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Four questions, five countries, one honest answer: which visa route you actually qualify for — and how much cash you need before you can use it.
Answer four questions. Every route you qualify for is ranked, with the ones that don't apply left out.
Three separate pots, because they behave differently: cash you spend, cash you must be able to show, and the monthly burn that eats the rest.
Rent bands are typical asking rents, not the cheap tail. All-in solo = mid one-bedroom rent + living costs; it excludes health insurance and any deposit.
| City | One-bed rent | Shared room | All-in solo | Job market | English | Bureaucracy |
|---|
Cheapest realistic setup in each country — shared room in its most affordable city, six months of runway. Swiss francs converted at the rate noted below so the columns are comparable.
| Country | Your best route | Fit | Monthly burn | Cash to land | Must show | 6-month total |
|---|
| Country | Move without a job offer? | Move to job-hunt? | Language expected | Bureaucracy |
|---|
Ticks are saved in this browser — close the tab and come back to it. Nothing is uploaded anywhere.
Sequencing is what actually breaks moves. Day 0 is landing day; everything above it happens from home.
Most visa "checkers" are lead-capture forms with a lawyer's calendar behind them. This one runs entirely in your browser and shows its arithmetic, because the two questions that actually decide whether a move happens are unglamorous: am I eligible for anything, and can I afford the gap before income starts.
The route engine scores every published route in a country against your four answers and drops the ones you can't use. A route you don't qualify for isn't shown as "locked" — it's absent, because a list padded with routes you can't take is how people waste six months. Where two routes are close, both appear, ranked, with the trade-off spelled out.
The cost tab deliberately refuses to give you one number, because the single-number version is what causes people to land underfunded:
Income thresholds, savings requirements and deposit caps are taken from the government source for each country and linked next to the figure inside the tool — not collected in a bibliography you'll never open. Rent bands are typical asking rents from listing portals in each city, stated as ranges rather than false-precision averages. Where a commonly repeated figure is wrong, the tool uses the legal one: France caps rental deposits at one month unfurnished and two months furnished, Switzerland at three, and Germany at three months' cold rent payable in instalments — figures a great many relocation blogs get wrong in the landlord's favour.
On paper, Portugal and Spain. Both run income-based routes needing no employer — Portugal's D7 (passive income) and D8 (remote work), Spain's non-lucrative and digital nomad visas. Portugal's D7 has the lowest income bar of the five; Spain's non-lucrative visa has the highest savings requirement. Germany's Opportunity Card is the only route here designed for moving specifically to job-hunt. Switzerland is effectively closed without an employer or a family tie, because non-EU permits are quota-capped.
Three pots, as above. Realistically, for a shared room in an affordable city with six months of runway, expect somewhere between €12,000 and €20,000 in spend-and-burn across Spain, Portugal and France, meaningfully more in Germany, and roughly double in Switzerland. Proof of funds sits on top of that and varies enormously — from nothing on an employer-sponsored route to nearly €29,000 for Spain's non-lucrative visa. Run your own combination in the tool.
Rarely for the visa; often for everything after it. None of the five requires language proof for a first work or income-based permit. But B1 German cuts the German settlement clock from 33 months to 21 on the EU Blue Card and adds points on the Opportunity Card, France expects French at renewal and naturalisation, and Swiss cantons weigh integration — including local language — when you renew. Treat language as a permanent-residency accelerator, not an entry ticket. The tool flags where your level specifically helps or hurts.
Verify them. Every threshold links to the government page it came from, and every page carries the date it was checked. Thresholds move — minimum wages are re-set annually and several of these routes index directly to them. If you find a figure that has changed, email support@joriu.com and it gets fixed, with the date bumped.
If Spain came out as a route worth pursuing, this 22-page guide is the next step: every visa rated for approval difficulty, verified 2026 income thresholds, the document checklist in consulate order, real rent figures by city, and the legal bridges that keep you in-country while a permit is processed.
Get the Spain guide$19 · instant PDFWhichever route the tool points you toward, the document phase is the same everywhere — and it is where most applications actually fail.
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Once you know your route, the detail work starts. Our long-form guides go deeper on each: how to move to Spain, the Spanish digital nomad visa and non-lucrative visa, Spanish cost of living by city, and the Schengen 90/180 rule — which catches people who try to "scout" for too long before filing.
Not legal advice. This tool summarises published requirements to help you narrow your options; it does not assess your individual case, and immigration decisions are discretionary. Thresholds and rules change, sometimes mid-year. Always confirm with the consulate or government office that will actually handle your file before spending money or making commitments. Figures verified 8 August 2026. Spot something out of date? Tell us — we date every correction.