Start with one number: 10
The US passport ranks 10th in the 2026 Henley Passport Index — its lowest annual ranking on record, at the end of a slow slide from fourth place in 2016 and the very top a decade before that. Nothing dramatic happened to American travel freedom; other passports simply kept gaining while the US plateaued. But that slide reframed something in the market we work in: the American passport stopped feeling like a finished product. Demand for a second one followed.
The US passport's Henley Index rank, 2016–2026
Rank 1 is the strongest passport, so the line falls as the US position worsens. Annual index editions; the October 2025 interim update briefly showed 12th.
Henley Passport Index, 2016–2026
Show data as table
| Year | Henley rank (1 = strongest) |
|---|---|
| 2016 | 4 |
| 2018 | 5 |
| 2020 | 8 |
| 2022 | 7 |
| 2024 | 8 |
| 2026 | 10 |
The demand curve has left the niche
Henley & Partners reports American applications for investment-migration programs nearly doubled in 2025, with the US its largest source market since 2023 — and roughly 93% of those applications filed by people still living in the United States (Henley Private Wealth Migration Report, 2026). The wider market moves with it: Henley forecasts 165,000 millionaires relocating internationally in 2026, and the investment-migration industry has grown into a business estimated above $20 billion a year (Investment Migration Council and industry estimates, 2025).
Program-level numbers make the growth concrete — and the pattern is not one country's story:
Program demand is climbing across the map
Latest published growth per program — year over year except Grenada, shown quarter over quarter.
AIMA via Forbes (Portugal, 2025) · Greek ministry data via IMI Daily (2025) · Italian program data via IMI Daily (2025) · Grenada CIU quarterly report (Q3 2025)
Show data as table
| Program | Latest published growth |
|---|---|
| Grenada CBI (applications, QoQ) | +122% |
| Greece Golden Visa (permits issued) | +95% |
| Portugal Golden Visa (approvals) | +72% |
| Italy Investor Visa | +63% |
Inside our own practice the same curve shows as cases: American residence- and citizenship-by-investment files grew 117% between 2023 and 2025, making investment migration one of the practice's fastest-growing service lines, alongside the retirement wave we measured separately. Our survey shows the same tilt the files do: 54% of US intenders target Europe first (Passquire Expat Survey 2026) — Portugal's Golden Visa leading — with the Caribbean programs taking the speed-focused quarter.
The buyer is getting younger
The stereotype golden-visa client — a retiree diversifying late — no longer describes the median file. In our screening and case-file data the median golden-visa intender is 44 — in the client files opened in 2022 the median stood at 51 — and 28% of Eligibility Tool screenings now come from people under 40. The external signals point the same way: digital-nomad visa uptake has multiplied since the schemes launched, and Henley's Crypto Wealth Report 2025 counts 241,700 crypto millionaires — up 40% in a year — in a market where roughly nine in ten crypto investors overall are under 40 and residence options are marketed like subscriptions.
What the young cohort buys is different in kind. The retiree bought a place to live. The 34-year-old founder buys jurisdiction — banking access, a tax seat chosen on purpose, an EU foothold before children exist, and, not least, a marker among peers that the exit was real. In our interviews the second passport sits somewhere between an insurance contract and a watch: an autonomy product with status attached.
Plan B is the product
Ask buyers why, and the answer has shifted from mobility to insurance. 61% of surveyed intenders name optionality — a fallback jurisdiction if things go wrong at home — as their primary motive; visa-free travel, the industry's historical selling point, comes first for only 22%. Industry observers describe the same shift: for most American clients a second citizenship is, in IMI Daily's phrasing, insurance and a fallback option rather than a travel upgrade, and advisers increasingly talk of clients building a portfolio of jurisdictions the way they build a portfolio of assets.
Consistent with insurance logic: 73% of our US intenders say they have no plan to renounce US citizenship. The second passport is an addition, not an exit — which is why renunciation, for all its record run since 2020, stays a rounding error next to the demand for second residences that we and every industry observer measure.
There is a hard tax logic underneath the keep-the-passport pattern too. US citizens are taxed on worldwide income wherever they live, and formally leaving the system can trigger the expatriation regime of IRC §877A — a mark-to-market exit tax on worldwide assets for covered expatriates. For a founder sitting on unrealized gains, renouncing is one of the most expensive documents they could ever sign. A second residence delivers most of the optionality at none of that cost, which is why the rational Plan B in 2026 is additive: keep the blue passport, add a jurisdiction, and let the exit question stay hypothetical. The buyers who do eventually renounce almost always held their second citizenship for years first — the sequencing, not the exit, is the product.
Demand is rising into shrinking supply
Record demand, meanwhile, is chasing a shrinking product shelf — the strangest feature of this market in 2026. Spain closed its golden visa outright in April 2025. Malta's investor-citizenship scheme was terminated after the Court of Justice of the EU ruled it contrary to EU law that same month, leaving only its residence programme standing. Ireland had already shut its Immigrant Investor Programme in 2023. And Portugal — still the category's reference product — doubled its citizenship clock in May 2026, from five years of residence to ten, counted only from the day the first card is issued.
Each closure re-routes demand rather than ending it. Our case files show the Spanish demand of 2024 resurfacing in Portuguese and Greek files in 2025; Greek permits issued nearly doubled even as new applications cooled after its own price increases. Buyers read the pattern correctly: programs are political products with political shelf lives, and the rational response to a closing window is to move earlier. That — more than any single country's rules — is the engine behind the 117% growth in our own files.
What Plan B actually costs
Advertised entry prices are never the whole bill, and the gap between the two is where most buyer disappointment lives. In the Caribbean, Grenada's own quarterly reporting now shows average inflows of roughly $342,000 per application — well above the headline donation minimum once government fees, due diligence and dependants are counted. In Europe, our Portugal analysis puts the unrecoverable, non-investment cost of a fund-route golden visa at roughly €37,000–€68,000 over the full ten-year clock for a single applicant, on top of the €500,000 committed capital — and roughly double the fee load for a family of four.
The under-40 cohort absorbs those numbers differently than the retiree did. For a founder with a liquid exit, the all-in cost of a Caribbean passport is discussed in the tone of a large purchase, not a life decision. What the younger buyer is far less tolerant of is time: in our screenings, stated willingness to wait drops sharply below age 40, which is exactly why the Caribbean's months-not-years processing keeps converting the urgency segment that Europe's backlogs turn away.
What the screenings show about readiness
Screenings give us one more angle the survey cannot: what people actually hold, not what they say. Among the 11,400 screenings to date, the golden-visa-intending subset skews sharply more liquid than the retirement subset — the median declared investable capital among golden-visa intenders sits near $650,000 — more than half of that subset clears Portugal's €500,000 fund threshold — while across all 11,400 screenings, retirees included, roughly one in five does. The binding constraint for the rest is rarely total wealth; it is liquidity locked in a US home or a retirement account, which is why bridge structures and the lower-entry donation routes dominate our first consultations.
Readiness has a second dimension the industry underprices: paperwork stamina. Screenings that reach a consultation convert at very different rates by age — the under-40 cohort converts fastest but abandons fastest too when timelines stretch, while the Plan-B families move slowest and finish most reliably. Matching the program's real processing tempo to the buyer's patience, not just their budget, is the quiet determinant of completed cases in our files.
Methodology
Survey. Golden-visa findings draw on the same Passquire Expat Survey 2026 as our Retirement Report (n=8,014, fielded Q1–Q2 2026, 61% US, panels in the UK, Canada, Germany and China; weighted by age band and income bracket; the panel is move-inclined by design). Golden-visa intenders are the subset who rate themselves considering or pursuing an investment-migration route (n=2,905). Client data. Aggregated, anonymized Roots Global case metadata, 2021–2025. Eligibility Tool. Anonymized screening inputs, 2025–2026, deduplicated by session. External data is cited inline with publisher and year; sources in full in the PDF edition.
Takeaways
- The product changed hands. Median intender age 44 and falling — program design, marketing and fund selection built for retirees now serve founders.
- Insurance beats mobility. 61% buy optionality. Programs and advisers still selling visa-free counts are answering last decade's question.
- Europe leads, the Caribbean converts. 54% start with Europe for the long game; the Caribbean's speed keeps winning the urgency segment.
- Renunciation is a red herring. 73% keep the US passport. The growth market is portfolio-building, not exit.
- The window narrows. Spain closed, Malta's CBI fell to the CJEU, Portugal's citizenship clock doubled — demand is rising into shrinking supply, which is precisely why buyers move early.