Programme sources. Recorded links and their limits.

Open data attributions

Where this site or our reports use third-party open datasets, attribution per their licences:

• The World Bank Open Data — 4,288 facts (GDP, GDP/capita, unemployment, demographics, purchasing-power conversion, some tax and quality-of-life indicators). Our largest single source. Released under CC BY 4.0. Attribution: "The World Bank, World Development Indicators." Source: data.worldbank.org.
• Numbeo — 2,477 facts (15% of all country data, second only to the World Bank) and 82% of all cost-of-living data: rent, groceries, utilities, transport and restaurant prices, plus some quality-of-life indices. Crowdsourced, not a statistics agency. Cited with attribution. Barred by policy from supplying any immigration or tax rule. Source: numbeo.com.
• PwC Worldwide Tax Summaries — 1,984 facts (income tax, capital gains, residency rules). A professional advisory firm, not a government. Cited with attribution under fair use.
• EF English Proficiency Index — 402 facts (English proficiency score and band).
• Our World in Data — 386 facts (health, safety, development indicators). Released under CC BY 4.0.
• EY Worldwide Tax & Immigration Guide — 330 facts (tax and immigration context). A professional advisory firm, not a government. Cited with attribution under fair use.
• ILOSTAT (International Labour Organization) — 322 facts (labour market, wages). Creative Commons Attribution.
• National tax authorities — 249 facts, taken directly from the issuing government. National statistics offices — 24 facts. These 273 are the whole of our directly-government-sourced country data: 1.7%.
• N26 (250) and Wise (250) — supported-country lists, used to determine whether a newcomer can realistically open an account. Published by the providers themselves.
• Cable.co.uk Broadband Speed League (229) · OpenAlex (200, released CC0 1.0) · Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index (199) · IQAir Air Quality Index (87) · Institute for Economics & Peace Global Peace Index (78) · Ookla Speedtest Global Index (5).
• Our own calculations — 422 facts derived from the sources above and from our own visa database. Marked as derived, never presented as a third party's finding.
• Carried over, verification pending — 300 facts (1.8%). Block-level fallbacks (207 tax, 76 economics) inherited from an earlier import whose per-field citation we have not re-established, plus 17 tax rates taken from a Wikipedia summary table. We are not going to quietly file these under a respectable name, or let any of them set a verdict.
• No source recorded in the historical snapshot: these records are not evidence for an immigration requirement. Missing support must remain explicit; an unsourced figure is not a substitute for a confirmed answer.

Counts were measured against the country dataset we serve on 3 September 2026, and cover all 16,273 country-level facts across our 250-country reference table. The previous figure published here — 14,302, counted on 13 July 2026 — was not regenerated for seven weeks; it now is, from the data itself. Sources we monitor but which currently feed zero facts — OECD, Eurostat, WHO, UNDP, IMF, UNESCO — are deliberately not listed above. Naming a source we don't actually use would be the same lie in the opposite direction.

Per-field provenance

Every number in our reports should be defensible. The table below shows the current state per field across the 200+ countries in our reference data — including the brutal distinction between numbers we re-pull live from the source and numbers that carry a labeled source we haven't re-verified today.

Legend:   ✓ Live = freshly pulled today from the cited source ·   ◐ Labeled = source name correct, value pre-existed (not re-verified today) ·   ◯ Pending = source NAMED as verification target; value still awaiting re-pull

Coverage % = countries where the value carries a per-field _last_verified + _source stamp. The Status column is the honest truth about how recently we re-verified each value against its named source. Re-generated from reports/data-provenance/by-field.json per audit run. If a number you rely on isn't defensibly sourced, email us: hello@wheretoemigrate.io.

How we use your quiz answers

Your passport, the route you pick, and five questions about that route. Every one feeds a specific part of the match. Nothing decorative. Here's the map.

Passport

Your passport decides which programmes are open to you at all. We filter the 7,000+ programmes against the nationalities each route names. EU citizens also unlock intra-EU free-movement rules.

The route you are taking

Work, study, investment, ancestry and the rest are separate legal families with separate rules. Picking one decides which five questions you are asked and which programmes we compare you against.

Eligibility profile

Who you are for this route: your occupation, the level you would study at, where the money would come from. Most routes are open only to particular profiles.

The core route requirement

The one thing a route will not bend on — a job offer, a place at an institution, the asset you would invest in. It is the most common reason an application never starts.

Financial requirement

The salary, the proof of funds, or the sum you could invest. Nearly every route sets a number here, and that number is what your answer is read against.

Rights and restrictions

Who moves with you, whether you may work, whether you must actually live there. Two routes with identical requirements can differ completely on what they let you do afterwards.

Duration and long-term outcome

How long you want this to last, and whether you are aiming at permanent residence or citizenship. It separates a route that renews indefinitely from one that simply ends.

No question is decorative. If we ask it, it maps to one of the five factors we show you for every programme.