The 2026 Visa Income Threshold Report: 6 Countries Compared

How This Was Compiled

Every row in the two tables below meets three conditions. If any one of them failed, the row was excluded rather than softened.

1. The figure comes from the issuing authority's own page. Not a law firm's summary, not a relocation company's blog, not a news article. Where the authority's page was unreachable from an automated request, a dated Internet Archive capture of that same URL was used and the capture date is noted in the sources.
2. The effective date is known. A threshold without an effective date is unusable, because most of these figures change annually and several changed twice in the last two years.
3. The basis is stated. Annual gross salary, hourly rate against a published median, or monthly amount against a social minimum. A table that mixes these without labelling them produces comparisons that look precise and are meaningless.

Two deliberate exclusions are worth naming. First, fees are separated from income thresholds, because they answer a different question: a fee is what you pay, a threshold is what you must earn. Conflating them is the most common error in published immigration-cost articles. Second, no figure is included where the government publishes none — the Blue Card residence permit fee and the Australian 482 visa fee both fell into that category during this compilation and were left out rather than sourced from a commercial site.

Income and Salary Thresholds by Country

Sixteen thresholds across six countries. Start by reading the basis column before comparing any two rows: an hourly rate against a national median and an annual gross salary are not the same kind of number, and treating them as comparable is how bad comparisons get published.

Three Different Things Called a Threshold

The single most useful thing to understand about this dataset is that the sixteen numbers above are not sixteen versions of the same measurement. They fall into three families, and reading one against another without accounting for the family is where comparisons go wrong.

Two practical consequences follow. A country can appear to have a low threshold and still be hard to qualify for, because the threshold is only one of several conditions. And a threshold quoted in an old article can be wrong without anyone having changed the policy, because an indexation moved the base.

Why Is a Threshold Not an Approval?

Every figure in this dataset is a condition, not an outcome. Meeting it is necessary and nowhere near sufficient, and the gap between the two is where most disappointment lives.

• A salary floor does not create an eligible occupation. Ireland and Australia both apply occupation lists on top of the salary test. A role paying well above the floor can still be excluded.
• A market rate test is separate from the floor. Australia's 482 requires the offer to clear the income threshold and to be no less than what an Australian worker would earn in the same role. Passing one says nothing about the other.
• An income requirement is assessed on evidence, not on arithmetic. Finland and Luxembourg both look at whether the income is stable and sufficient over a period, not only at whether the monthly figure clears the line.
• A sponsorship income test is about the sponsor. The US I-864 figure applies to the person signing the affidavit, and a joint sponsor changes the analysis entirely.

For anyone building a case around these numbers, the order of operations matters: confirm the occupation is eligible, confirm the route exists for your nationality, then check the threshold, then assemble the evidence. Doing it in the reverse order is the most common way to spend money on an application that could not have succeeded.

Short-Stay Authorisation Costs

These are fees, not thresholds — a distinction that published comparisons routinely ignore. All five were checked on the same date, so the set is internally consistent even though each government sets its own amount.

What Changed in 2025 and 2026

Four of the sixteen thresholds moved within the last eighteen months, and one changed in kind rather than in amount. Anyone quoting a figure from 2024 is now wrong on at least one of these.

1. New Zealand replaced its AEWV wage test. From 10 March 2025 the median-wage test stopped applying to most accredited employer work visa roles, replaced by a market rate plus adult minimum wage requirement. Older guides still quote the retired NZD 29.66 figure as if it were current.
2. Ireland raised its employment permit thresholds. The figures in force from 1 March 2026 differ from the previous set, and the department's own summary table and its permit pages have printed slightly different numbers for the same threshold, which the notes below address.
3. Australia reindexed the 482 thresholds. The Core Skills figure moved to AUD 79,423 for the 2026–27 program year from AUD 76,515 the year before. The prior-year figure is included in the table because applications lodged under the earlier program year are assessed against it.
4. New Zealand introduced its 6-point Skilled Migrant Category. The residence route no longer runs on a cumulative points total, so the 160-point and 180-point targets that appear in older articles describe a system that no longer exists.

The general lesson is not that these governments are unpredictable. It is that indexation happens quietly: a threshold pegged to a median wage or a social minimum moves every year without any announcement, while a fixed statutory figure moves only when someone decides to move it. Both kinds go stale, and they go stale at different speeds.

Country Notes

Ireland

The Critical Skills and General Employment Permit thresholds were restated from 1 March 2026. During verification the department's permit pages and its own minimum-remuneration table printed figures that differed by a few euro for the same threshold; this report uses the permit-page figures. Anyone whose salary falls inside that narrow gap should confirm the applicable figure before signing a contract, because a difference of a few euro decides which permit route is available.

Australia

The 482 thresholds are set per program year and apply to the nomination, not to the applicant's history. The Specialist Skills figure is roughly 185% of the Core Skills figure, which is why the two streams are not interchangeable for the same role.

New Zealand

Two different numbers matter and they are frequently confused: the immigration median wage (NZD 35.00 from 9 March 2026), used as the base for residence-related thresholds, and the adult minimum wage (NZD 23.95 from 1 April 2026), which is the floor for most AEWV roles. They are set by different processes and change on different dates.

Luxembourg

The Blue Card figure is the national average gross annual salary for the reference year stated in the ministerial regulation, not a policy target. Because it is derived from an average, it moves when the average moves. The salaried-worker route instead references the unqualified social minimum wage, which is indexed separately — so the two Luxembourg rows in this table move on different schedules.

Finland

Finland publishes income requirements by permit type and, for family routes, by municipality group and household size. The two figures in the table are the specialist and employee routes; the family-route figures are lower and vary by household composition, which is why they are not reduced to a single row here.

United States

The I-864 figure is 125% of the Federal Poverty Guidelines for the household size, and the guidelines are republished annually. The figure applies to the intending immigrant's filing date, not to the date of the affidavit, which is why two applications filed months apart can be assessed against different tables.

How to Cite This Page

Each table above carries a copy button that places a ready-formatted citation on your clipboard. If you prefer to build one by hand, the elements are: publisher VisaGrade, page title The 2026 Visa Income Threshold Report: 6 Countries Compared, publication date 1 November 2026, and the URL of this page.

If you are citing a single figure rather than the dataset, cite the originating authority as well — for example, the Irish threshold should be attributed to the Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment with VisaGrade as the compiler, because the authority is the source of record and this page is the index.

VisaGrade. "The 2026 Visa Income Threshold Report: 6 Countries Compared."
VisaGrade, 1 Nov. 2026, visagrade.com/visa-income-thresholds-2026.html.

What This Dataset Cannot Tell You

• It is not a ranking of difficulty. A higher threshold does not make a country harder to move to, because occupation lists, quotas, language tests and processing behaviour all sit outside the number.
• It does not cover every route. Six countries, sixteen thresholds. Student, investor, family and humanitarian routes are largely absent, and the absence is deliberate rather than an oversight.
• It will age. Every figure here has an effective date, and several are indexed annually. A version of this page read in twelve months should be treated as historical.
• It says nothing about approval odds. No dataset can, and any page that offers a percentage is modelling something other than a government decision.
• It excludes fees for work and residence permits, because several governments do not publish them as a single figure and the ones that do change them independently of the thresholds.

Questions