The Million Dollar Question: More than a year after the US created its own $1 million “Gold Card” visa, how many applicants had actually been approved as of April 2026?
Read on for the answer.
The United States spent decades as the one major country in the world that didn’t, officially, sell residency. Then, in September 2025, it did. The timing is the whole story: Washington opened its door for sale at almost the exact moment Europe spent closing most of its own, and at almost the exact moment the wealthiest Americans started buying second doors abroad in record numbers. Three overlapping stories – closures, price hikes, and one very expensive American experiment – are really one story about what a residency permit is worth when a government decides to put a price on it.
What a golden visa actually is
“Golden visa” is shorthand for residency by investment: a program that grants legal residence – not, usually, instant citizenship – to someone who puts a defined sum of money into the country, typically through real estate, a government-approved fund or business, a straight donation, or (rarely now) a bank deposit. It is a different product from citizenship by investment (CBI), the smaller set of programs, concentrated in the Caribbean and Malta, that grant a passport directly, usually within months, with no residency requirement at all.
National governments run these programs on their own; there is no single “golden visa law.” The European Union has no authority to ban a member state’s residency program outright, though it has leaned hard on members over the practice – the European Commission formally pushed Malta over its citizenship scheme for years before Malta adjusted it, and EU pressure, Russia sanctions, and domestic housing-price backlash are the three forces that actually closed programs down, not a bloc-wide prohibition.
Who’s buying – and why the fastest-growing buyer is American
For most of the 2010s, the demand side of this market had a predictable shape: wealthy families from China, Russia, Turkey, and the Gulf buying a European or Caribbean plan B. Russian buyers were sanctioned out of nearly every Western program after February 2022. Chinese demand never went away. But the fastest-growing client nationality in 2026, by a wide margin, is American.
Henley & Partners, the investment-migration advisory firm whose rankings and client data are the industry’s closest thing to an official scoreboard, reported on October 27, 2026 that applications from US citizens had risen 52% over the prior 18 months compared with the 18 months before that – and that only 9% of its American applicants actually live outside the US when they apply, meaning this isn’t expats formalizing an existing move. It’s wealthy Americans, still living in America, buying an exit option they haven’t used yet. The firm says its US clients applied for 27 different residency and citizenship programs in 2026 alone, a sign of how broad the shopping list has become.
The money behind that shift is substantial. Henley’s own USA Wealth Report puts the US at 32% of global liquid investable wealth – something like $67 trillion – and 37% of the world’s dollar millionaires, which is the real reason the investment-migration industry has spent the past two years retooling its marketing around American clients specifically rather than its traditional base.
Why wealthy families buy one
The pitch is rarely about moving immediately. It’s optionality: a second place to live, legally, on short notice, if a first-choice country becomes less livable for political, fiscal, or personal reasons. Beyond that, the recurring reasons are visa-free travel on a stronger passport; access to a different tax regime (Italy’s flat tax and the UK’s old non-dom rules were both golden-visa adjacent draws before each tightened); and – frequently the actual driver inside a family – university access and a foothold for children, the same motive that drives much of the US’s own EB-5 demand, covered in The US Wealth Visa.
The distinction between residency and citizenship matters more than the marketing usually lets on. Most golden visas buy the right to live somewhere, plus a path to citizenship after a multi-year wait with its own language and residency requirements. A Caribbean CBI program buys an actual passport, often within three to six months, with no obligation to ever set foot in the country. They solve different problems, and a family chasing a second passport fast is shopping a different shelf than one looking for a long-term European base.
The 2026 map: what’s open, what’s closed, what changed
Four Western European golden-visa programs have shut their doors outright since 2022: the UK (closed February 17, 2022), Ireland (closed February 15, 2023), the Netherlands (ended April 17, 2024), and Spain (ended April 3, 2025) – the last of these after years of domestic political pressure over housing prices in Madrid and Barcelona. None of that killed demand; it rerouted it toward the programs still standing, most of which responded by raising their prices rather than lowering them.
Greece, now ranked by Henley & Partners as the world’s number-one residence-by-investment program, is the clearest case. Its real estate minimum now runs on a tiered map: €800,000 in the highest-demand zones (Attica, Thessaloniki, Mykonos, Santorini, and other islands above a population threshold), €400,000 everywhere else in the country, and the original €250,000 figure surviving only for commercial-to-residential conversions and listed-building restorations. Investors must now buy one property of at least 120 square meters rather than assembling several smaller units, closing a popular loophole.
Portugal, Greece’s longtime rival for the top of investor shortlists, killed its real-estate route back in October 2023 and now runs almost entirely on a €250,000 donation to the arts or heritage preservation, or €500,000 into an approved investment fund or scientific research – no property purchase at all.
Malta keeps a property-based residency route (the Permanent Residence Programme) running around €169,000 in total cost for a family of four, built on either a roughly €375,000 purchase or about €14,000 a year in rent, plus government fees – distinct from the country’s separate, far pricier citizenship-by-naturalization-for-exceptional-services track. Cyprus offers residency for €300,000 in approved property or investment assets, plus proof of foreign income; it ended its citizenship-by-investment program outright in 2020 after a corruption scandal and never brought it back. Italy runs a €250,000 “innovative startup” investment visa. Hungary reopened its own program with a €250,000 real-estate-fund option or a €1,000,000 donation route. Latvia keeps the continent’s cheapest entry point, from roughly €50,000 into a Latvian company, though its rules are set to change on September 15, 2026. Luxembourg still runs a €500,000 program, though repeal has been proposed and hasn’t yet become law.
Outside Europe, the list of sellers is actually growing. Mauritius launched a new $1,000,000 program in 2026 capped at 100 visas a year. New Zealand adjusted its Active Investor Plus “Growth” category effective June 1, 2026 to let up to 20% of the required investment go to philanthropy instead of pure capital.
The Caribbean runs on a different model entirely – direct citizenship rather than residency – and it moved in the opposite price direction from Europe. Four OECS members (Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, and St Kitts and Nevis) agreed to harmonize around a $200,000 price floor to stop undercutting each other. St Kitts and Nevis, the oldest CBI program in the world, actually cut its single-applicant price in July 2024, from $350,000 to $250,000, specifically to stay competitive with its neighbors rather than lose market share entirely – proof that even in a market trending upward, individual programs will cut prices when they’re pricing themselves out of their own region.
| Program | Status in 2026 | Minimum investment |
|---|---|---|
| Greece | Open, raised | €250,000-€800,000 (zone-dependent) |
| Portugal | Open, restructured | €250,000 donation / €500,000 fund |
| Malta (residency) | Open | ~€169,000 (family of four, total cost) |
| Cyprus | Open | €300,000 |
| Italy | Open | €250,000 |
| Hungary | Reopened | €250,000 fund / €1,000,000 donation |
| Latvia | Open, changing | from ~€50,000 |
| Luxembourg | Open, repeal proposed | €500,000 |
| Mauritius | New in 2026 | $1,000,000 (100/year quota) |
| St Kitts & Nevis (citizenship) | Open, price cut | $250,000 |
| Spain | Closed 3 Apr 2025 | – |
| Netherlands | Closed 17 Apr 2024 | – |
| Ireland | Closed 15 Feb 2023 | – |
| United Kingdom | Closed 17 Feb 2022 | – |
What it actually costs – and what the rankings say about it
The headline minimum is never the real bill. On top of it sit government application and due-diligence fees, legal and agent fees that can run into the tens of thousands, and, in several programs, annual maintenance payments that keep ticking after the initial investment clears. None of that has stopped demand, and Henley’s 2026 Global Residence and Citizenship rankings – based on 40 of the more than 100 programs it tracks worldwide, scored on reputation, quality of life, compliance, investment requirements, tax treatment, processing standards, and travel mobility – show price isn’t the main thing buyers are optimizing for. Malta topped the citizenship-program ranking for an 11th consecutive year, and Greece topped the residence-program ranking, even as both raised their prices. The UAE jumped from fifth to a tied second place on the residence index, its first time ever in the top three, while Uruguay, Saudi Arabia, and the Maldives all debuted in the top rankings for the first time.
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What the Gold Card actually changes
Here is where the United States enters its own market. On September 19, 2025, Executive Order 14351 created the “Trump Gold Card.” It is not, legally, a new visa category – Congress has not passed any law creating one – but a Commerce Department program (run through trumpcard.gov) that treats a qualifying gift to the government as evidence of eligibility under existing EB-1A, EB-2, and EB-2 NIW immigrant visa categories. An individual applicant pays a $1,000,000 gift plus a non-refundable $15,000 fee; a company sponsoring a foreign employee pays $2,000,000 plus the $15,000 fee, a 1% annual maintenance charge, and a 5% transfer fee; and a $5,000,000 “Platinum” tier remains, in late 2026, a waitlist rather than a working product. Four federal bodies share the job: Commerce collects the gift, USCIS adjudicates the actual petition (Form I-140G), DHS handles vetting, and the State Department issues the visa itself.
The gap between the pitch and the result is the real story. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told reporters the government had sold “$1.3 billion” worth of Gold Cards within days of the December 2025 launch – a figure that dwarfs an even earlier claim Lutnick reportedly made at a cabinet meeting that the program would eventually raise $1 trillion. Then, on April 23, 2026, Lutnick told a House Appropriations subcommittee that exactly one applicant had actually been approved, with “hundreds” more sitting in the review queue – a disclosure reported by the Associated Press via Fortune and independently by Bloomberg the same week, and one Lutnick did not reconcile with his own earlier billion-dollar claim when asked about it directly.
Part of the slow start is structural, not incidental. A Gold Card does nothing to exempt a new US permanent resident from worldwide taxation, which attaches from day one the way it does for any green-card holder – a sharp contrast with several golden-visa countries that tax residents only on local income for years. There’s no refund mechanism if an application is denied or the program is struck down in court. The executive order asked federal agencies to consider folding the much older, cheaper EB-5 investor visa (currently $800,000 in a targeted employment area or $1,050,000 standard, detailed in The US Wealth Visa) into the new system; as of late 2026, that hasn’t happened, and EB-5 remains its own separate program. And the Gold Card is already in federal court: a group led by the American Association of University Professors sued the Department of Homeland Security on February 3, 2026, joined by the United Auto Workers in May; as of September 2026 the case was still at the motion-to-dismiss stage, with no ruling on the merits.
What the Gold Card changes, in other words, isn’t (yet) the competitive landscape – one approved applicant doesn’t move a market Greece and Malta serve with tens of thousands of successful cases a year between them. What it changes is the framing. The US government formally conceding that a price tag can sit next to a green card application removes the US from the small list of countries that could credibly claim they’d never do what Greece, Portugal, and the Caribbean do openly. Whether that experiment ever works at scale is still, more than a year in, an open question with an answer of exactly one.
What people get wrong
That a golden visa is a passport. Almost all of them are residency permits with a separate, later naturalization process attached – only Caribbean CBI programs and Malta’s citizenship-for-exceptional-services route hand over a passport directly.
That a program’s closing kills demand for the concept. Four major European programs shut down in three years, and global interest in buying residency is at a recorded high, not a low – the money simply moved to whichever doors stayed open, which is exactly why those doors got more expensive.
That a rising minimum investment means a program is failing. Greece and Malta both raised prices and both still top Henley’s 2026 rankings in their categories – a government raising its price is often a sign a program is oversubscribed, not struggling.
That the Gold Card is “America’s golden visa” in the same sense Greece or Portugal has one. It isn’t a standalone visa category Congress created; it’s an executive-branch framework layered onto existing employment-based immigrant visas, which means applicants from backlogged countries like India and China don’t get the clean line-skip the marketing implied, and the whole arrangement remains one unfavorable court ruling away from disappearing.
Bottom line
A. As of the most recent public disclosure, exactly one Gold Card applicant had been approved – against an earlier, unreconciled claim of $1.3 billion in sales and a still-earlier claim of $1 trillion in eventual revenue. The European and Caribbean programs the Gold Card was implicitly competing with aren’t struggling at all: American demand for them is at a record, and the countries that stayed in the business responded to that demand the way any seller responds to a buyer’s market – by raising the price. The US just discovered, in its first year as a seller, that the hardest part of this business isn’t writing the rules. It’s getting anyone to actually buy.
Related reading:
– The US Wealth Visa: EB-5, EB-1, and Inbound Millionaire Immigration
– Residency and Citizenship: Why the Wealthy Buy Options Across Borders
– Asian and Gulf Wealth
– Billionaires Flood Miami: Wealth Migration and the New American Geography
– How Many Millionaires Are in the World?
