Moving to Iraq from Australia

Our residency index: 35/100, hard to obtain. It is our own rating of how realistic long-term residency in Iraq is for Australian citizens, based on the routes Iraq publishes. Long-term residency for foreigners runs almost entirely through employer-sponsored work permits or marriage/family, with no federal investor or passive-income visa; the only self-funded capital route is the Kurdistan Region's new investor/property residency.

The cheapest self-funded routes we track:

• Investment: about $50k (Kurdistan Region (KRI) investor/property route, minimum USD 50,000 residential unit purchase in an approved project for a renewable 1-5 year residence permit; no federal investment program exists; as of June 2026)

Check the official requirements before you apply: amounts, conditions and exchange rates change, and what a couple needs can differ from a single applicant's threshold.

For short visits, Australian passport holders can get a visa on arrival for a visit, according to the passport-index dataset. Short-stay entry covers visits; living there takes a residence permit.

As of 13 October 2026, the US State Department advises against all travel to Iraq ("Level 4: Do Not Travel"). We do not rank its cities here or on our best-cities lists. Read the current advisory on travel.state.gov and your own government's travel advice.

See the cities we track in Iraq

Iraq is in our low to medium tax tier (moderate personal income tax); Australia 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 Australia after you leave, or the treaty between the two countries, so check both with a tax adviser before you move.

• Moving to Iraq from the US
• Moving to Iraq from the UK
• Moving to Iraq from Canada
• Moving to Iraq from Ireland
• Moving to Iraq 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 Australian 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.