Methodology

Collecting the data

We download official files and use official interfaces only; we do not scrape websites or get around access controls. Each file is kept as published, converted for analysis and checked against the totals the publisher reports. Sources and licences are listed on the sources page; refresh dates on the update status page.

Matching employers

Employer names are normalised (letter case, punctuation and the spelling of legal forms such as "Limited" and "Ltd") so that spelling variants of the same name in the same place count once. Legal forms are kept: "Example Inc" and "Example LLC" are different legal entities. Records from different countries are never merged; where the same legal name appears in two registers, the records are shown side by side and are not linked by any official identifier.

Personal data

Fields naming individuals (contact persons, attorneys, preparers, e-mail addresses, telephone numbers) are removed when files are converted. Employers that appear under a person's own name do not get a page and are only counted in totals.

Figures

• Not issued (refusal) rate — short-stay visa applications not issued divided by applications, as reported by the consulate for the year.
• Certified share — filings certified (including certified then withdrawn) divided by all decided filings in the period.
• Offered annual wage — the lower end of the offered wage range converted to a yearly amount (hourly × 2,080; weekly × 52; bi-weekly × 26; monthly × 12); full-time positions; values below $20,000 or above $2,000,000 are excluded as unit errors.
• Occupation overlap — similarity of two employers' mix of occupations (cosine similarity of filings by occupation code).
• Share — a page's figure divided by the national (or state, or destination) total for the same period and measure, as published by the same source.
• Change on a year earlier / since a base year — (latest − earlier) ÷ earlier, for the same measure; not shown when the earlier value is missing or zero.
• Australian financial year — 1 July to 30 June; "2025–26" ends on 30 June 2026. Counts of Australian skilled visas refer to primary applicants (the nominated workers) unless a table says otherwise; family members are secondary applicants.
• Japanese foreign residents — a count of people holding each status of residence at the end of December (a stock, not new visas). "Work-related statuses" are the employment statuses of Appended Table I of the Immigration Control Act, from Professor to Technical Intern Training; Designated Activities is not included because it mixes work and non-work activities.
• Foreign workers in Japan — the number of foreign employees that employers report to the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare at the end of October each year. It counts people in work, so it differs from the count of residents.
• Hong Kong schemes — applications approved in the calendar year; yearly totals for the General Employment Policy and the Mainland Talents scheme come from the Immigration Department's tables by industry sector.
• Residence in Germany and Italy — Germany: foreign citizens in the Central Register of Foreigners on 31 December, by residence status. Italy: new residence permits issued during the year and permits valid on 1 January.
• National statistics in Europe — Denmark: residence permits granted, by type; Sweden: immigration by grounds for settlement; Netherlands: immigrants by migration motive (citizens of countries outside the EU and EFTA only); Finland and Austria: arrivals and departures by citizenship. Net migration is arrivals minus departures.
• Remittances — personal remittances received and paid, in current U.S. dollars, as share of GDP, and the average cost of sending $200, from the World Bank's World Development Indicators; each country's latest reported year.
• Embassies and consulates — embassies, consulates general and consulates recorded in Wikidata; honorary consulates are not included because they do not issue visas. The city is the recorded location of the mission. The list may be incomplete; the mission's official website is authoritative.
• International migrant stock — UN DESA mid-year estimates (1990–2024) of people living outside their country of birth; where a country records only citizenship, foreign citizens are counted, and refugees are added where UNHCR or UNRWA report them. Each page states the basis. Destinations whose figures the UN imputed are not shown.
• Migrants in the labour market — ILOSTAT labour force survey indicators by place of birth, people aged 15 and over: employment-to-population ratio, unemployment rate and the share of people born abroad among the employed by skill level of the job (ISCO-08: high = managers, professionals, technicians; elementary = elementary occupations; medium = all other major groups). Values the ILO flags as unreliable and years before 2019 are not shown.
• Earnings by occupation — Eurostat Structure of Earnings Survey 2022: mean gross annual earnings of employees in enterprises with 10 or more employees, by ISCO-08 major group, with an index against all occupations and women's earnings as a share of men's. Amounts are in euro for euro-area countries and Croatia, and in national currency elsewhere. The survey is carried out every four years.

When a page is published

A page is published only when at least three blocks of data and one calculated figure are available for it. Every block shows its source and the date the data relates to.