77+ countries · every major route · ~3 minutes
Live and work abroad. Find the right place and path for you.
Work, remote income, study, savings, retirement — or a grandparent you barely knew. Every route into another country, ranked for your situation. Most people who move abroad never had an ancestry claim at all.
No family connection anywhere? That is the normal case, and most of what we cover needs none.
Have a DNA test result? Start from that instead
Type in the percentages from your test. You do not need them all, and they do not need to add up to 100.
🔒 Local preview — a test build on this machine. It is not a hosted Roots account service, and it is not backed up. Please do not enter real documents or real family details. Privacy Notice
A job. Remote income. Savings. A degree. A pension. A grandparent’s birthplace. Any one of them can be the thing that gets you residence somewhere else — and which one works depends entirely on your situation, not on anyone’s marketing. We hold 77 countries and every major route, rank them against what you actually have, and hand you to the right professional to finish it.
Most people have no ancestry claim. Most people have a route anyway.
Roughly 443 routes across 77 countries sit behind this page, and the overwhelming majority need no family connection at all: skilled and sponsored work, remote-work and digital-nomad permits, study with the right to stay afterwards, self-employment and startup routes, investment, and retirement or passive-income visas. Each one carries what it really requires — the income floor, the years to residence, whether citizenship is even reachable, and whether it is a right or a discretionary grant. Some routes are honest dead ends that never lead to permanent residence; we say so, because that is exactly the kind of thing people find out too late.
And if you do have ancestry, it is the strongest card in the deck
Every other route is something you qualify for. An ancestry claim can mean you already hold the right today — no income test, no employer, no waiting years to become eligible. A single EU nationality unlocks the right to live and work across 27 countries, and it passes to your children. It is rarer than the internet suggests, and the law has tightened sharply since 2025, but when it is there it beats everything else on this page. It costs three minutes to find out.
Feed it everything
Type a grandparent’s birthplace. Drop in a family-tree (GEDCOM) file. Start from nothing but a surname or a DNA ethnicity result. Our engine flags the relatives whose missing details could be hiding an opportunity — then asks you the exact questions that turn a maybe into a yes.
Don’t know your roots? Search by surname — no DNA test needed
Just a last name is enough to try this — most people have that and nothing else. It’s a novelty, not evidence: surnames can hint at where a family name likely originated, but marriages, adoptions, name changes, and transliteration across generations all sever the link — plenty of people carry a surname from a country none of their recent ancestors were citizens of. Fun to explore either way.
What used to take weeks and thousands of dollars
Finding out whether you qualify meant hours lost in foreign-language government portals and obscure legal databases — or a five-figure retainer at an international law or tax firm, just to learn whether you had a case at all. We compress that first, most expensive step into minutes and a small fee, verified against official government sources. So you spend expert money only when you already know it’s worth spending.
What this is — and isn’t. This is not legal or tax advice. It’s an efficient compilation of publicly available official information, plus a synthesis of the complex treaties and rules behind it — built to tell you where you likely stand and what to ask next. A licensed professional is the necessary next step to verify your qualifications and handle your case, and we connect you with the right specialist for your situation.
Roots is deliberately limited to general, sourced informational research and does not establish a professional-client relationship or provide individualised professional advice.
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Roots provides decision support, not legal or tax advice. A qualified professional should verify a route before you act.
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