These are the internal rules that decide what reaches your report — how we source data, how we mark confidence, how we rank countries, and how we correct mistakes when readers find them.
Headline: we publish at the speed of editorial judgement, not the speed of automation. Every visa pathway has a government source URL on file. Every country score is reproducible. Every error we make gets published openly at /errata.
1. Sourcing — where our facts come from
1.1 Government sources first
Every visa pathway must link to an official government source — embassy, ministry of immigration, or licensed regulator. This is non-negotiable. If we cannot locate an official source, the pathway does not enter the database.
1.2 Secondary sources by category
Cost of living
World Bank, OECD, cost-of-living tools, Expatistan, in that priority order. cost-of-living tools data is consumed but its commercial licence is unresolved (a known limitation logged in our /limitations).
Salary benchmarks
OECD Labour Statistics, ILO, national statistical offices. We disclose the source in the report appendix.
Education / universities
OpenAlex (CC0), QS World University Rankings, national accreditation registries. 24,191 institutions across 218 country codes.
Tax regimes
OECD tax database, national finance ministries, big-4 tax advisory firm reports (PwC, EY, KPMG, Deloitte) for verification.
Quality of life / safety
UN Human Development Index, cost-of-living tools Safety, Global Peace Index, WHO health data. We average across at least two sources when available.
2. Verification status — what "draft" and "verified" really mean
Every visa pathway carries a status flag in our database. You should know what these mean before trusting a report.
status: "verified"
Independently fact-checked by a second researcher against the official source within the last 12 months. Only a small portion of pathways carry this flag today — independent verification is expensive and we have not built that pipeline at scale.
status: "draft"
Captured by one researcher from the official source at time of entry. Has not been independently re-verified. The majority of our 2,500+ pathways are in this state. The engine compensates with a confidence multiplier — lower-confidence pathways are de-ranked.
data_confidence: "high" / "medium" / "low"
Per-pathway editorial judgement of how much we trust each individual field (income threshold, processing time, etc.). The engine reads this and adjusts the score accordingly.
What you can safely assume: the government URL we cite was correct at time of capture. What you should NOT assume: that the threshold, processing time, or eligibility list has not changed since. Always cross-check against the official source linked in your report before paying any non-refundable application fee.
3. Ranking — how country scores are produced
We use a three-layer hierarchical model. Every score is reproducible — same inputs, same output, every time. The full mathematical decomposition lives at /methodology; here are the editorial principles behind it.
3.1 The three layers
Execution (25%) — can you actually get in? Financial fit, processing time, paperwork complexity, spouse / family eligibility.
Survival (25%) — can you afford to stay? Cost-of-income ratio, tax burden, savings runway, language barrier.
Upside (30%) — is it worth it? Career fit, pathway value (PR / citizenship), quality of life, priority match.
3.2 Two multipliers we apply on top
Confidence multiplier (0.1–1.0) — how much we trust the underlying data for this country / pathway. Reduces the score for editorially weaker entries.
Desirability multiplier — GDP-per-capita weighted, prevents an easy visa to an undesirable destination from outranking a competitive one to a strong destination. Example: a technical visa to a fragile state doesn't outrank Germany Skilled Worker even if the technical bar is lower.
3.3 Hard kills
Regardless of total score, a verdict is forced to AVOID if any of these fire: approval probability below 30%, savings runway below 3 months, or a fragile-state classification with approval probability below 50%. This is the system's truth-telling failsafe — we would rather lose the sale than rank a destination MOVE when it is unsafe.
4. Editorial voice
Verdict over data
We give you a decision (Eligible / Almost) before we give you the underlying data. Competitors show numbers; we show a verb.
AVOID is a legitimate output
If the engine says you should not move, we publish that — even when it means the report is "less useful" to the buyer. Credibility comes from being willing to say no.
Confidence over coverage
"We don't know" beats "ranked 7.3 with shaky data". When we don't have enough data, we say so.
No emotional sales copy in the data layer
Your report contains numbers, sources, and pathways — not "amazing!" / "incredible!" / "join thousands of happy users". Marketing language stays in marketing pages.
5. Correction policy — how we fix mistakes
Mistakes happen. The question is how we handle them. Every confirmed factual error becomes a public entry at /errata with date, what was wrong, what we changed, and (where relevant) which reports were re-generated.
Within 72 hours of a reader-flagged error: we confirm receipt and start verification against the official source they cited.
Within 14 days: if verified, the fix lands in the database, every affected report is re-generated at no cost to the customer, and the correction is published at /errata.
If we disagree: we reply with our reasoning and the source we used. For ambiguous regulations we may consult external counsel before deciding.
6. Update cadence
Visa pathway database
Updated continuously as government rules change and as we discover gaps. Discovery is currently manual (news, reader emails, quarterly reviews) — we do not have automated change-detection across every immigration page.
Cost-of-living + salary data
Refreshed quarterly against source data. The figures in your report are a snapshot at time of generation.
Quarterly 30-URL government source spot-check
Random sample of 30 pathway source URLs verified each quarter to detect link rot and silent government-page moves. Decision rule and procedure live in our internal /limitations.
Blog posts
Reviewed annually for accuracy. Posts that age out of accuracy are updated, marked with revised "Updated" dates, or deprecated and redirected.
7. Affiliate and partner relationships
Some pages link to financial tools (Wise, Airalo, NordVPN, etc.) with affiliate codes. We only recommend services we use ourselves. The relationships do not influence visa rankings or country scores — the scoring engine has zero affiliate signal in its inputs. See /affiliate-disclosure for the complete policy.
8. AI use
We use AI tooling for first-draft research, language editing, and consistency checks across our content base — and disclose this in /ai-sources. No AI output is published without human editorial review. Verdicts, scores, and policy decisions are 100% human-led.
9. What we don't do
For balance, the explicit list of what falls outside our editorial scope lives at /limitations. In one line: we are research, not legal advice. We help you decide. We do not file your paperwork.