) and KPMG flash alert 2025-008 for the closure mechanics; Cyprus via IMI Daily (16 Apr 2026, citing data presented to parliament). Search volumes are a Tregie analysis of Ahrefs monthly volume history, UK and US markets combined, pulled 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, two series that measure different things); Portugal's 2023 main-applicant total was never published cleanly during the SEF-to-AIMA transition and its 2025 total is expected from AIMA in late 2026; Spain's 2024 figure was never published in a consistent series. 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, September 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.
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