How We Verify Visa Data

Visa rules change, and a number that was right last year can quietly become wrong. This page explains how we decide what counts as a fact on living-abroad.org, where each figure comes from, and what we do when sources disagree.

Where the facts come from

We work from a clear order of sources. Government immigration portals, foreign and interior ministries, official e-visa platforms, and published gazettes come first — these are the bodies that actually set and administer the rules. Established law firms are used only to help interpret those official texts, never as the rule itself. General blogs, forums, and aggregator sites are not cited as sources for any figure or legal point.

That order matters most for the things people plan their lives around: income thresholds, length of stay, renewal terms, tax treatment, and insurance requirements. Each of those comes from the authority responsible for it, not from a secondhand summary.

A source and a date on every claim

Every visa entry stores the specific sources behind its claims, the date each one was last checked, and a confidence rating describing how solid the underlying evidence is. On the country guides you can see when a program was last verified and follow the links straight to the official pages we relied on, so you can confirm anything yourself.

Where money is involved, we show the original currency alongside a euro equivalent, and we note the date that conversion is based on, so an exchange-rate shift doesn’t silently distort a cost-of-living comparison or an income threshold.

When sources disagree

Official sources are not always consistent with each other — a ministry page and an e-visa platform can list different figures, or a rule can be worded ambiguously. When that happens we do not quietly pick the more convenient number. We flag the conflict with a visible warning so you know the point is unsettled and can check the official source before relying on it. Anything resting on weaker evidence is marked low-confidence rather than presented as settled fact.

Kept current, and checked by a person

Entries are re-verified on a schedule, and each one is flagged when it is due for another look, so pages don’t drift out of date unnoticed. Findings that need real judgement — an unclear regulation, a threshold that depends on a figure published elsewhere — are held as open questions and checked by a person against the official source before they are treated as confirmed.

For more on our approach and the people behind it, see our methodology and about pages.