Dit artikel is nog niet in het Nederlands vertaald; de vertaling volgt binnenkort. Hieronder leest u de Engelse versie.

Second passports in 2026: what's still worth the money?

Passports and residency permits bought through investment programmes now take far longer to get, often twelve to eighteen months where three to six was normal three years ago. The fee and the brochure haven't changed. The checks behind them have, and almost nobody selling these programmes tells you that up front.

We work with people who need a second citizenship or a new residency for real reasons. Maybe a single passport no longer gets them a bank account. Maybe it's school options for the children, or a fiscale woonplaatsFiscale woonplaatsHet land dat u voor de belasting als inwoner beschouwt en dat dus belasting mag heffen over uw inkomen uit de hele wereld. Elk land bepaalt zelf de regels; uw nationaliteit is daarvoor niet bepalend. that matches where they actually live. Or simply a plan B they hope never to use.

None of that has gotten easier. It has gotten slower, more scrutinised, and much less forgiving of a messy file showing where your money came from.

This is a status report, not a sales pitch. Some programmes are still worth the fee. Several are not, whatever the marketing says.

What actually changed since 2024

Two things moved at once, and most advisers still talk about them separately. They belong together.

The checks got much tougher, for everyone. After pressure from the banks that handle international payments (correspondent banksCorrespondent bankA bank that holds accounts for other banks and processes payments for them, often in US dollars or euros.) and scrutiny from the EU of programmes linked to Schengen travel, processing agencies now run checks from many sources. These include commercial databases, sanctions lists and media searches in your home language. In several cases there are interviews that didn't exist before.

If you're a clean applicant with a simple source of fundsHerkomst van geld en herkomst van vermogenWaar het geld vandaan komt dat op een rekening binnenkomt (herkomst van geld) en hoe u uw vermogen als geheel hebt opgebouwd (herkomst van vermogen). Banken vragen naar beide., you'll still clear this without drama. If your income runs through complex companies, your business has a cash-heavy history, or your money sits somewhere the reviewing bank doesn't like, you'll now hit that problem at the application stage. It used to turn up at the banking stage, two years later.

Banks started acting as a second regulator. A passport from a programme with a weak checking reputation is no longer just a travel document. Some private banks and correspondent banks now screen for it explicitly. We've seen clients hold a passport for over a year and still get declined at account opening. The problem was the programme that issued it, not the applicant.

So the programmes worth using in 2026 are the ones that made their own checks harder before regulators or banks forced them to.

Citizenship by investment: what's actually working

Caribbean programmes have split into two tiers. Some responded early to the 2023–24 EU pressure on visa-free Schengen access by tightening applicant checks, raising minimum investment amounts and publishing clearer processing data. They've kept their Schengen access and their banking reputation intact.

The ones that didn't respond have seen slower processing and occasional banking friction for people holding only that passport. In one case, visa-free travel was temporarily suspended, which rattled the whole asset class. We now screen every Caribbean programme on whether banks accept it before we look at the investment amount. That's the reverse of how this used to be judged.

Vanuatu is still fast, and still what it is. Processing can still finish in under two months. That speed is exactly why several private banks treat a Vanuatu-only passport as a discussion point rather than a formality. It's a legitimate tool for travel flexibility. On its own, it isn't a banking solution.

Malta sits in its own category. It's genuine EU citizenship, genuinely slow and genuinely expensive. It's also under periodic scrutiny from the European Commission about whether "investment migration" and EU citizenship should coexist at all.

If you start a Malta application, assume the cost and the wait will both be at the top of what's quoted. Have a backup plan in case political pressure shortens the programme's life.

Waar zitten de grijze gebieden?

Investment migration rules change quickly and without much notice, and banks and regulators make their own judgements about programmes. So several of the points below can't be settled with a clear yes or no. Here's how we see them.

None of this means you can't proceed. Plenty of people do, once they understand the risk. But go in knowing which of these applies to you.

Residency by investment: the quieter, more durable option

For most clients we advise, residency by investment does more real work than citizenship by investment. It costs less and carries less risk of scrutiny.

Portugal's Golden VisaResidence by investment (golden visa)A programme that grants the right to live in a country in return for an investment, often in property or funds., after its reform, is smaller but cleaner. Buying property no longer qualifies, though the fund and business investment routes remain. Processing is still slow by Portuguese standards, but it leads to genuine EU residency and, eventually, citizenship. It also no longer carries the reputational baggage of the property-driven version that drew criticism through the early 2020s.

UAE golden visas are the most underrated tool in this category. You get ten-year renewable residency and a route that doesn't require giving up your existing tax residency elsewhere. The UAE also has an increasingly strong banking reputation, not a weakening one. If you're moving a business or a family base to the Gulf, this is often better value than any citizenship programme on the market.

Greece and Spain have both raised their thresholds and narrowed property eligibility, under the same political pressure that hit Portugal. Both still work for the right client profile. But the property route that made them famous is a smaller part of the picture than it was two years ago.

The question nobody asks first

Everyone arrives asking "which programme is fastest?" or "which is cheapest?" Those are the wrong first questions.

The right one is: what is this passport or permit actually for? Travel flexibility, tax residency, banking access and a family's long-term base are four different problems. They rarely point to the same programme.

We build the mobility plan before we choose the programme, not after. Order matters too. See our companion piece on sequencing a new passport with an existing corporate and banking structure, because the order these pieces go in changes what each one is worth.

What we tell clients starting this process now

There are three things to do.

1. Budget for eighteen months, not six, on any programme carrying EU-adjacent benefits.
2. Get your source-of-funds file to bank standard before you submit it. That means before the application, not after, when you come to open an account.
3. Treat banking acceptance as a pass/fail test when you choose the programme. It isn't a problem to solve once you already hold the passport.

This briefing reflects programme rules and processing patterns as of August 2026. Investment migration rules change quickly and without much notice. If you're looking at a specific programme, get current confirmation before relying on any timeline or threshold quoted here, including this one.