Asia Ranked, Easiest to Hardest

Most sites tell you which countries have visas. This one tells you which countries are actually easier to move to, and shows the arithmetic.

The ranking is editorial, not legal. It scores each country on five criteria, weights them, and publishes every component so you can disagree with the weighting and re-rank it yourself.

Who this ranking is for

One persona, named explicitly, because “easiest country” is meaningless without one.

You earn remotely or live on passive income. You have no employer in the country. You want to be there for five years or more, possibly with a partner. You are not a citizen of any Asian country.

Every score below is measured against that person. A skilled professional with a local job offer would get a different ranking, and that view is included further down.

The model

Five criteria, 100 points.

Scoring bands:

Financial barrier. No threshold 25. Under USD 20,000, 20. Under USD 50,000, 15. Under USD 150,000, 10. Under USD 500,000, 5. Above that, or no route, 0.

Speed. No application required 20. Two weeks or less 17. Two to six weeks 13. Two to three months 8. Three to six months 4. Longer, or not operational, 0.

Legal certainty. Codified and stable 20. Codified but changed in the last year 15. Practice driven or office discretionary 10. Announced but not operational 5. No route 0.

Family. Dependants included on the main route 15. Partial 9. None 0.

Settlement. Permanent residence at grant 20. A real clock under five years 15. Requires switching status 10. Discretionary or rare 5. None 0.

The ranking

What the ranking actually says

The top four are not the four you would guess. Armenia, Georgia, the Philippines and Hong Kong. None of them are the obvious lifestyle destinations. All four score well because they either require almost no money or give you real permanence, and two of them do both.

Armenia wins on an accident of history. Most Western passports get 180 days visa free. A residence card costs about USD 5,000 in company capital. Permanent residence comes after three years. Citizenship after three years, with dual nationality allowed. Nowhere else in the region stacks that cheaply.

Georgia is the easiest place to simply arrive. 365 days a year, no application, no income test, for 95 plus nationalities. It scores lower than Armenia only because the residence and permanent residence path is slower and the rules have been moving.

The Philippines is the only country where retirement money buys immediate permanent residence. USD 15,000 with a pension, age 50 plus, and you have PR at grant rather than a decade of renewals. It is also the only route in Asia that combines low cost with actual permanence.

Thailand is mid-table and that is correct. Easy to enter, cheap to hold, well codified, family friendly, and completely terminal. The zero in settlement is the whole story.

Taiwan, Korea and Japan rank below Cambodia on this model. That is not a mistake. Each has a clean, well run remote work visa that expires and gives no dependant rights and no permanent residence. Cambodia is cheap, fast and formless, and then also gives you nothing. The model is measuring friction plus future, and both sets score badly for different reasons.

Singapore scores 53 despite being the richest country in the region. A 5 out of 25 on financial barrier. The Overseas Networks and Expertise Pass wants SGD 30,000 a month. Great country, not an easy one.

China, Vietnam, India and the Maldives are at or near zero because for this persona there is no route at all. That is the most useful thing this page can tell you, and no competitor says it.

Nepal was initially scored zero and that was wrong. Nepal runs a Residential Visa for retirees: USD 20,000 in savings plus USD 20,000 of annual income, renewed annually. It scores low because it is practice driven and leads nowhere, not because it does not exist. The correction moved it from last to thirteenth.

Filtered views

The weighting above is one opinion. Here are four others.

Cheapest to enter

Fastest to a legal permit

Best for families

Nine countries score the full 15: Armenia, Georgia, Philippines, Hong Kong, Thailand, UAE, Singapore, Japan, Malaysia. Then Turkey, Taiwan, Cambodia and Indonesia score zero, because their main routes for this persona allow no dependants.

Best if you need to still be there in ten years

Note what is absent. Thailand, Japan, Malaysia, Taiwan, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Cambodia and Nepal all score zero. That is most of the region, and it is the finding that should shape any long term plan.

If you have a job offer instead

Different persona, different ranking. With a local employer sponsoring you:

Employment transforms the ranking because it unlocks the settlement column that most remote work routes zero out.

How to use this

Do not read the rank number. Read the component columns.

If money is your constraint, look at the financial column and ignore the rest. If permanence is the constraint, look at settlement and accept that nine of the twenty one countries are eliminated immediately. If you have a partner and children, the family column eliminates four more.

The ranking is a filter, not a verdict. The country pages carry the detail.

This score measures one thing: how easy the country is to get into and stay in. It says nothing about whether the place is good to live in. That is scored separately, on safety, affordability, health, clean air, English and internet, and the two scores are published side by side precisely because they disagree so often. See quality of life.

Sources and method notes

Scores are derived from the programme data in the stayingasia dataset, checked against primary government sources on 2026-10-22. Where a country has several routes, the score uses the route most accessible to the stated persona, not the best route in the country.

Judgement is involved in three places: the choice of persona, the weighting, and the band boundaries. All three are published so the model can be audited or re-run. Nothing here is legal advice.