Moving to St. Kitts & Nevis from Australia

Our residency index: 85/100, comparatively open. It is our own rating of how realistic long-term residency in St. Kitts & Nevis is for Australian citizens, based on the routes St. Kitts & Nevis publishes. Realistic long-term residency runs through the citizenship-by-investment program (one-time donation or approved real estate), with a discretionary retiree/self-sufficiency residence permit also available but no published income threshold.

The cheapest self-funded routes we track:

• Investment: about $250k (St Kitts & Nevis CBI, Sustainable Island State Contribution (SISC) one-time donation, USD 250,000 for a single applicant; 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.

Ranked by our match model for a typical couple who both hold Australian passports, using the preset answers of our best places to live list. Your own answers would change the order. We pick the cities, up to five, by how often English Wikipedia readers looked them up over the past year.

1. 1

   1. Basseterre

   68% match

   Est. cost

   €2,819/mo

   Avg temp

   27°C

   Safety index

   68/100

Our estimate for a couple living centrally in Basseterre is €2,819 a month. For comparison, we estimate €4,094 a month in Melbourne. Use these figures to compare places rather than to set a budget.

St. Kitts & Nevis is in our zero or very low tax tier (little to no 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.

• Best cities to live in with zero or very low income tax
• Best places to live in the Caribbean

• Moving to St. Kitts & Nevis from the US
• Moving to St. Kitts & Nevis from the UK
• Moving to St. Kitts & Nevis from Canada
• Moving to St. Kitts & Nevis from Ireland
• Moving to St. Kitts & Nevis 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.