We checked 53 nomad visa programmes. 21 of them lead nowhere.

Why nobody else publishes this

Search for any of these visas and page one is relocation agencies, immigration lawyers and affiliate guides. All of them are paid when you apply. None of them is paid when you decide not to — which means a sentence like "this one expires after two years and leads to nothing" costs money to write, and every commercial incentive in the niche points away from writing it.

There is no affiliate link, no agency relationship and no lead sale behind a single record in this dataset — not one of the visa pages earns us anything. We do earn commission on some insurance pages, which are marked, and one is linked at the foot of this page. What we are not paid for is the answer above: no government, agency or insurer has any influence over which programmes we list as dead ends. That is the only reason this page can exist.

These timelines move, and one moved this year

Portugal is the example everyone still gets wrong. Naturalisation there went from six years to ten for most applicants, and from five to seven for EU and CPLP nationals, under Lei Orgânica n.º 1/2026, in force 19 May 2026. The same law changed how the clock is counted: legal residence now runs from the issue date of your residence card, so the wait for the card no longer counts toward the total. Guides published before that date are still circulating with the old number. See the Portugal record.

Three more corrections we hold against sources that are still repeating the error: Portugal's NHR tax regime closed to new entrants in 2024 and its replacement mostly excludes remote workers; the UAE did not introduce a 5% income tax, which is a misreading of VAT; and Spain's Beckham Law generally excludes freelancers, who are exactly the people it gets recommended to.

Where we don't know, we say we don't know

For 18 open programmes, the issuing government publishes nothing about a residency path in either direction. We record that as unpublished, not as a no. Rendering silence as "no permanent residency" would invent an immigration fact and put it under our name — on the page whose whole argument is that other people do exactly that.

It's also why the count above is smaller than it could be. Treating every unknown as a dead end would make the headline number look better and the page worth less.

How we counted

One record per programme, each checked against the best source we can find — the issuing government's own page wherever one exists, the official portal we did use where it doesn't — and stamped with the date it was last verified. A weekly automated job re-reads those source pages and flags anything that changed. It does not reach all of them — a dozen or so block automated requests outright and are checked by hand — and we would rather say that than imply a coverage we don't have. Its first run found seven of them dead — on programmes other sites were still publishing application guides for. Our method, including its limits, is at how we verify, and the full dataset is public under CC BY 4.0. The published file now carries one row per programme, so every programme counted here is in the export.

If you're choosing between these, the practical question isn't which visa is best — it's whether you're buying a long stay or an immigration route, because they are different products at similar prices. Start with the full comparison table, and if you're moving rather than visiting, sort out health cover that works where you're going before you file anything: several of these programmes require proof of it at application.