Moving to Brunei from Canada

Our residency index: 10/100, hard to obtain. It is our own rating of how realistic long-term residency in Brunei is for Canadian citizens, based on the routes Brunei publishes. Long-term presence is essentially employer-sponsored (work permit tied to a job) or via the new discretionary five-year Long-Term Pass for those with family ties, qualifying business investment, or scarce professional expertise; there is no investor, retirement, or means-tested self-funded route, and permanent residency requires roughly 15 years of continuous residence (10 if married to a citizen) at official discretion.

Our dataset has no self-funded income or savings threshold for Brunei. Check the official requirements before you apply.

For short visits, Canadian passport holders can visit visa-free for up to 90 days, according to the passport-index dataset. Short-stay entry covers visits; living there takes a residence permit.

We do not rank cities in Brunei here. Our residency index rates long-term residency there as hard to obtain for most foreigners (under 40 out of 100), so our ranked lists leave it out. In the quiz, cities where residency looks out of reach for a couple move to a separate list.

See the cities we track in Brunei

Brunei is in our zero or very low tax tier (little to no personal income tax); Canada is in our high tax tier (high personal income tax). Tiers describe each country's own income tax. They do not cover tax you may still owe in Canada after you leave, or the treaty between the two countries, so check both with a tax adviser before you move.

• Moving to Brunei from the US
• Moving to Brunei from the UK
• Moving to Brunei from Australia
• Moving to Brunei from Ireland
• Moving to Brunei from New Zealand

Every country and origin we cover

Every figure here comes from the datasets behind our city and country pages:

• Short-stay entry: the passport-index dataset (ilyankou, MIT license), which records the entry rule for short visits on each passport.
• Residency index, routes and thresholds: the OurNextCity residency dataset, hand-reviewed against published immigration rules, figures as of June 2026. It is a summary, not legal advice.
• City ranking: our match model, the one behind the quiz, run with a typical couple's preset answers and both partners holding Canadian passports. It ranks up to five of the country's best-known cities: of the cities in our quiz (100,000 people or more, capitals and a few towns movers seek out, such as Faro), the five most read about on English Wikipedia over the past year. It folds suburbs into their main city and leaves out countries with a residency index under 40 and areas under a US State Department Level 4 advisory, as our best-cities lists do.
• Costs: our cost model, a country-level cost-of-living index scaled for city size, from our city dataset (last rebuilt June 2026).
• Tax tiers: three coarse bands we assign by hand from each country's top marginal personal income tax rate and overall tax reputation.