Start or run a business — Entrepreneur, self-employed, startup founder.
Each card names that country's routes and links to what we hold on each one — the requirements, the official source it was read from, and the date it was checked. Up to 6 routes are named per country; where a country has more, the card says so and links to its full list. The other 140 are listed on their own country pages, each with every route it holds.
Canada22 routes
Rwanda12 routes
New Zealand9 routes
Italy9 routes
Romania8 routes
France7 routes
China6 routes
Cyprus5 routes
Netherlands5 routes
San Marino5 routes
Australia5 routes
Papua New Guinea5 routes
Hungary4 routes
Andorra4 routes
Japan4 routes
Germany4 routes
Portugal4 routes
Bulgaria4 routes
Tanzania4 routes
Eswatini4 routes
Switzerland3 routes
Spain3 routes
Myanmar3 routes
A country will often grant the same person residence under a different heading. These are the categories that also serve this reason, with their own counts — they are not added into the figures above, so nothing is counted twice.
Every route on this page is one entry in the same inventory the 227 country pages are generated from — one row per route, per country, held under the technical category the law itself uses. “164 of 227 countries” means at least one route of this kind is on record for that country. It does not mean the route is open to you, and it never means a country has no other way in that we have not yet recorded. A higher route count is not an easier move: it is a count, not a score.
Routes for founders, freelancers and the self-employed. Some ask for a business plan and job creation; others simply for clients and an income.
A “proven fact” carries all four things a claim about your life needs: a value, the official page it came from, a quotation that demonstrates that value, and the date it was checked. Anything short of all four is not counted here and is shown as unproven on the page that uses it. The evidence figure above counts eligibility criteria only — the rules that decide whether a route is open to you — read from the live database on 2026-08-07.
All 10 reasons to move · Browse the same inventory by country · How we verify our data
Answer 14 questions and get a verdict per country — eligible, almost, or not eligible — against this same inventory.
Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha