The new Europe map — where Americans are moving

The American migration to Europe is now large enough to show up in every member-state's statistics office. 2025 set the record. 2026 is pacing to beat it. For the first time since the post-war reorganisation of who moves where, the US is a net exporter of educated workers to the EU in several age brackets at once.

Where are they landing? Not evenly. The map reads like this:

Portugal holds the top spot for the fourth consecutive year. The D7 passive-income visa and the revised D8 digital-nomad visa — combined with Portuguese income tax rules that have become more predictable after the 2024 political settlement — make it the simplest legal path for a remote-earning American to relocate. The country is also the cheapest in the top six on cost-of-living, though the gap has narrowed sharply since Lisbon's rental market peaked in late 2024.

Spain's rise is newer and almost entirely about Valencia, Málaga, and the Canary Islands. Barcelona and Madrid are no longer the destinations they were five years ago — rent and saturation pushed the new wave south. Spain's digital-nomad visa, introduced in 2023 and simplified in 2025, is the fastest to process of any in the top six.

Ireland's share is distorted by a single factor: a remote-first Silicon Valley labour market with Irish great-grandparents. The 1956 Irish Nationality and Citizenship Act — the "three-generation" rule — has become the single most valuable immigration instrument for upper-middle-class Americans in the last three years. Estimates put the backlog on the Foreign Birth Register at approximately 55,000 pending applications, mostly from the US, mostly from software workers.

Italy is driven almost entirely by the impatriate tax regime and a growing cluster of US remote workers in Florence, Bologna, and the Lake Como corridor. Greece by a combination of golden visa, climate, and — underappreciated — the EU's most generous freelancer tax structure for the first seven years of residency.

What is driving all of this?

Three forces compounding. First, US housing costs crossed a threshold in major cities during 2024 that made the arithmetic of relocation visibly favourable for a specific band of remote worker. Second, the 2024 US political outcome concentrated a wave of political migration that was already underway. Third — most boring and most durable — the EU spent the last five years quietly modernising its visa programs to court exactly this demographic. The paperwork that used to take 12–18 months now takes 4–8.

The people moving are not retirees. The median age of an American obtaining an EU long-stay visa in 2025 was 38. The most common occupation was software engineer. The median household income was north of USD 175,000. These are the people your European cities are now selling their apartments to.

If you are reading this from the US and wondering whether the numbers are noise or a trend — the answer is neither. It is a compounding structural shift, and 2026 will be bigger than 2025 by every leading indicator currently available.

— The Editor's Bureau