StayingAsia is a reference on how long a foreigner can actually stay in 21 Asian countries. It covers 113 individual legal instruments, from Thailand's Destination Thailand Visa to Georgia's ten year permanent residence clock, and it scores the same 21 countries twice: once on how easy they are to stay in, and once on how good they are to live in.
How the figures are produced
Every route starts from the authority that publishes it: an immigration department, a ministry, an official gazette, or a state investment agency. The threshold, duration, renewal rule and settlement path are taken from that page, or from the statute where the authority does not publish a route page. Each programme record links to the official page it was built from, and says when no official page exists.
Where a figure could not be confirmed against a primary source, the record says so instead of asserting a number. Some records carry a figure that is reported but unconfirmed, and it is labelled that way on the page.
How often it is re-checked
Records carry the date they were last checked, not the date they were written. Money thresholds and anything that changes with a government fee schedule are re-checked every 90 days. Procedural pages are re-checked every 180 days. Every rule change logged between checks appears in The Wire with its date and source, and each month is collected into the digest.
Corrections
When a rule changes, the record is updated and the change is logged with what it was before. When a figure on this site turns out to be wrong, the correction is recorded in the same log rather than made quietly. Reply to any digest email to flag one.
What this is not
It is not legal advice, and it is not an agent. There are no referral links in the programme records, and no route is ranked by who pays for it. The scores are editorial judgments with published weights and published component scores, so they can be re-weighted or disagreed with.
Analytics
Page views are counted by Vercel Web Analytics. It sets no cookies and stores nothing on your device, so there is no banner to dismiss. It records which page was opened, from which country, and which site sent you, and nothing that identifies you personally.
Machine access
Every record is also served through an MCP endpoint at
https://stayingasia.com/api/mcp/, so an assistant can ask what a passport gets
you or which routes exist in a country and get the site's own answers back, with the page
each answer came from. There is no key and nothing to sign up for.
Data
The full dataset is published as plain text at /llms-full.txt for retrieval, and the two rankings are available under CC BY 4.0 with attribution to StayingAsia.