Moving to Iceland from the UK
UK passport holders can visit Iceland visa-free for up to 90 days, but living there takes a residence permit. Our residency index rates Iceland 30/100 for UK citizens (hard to obtain). Iceland is in our high tax tier. Check the official requirements before you apply.
12 questions, about 4 minutes, no account needed. Taking the quiz is free, and so is seeing your #1 city. Full results for both of you are a one-time US$12 (€12 in Europe).
- Short stays
- Visa-free 90 days
- UK passport
- Residency
- 30/100
- Hard to obtain, our index
- Tax tier
- High
- High personal income tax
Living there long term
Our residency index: 30/100, hard to obtain. It is our own rating of how realistic long-term residency in Iceland is for UK citizens, based on the routes Iceland publishes. Long-term residency for non-EEA nationals runs almost entirely through employer-sponsored skilled-work permits (qualified experts, athletes, labour-shortage roles) or family reunification, with no passive-income, retirement, or investor route and a remote-worker long-stay visa that is capped at six months and grants no residency.
Our dataset has no self-funded income or savings threshold for Iceland. Check the official requirements before you apply.
For short visits, UK 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.
Source: OurNextCity residency dataset, hand-reviewed approximations researched against published immigration rules, figures as of June 2026. Not legal advice: check the official source before you apply. Short-stay entry from the passport-index dataset (ilyankou, MIT).
Where in Iceland to start
We do not rank cities in Iceland 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.
Taxes
Iceland is in our high tax tier (high personal income tax); the UK 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 the UK after you leave, or the treaty between the two countries, so check both with a tax adviser before you move.
Source: OurNextCity tax tiers, assigned by hand from each country's top marginal personal income tax rate and overall tax reputation, with no fixed rate cut-offs. Coarse by design; not tax advice.
Moving to Iceland from elsewhere
How we built this page
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 UK 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.