Moving to the Seychelles from Australia

Australian passport holders can visit the Seychelles visa-free for up to 90 days, but living there takes a residence permit. The self-funded residency routes we track start at an investment of about $1M, and our residency index rates the Seychelles 30/100 for Australian citizens (hard to obtain). The Seychelles is in our low to medium tax tier. Check the official requirements before you apply.

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Short stays
Visa-free 90 days
Australian passport
Residency
30/100
Hard to obtain, our index
Tax tier
Low to medium
Moderate 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 the Seychelles is for Australian citizens, based on the routes the Seychelles publishes. Long-term residency realistically runs through the USD 1M permanent-residence-by-investment route or a discretionary residence/retirement permit granted to people of means; there is no published, fixed-threshold passive-income visa.

The cheapest self-funded routes we track:

  • Investment: about $1M (Seychelles Permanent Residence by Investment, USD 1,000,000 minimum investment in a qualifying Seychelles business (plus ~USD 25,000 fees and means of support for 1 year); 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 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 the Seychelles to start

We do not rank cities in the Seychelles 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 the Seychelles

Taxes

The Seychelles 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.

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 the Seychelles 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 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.