Poland, Ireland and Slovenia issued the highest number of EU residence permits per capita in 2022

During 2022, European countries issued a total of 3.4 million permanent residence permits. Poland was the leader in terms of the number of permits issued during the year. However, according to Schengen statistics, Malta issued the highest number of permits relative to its population.

Malta issued 37,851 permanent residence permits for a population of 535,064. This means that the issuance rate per 10,000 people is around 707, which is the highest in Europe. In second place is Cyprus with 308 residence permits issued for every 10,000 inhabitants. Third countries received a total of 38,851 permits.

It is worth noting that Malta and Cyprus have much smaller populations than the other countries, so the high number of permits issued in these two countries is logical.

On the other hand, among countries with a higher population and larger territory, Poland is the leader in terms of the number of residence permits issued for 10,000 people - about 170. A total of 700,264 permits were issued in 2022.

The founder of SchengenVisaInfo.com, Besart Bayrami, notes that due to the small populations of Cyprus and Malta, the number of residence permits issued may look uneven.

When comparing only countries with larger populations, Poland remains the first country to grant the highest number of residence permits overall as well as per capita in 2022," Besart Bajrami said.

residence. This means that there are approximately 169 permits for every 10,000 people. The next countries with the highest number of residence permits issued per capita are Slovenia, Luxembourg and Portugal. In these countries, the number of permits issued is about 154 and 106 per 10,000 people, respectively.

In addition, Lithuania issued 27,380 residence permits in 2022, which is about 100 permits per capita. Lithuania has a population of approximately 2.7 million people.

Among the countries with the highest number of residence permits issued per capita are Finland, Spain and Sweden. These countries have between 96 and 79 permits per 10,000 people.

The total number of residence permits issued in 2022 in these three countries was 591,974. Finland registered the highest number of permits (457,412), while Spain and Sweden issued about 50,000 and 85,000 residence permits, respectively.