Moving to Kuwait from the US

Our residency index: 20/100, hard to obtain. It is our own rating of how realistic long-term residency in Kuwait is for US citizens, based on the routes Kuwait publishes. Residency is overwhelmingly sponsor-tied (kafala); the only self-funded long-term routes are a discretionary investor permit (KDIPA-licensed business), a property-owner permit, and a new self-sponsored category, with no permanent residency or realistic citizenship.

The cheapest self-funded routes we track:

• Investment: about $650k (Kuwait property-owner 10-year residency (effective 23 Dec 2025); no fixed statutory minimum, case-by-case, but a qualifying private home runs ~KD 200,000-300,000, with KD 200,000 the practical low end (1 KWD = ~3.26 USD); foreign individual ownership is itself tightly restricted (10-year prior residency, one home, 1,000 sqm cap); 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, US 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.

We do not rank cities in Kuwait 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 Kuwait

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

• Moving to Kuwait from the UK
• Moving to Kuwait from Canada
• Moving to Kuwait from Australia
• Moving to Kuwait from Ireland
• Moving to Kuwait 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 US 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.