Europe's residency deal is changing. For over a decade the way in was simple: buy a property, collect a residence permit. That route has now closed across most of the region.
Mostly no. Spain closed its golden visa in April 2025, Portugal removed the real estate route in October 2023, and Malta's citizenship-by-investment scheme was struck down by the European Court of Justice. Greece still has a property route, but at €400,000 to €800,000. Digital nomad visas, which test remote income instead, have replaced them as the realistic path.
Four of Europe's best-known residency-by-investment programs have closed or narrowed in the past three years. Spain shut its golden visa to new applicants, Portugal stripped real estate out of its own, Malta lost its citizenship scheme to a court ruling, and Greece roughly doubled its entry price in the places people actually want to live.
That reaches further than investors. If you were buying to secure residency, your route may not exist. If you were planning to relocate and buy on arrival, the order of those two steps has changed. If you already own in one of these markets and were counting on foreign demand at resale, your buyer pool is different from the one you bought into.
Below is why these programs closed, which ones went and which survived, what replaced them, and what Properstar's own search data shows buyers actually doing in response. There is still a route into Europe. It is a different one, it tests something other than your capital, and it is more open now than it has ever been.
Housing costs. Spain, Portugal, and Greece launched golden visas in the early 2010s to pull foreign capital into distressed post-crisis property markets. A decade later, governments blame those same programs for pushing local prices out of reach, and have closed or narrowed them in response.
Golden visas were never subtle about their purpose. Each program launched in the aftermath of the financial crisis, when the goal was to offload real estate that was not moving and attract foreign capital. Buy a property above a set threshold, and a residence permit followed, with a path to citizenship after several years of holding it.
The appeal went beyond the property itself. Holders typically got visa-free travel across the Schengen area and light physical-presence requirements, in some cases just a week or two per year. Most programs also let holders include a spouse and dependents on the same application. For a decade, it was the default route into the European Union for anyone with enough capital and no interest in a work visa.
What changed is the politics of housing. The same governments that once needed buyers now face voters who cannot afford homes in their own cities, and a program that explicitly sells residency in exchange for property purchases is a straightforward thing to legislate away. The pattern is worth noting: across these four countries, no golden visa program has been widened in the past three years. Every move has been in one direction.
Spain closed to new applicants on April 3, 2025. Portugal dropped real estate from its program in October 2023. Malta's citizenship-by-investment scheme was struck down by the European Court of Justice in April 2025 and closed that July. Greece kept its property route but raised the minimum to €400,000 or €800,000.
A digital nomad visa grants temporary residence to people earning remote income from outside the country, with no property purchase required. Estonia launched the first in 2020, and more than 60 countries and territories now offer one. It tests your income rather than your capital, which is the opposite of what a golden visa tested.
Remote work was already drifting toward some kind of formal recognition, but the pandemic turned that drift into a policy scramble. Estonia passed the world's first dedicated digital nomad visa law in June 2020 and opened applications on August 1. It let remote workers and freelancers stay for up to a year without a traditional work permit, as long as their income came from outside Estonia.
That single program set the template every other country has followed since, and the category has expanded fast: more than 60 jurisdictions now run one, up from essentially zero before 2020.
The filter is fundamentally different. A golden visa tested whether you had capital sitting still. A digital nomad visa tests whether you have income that keeps moving, whether or not you are in the country most of the year. One asked what you owned; the other asks what you earn.
Yes, in the markets that closed the property route. Rent's share of Properstar searches climbed from 30% to a 39% peak in Spain and from 19% to 27% in Portugal. In Greece, where the property route stayed open, it rose to 21% and then fell back to 17%, close to where it started.
Policy changes are one thing. Whether people search differently is another, and this is where our own data adds something the coverage cannot. We pulled a year of search activity on Properstar listings in Spain, Portugal, and Greece, from August 2025 through July 2026, and split it by transaction type: rent versus sale (Properstar internal data, September 2026).
Rent share is measured from searches on Properstar listings in each market, not from completed transactions. It shows what people are looking for, which moves faster than what they buy.
In Spain, rent made up 30% of searches in August 2025. That share climbed through the fall, crossed 38% in January 2026, and peaked at 39% in February, ten months after the closure took effect. It then held near 38% through May before easing to 35% by July. Well above where it started, even after the plateau cooled.
In Portugal the climb was steadier and has held. Rent's share rose from 19% in August 2025 into the high 20s through most of 2026, sitting at 27% in July. Unlike Spain's pullback, Portugal's shift toward renting has stayed roughly where it landed.
Greece runs the other way, and that makes it the most useful of the three. Rent's share started at 14% in August 2025 and peaked at 21% in November, then drifted back to 17% by July 2026. Greece never closed its property route the way Spain and Portugal did, and its search behavior reflects that. The bump was temporary. It never became a lasting shift.
Across all three markets, search behavior moved the most, and stayed moved the longest, where the property route actually closed. Where the door stayed open, even in a narrower form, buy-side demand came back.
There is a smaller supporting signal outside our own data. In the United States, "digital nomad visa" now draws more monthly search volume than "golden visa," 9,900 against 6,600, according to Semrush's US database in September 2026. That gap is not universal once you get to country-specific searches, and plenty of people still search "golden visa Portugal" more than its digital nomad equivalent. But the newer term has overtaken the older one in aggregate.
No. A golden visa led to permanent residency and eventually citizenship. Most digital nomad visas are temporary, capped at one or two years at a time and renewable, with no citizenship track built in. The new route is easier to get and harder to make permanent.
None of this is a clean, one-for-one swap, and treating it that way oversells the digital nomad visa. A golden visa was built to lead somewhere permanent: years of residency, then a real shot at citizenship at the end of it.
The honest version of this trade is a straightforward exchange. Anyone weighing a digital nomad visa against a golden visa alternative is trading a slower, more expensive path to permanence for a faster, cheaper path to nowhere in particular. Which one makes sense depends on what you actually want out of relocating: permanent roots, or time spent living somewhere else.
Check whether the property route still exists in your target country before you make an offer. It is gone in Spain and Malta, gone for residential purchases in Portugal, and considerably more expensive in Greece. If residency was never the point, a digital nomad visa is now the faster and cheaper route in.
Start with the country, not the property. The route you are relying on may simply not be there, and that is a cheaper thing to discover now than after an offer. Greece still has a real estate route, just a stricter and more expensive one than it was two years ago, and the €250,000 tier is narrower than it sounds.
Do not assume the current rules are the final ones. Greece has already changed its terms twice, most recently in February 2026, and no country in this group has widened a program in three years. If your plan depends on a door reopening, plan for it to stay shut.
If residency was never the point and you simply want to live somewhere for a while and work remotely, the digital nomad visa landscape is bigger and easier to enter than it has ever been. More than 60 countries and territories now offer one, and none of them require you to buy anything first.
And if you are simply looking to buy or rent a home in Spain, Portugal, or Greece, none of this changes what is available to you. Foreign nationals can still purchase property in every one of these markets regardless of golden visa status. The visa question and the property question are separate, even though the last decade of headlines made them sound like the same thing.
Search for properties in Spain, Portugal, or Greece to see what your budget actually reaches today. Properstar's country guides cover the current rules market by market, and the house price index tracks how prices have moved as these policies shifted.
The three markets in this piece set very different bars. Spain asks €2,849 a month, Portugal €3,680, and Greece €3,500. Spain sets its threshold at twice the national minimum wage and Portugal at four times, so both figures move every January. Confirm the current one with the consulate before you rely on it.
Usually yes, once you pass 183 days. That is the point at which Spain, Portugal, and Greece can each treat you as tax resident on your worldwide income. Reduced-rate regimes exist in some of these countries, but none applies automatically and each carries its own conditions. Take local tax advice before you move.
Yes, and you do not need the visa to buy. Spain, Portugal, and Greece all allow foreign nationals to purchase property regardless of immigration status. What changed is the reverse: buying no longer earns you residency in Spain or Portugal, so the two decisions are now entirely separate.
Eight as of 2026: Portugal, Greece, Hungary, Bulgaria, Latvia, Italy, Cyprus, and Malta. Only Greece, Latvia, Cyprus, and Malta still accept property as the qualifying investment. Malta's residency program survives; it was the separate citizenship-by-investment scheme that the European Court of Justice struck down.