Where Americans settle in Europe: the official numbers by country

The three numbers

The ranking changes with the question. Spain leads for new permits. Germany leads for permits in force and also for people who receive US Social Security and live there, a count of residents that does not depend on citizenship.

Every country ranked by new permits in 2025

First permits are the permits issued for the first time during 2025 to US citizens. The next columns give the permits in force at the end of 2025, the Americans who took the citizenship of the country in 2024, and the people living there who draw US Social Security in December 2025. Each column counts something different, so read across with care.

The change column is our arithmetic on the two published figures. "No figure" is a cell Eurostat does not publish. "Not shown" means the SSA table does not list the country: it shows separately only countries with 500 or more beneficiaries (Estonia, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Slovenia, Iceland, Liechtenstein). The EU total is Eurostat's own and does not include the EFTA countries.

Ten years in the eight largest countries

First permits issued to US citizens each year from 2016 to 2025, in the eight countries that issued the most in 2025. All eight panels share one scale, so a bar means the same number everywhere. France is in blue.

Switzerland has no published figure for 2019 and 2020, so those bars are empty. 6 of the 7 countries with a figure for both years issued fewer permits in 2020 than in 2019. We found no source that sets out why for each country, so we offer no reason for the dips or for any other change.

Why Americans received a first permit in 2025

Eurostat sorts first permits into four exclusive reasons. Each bar is the 2025 total of one country, split by reason, for the ten countries with the most permits.

Education is the largest reason in France, Denmark, Ireland, Czechia. In France 7,303 of 15,388 permits were for education (47%). In Spain the largest reason is family. "Other" covers every permit that is not for education, employment or family.

What each count includes and leaves out

First permits (Eurostat migr_resfirst)

A first permit is a permit issued to a person for the first time. A permit also counts as first when at least six months passed between the old one expiring and the new one starting for the same reason. Eurostat defines a residence permit as any authorisation valid for at least 3 months that lets a third-country national stay legally. Where national law grants a long-stay visa instead of a permit, that visa is counted too. This is a flow: permits issued during the year, not people who stayed.

Valid permits (Eurostat migr_resvalid)

Permits in force on 31 December of the year, by the holder's citizenship. It is a stock of permits, not of residents. People under temporary protection are left out. A stay that needs no permit, such as a visit under 90 days, does not appear. Eurostat's definition of a third-country national is any person who is not a citizen of the Union, so an American who also holds an EU citizenship is not who these statistics are about.

New citizens (Eurostat migr_acq)

People who acquired the citizenship of the reporting country during the year, sorted by the citizenship they held before. Eurostat defines citizenship as a legal bond acquired through birth or naturalisation, by declaration, choice, marriage or other means under national law. Here the former citizenship is American. The latest year of the series is 2024, one year behind the permits.

Social Security beneficiaries (SSA table 5.J11)

The US Social Security Administration counts the people who receive a US Social Security benefit and live in each country. It counts people by place of residence and not by citizenship. They are retired workers, disabled workers, spouses, widows, parents and children. A country appears only when it has 500 beneficiaries or more. The table's source is the Master Beneficiary Record and US Postal Service geographic data. The worldwide total for December 2025 is 733,078, of which 273,631 live in Europe. Do not read these figures as the number of Americans in a country.

Limits to keep in mind

• A first permit is counted once, in the year it is issued. A valid permit is counted on every 31 December on which it is in force. The two columns are not two views of one number.
• Eurostat's metadata says German acquisition figures are rounded to the nearest multiple of 5 from 2018, and that Ireland's are suppressed below 5 persons.
• Ireland's first permits carry the low reliability flag in most years, and some countries have breaks in their series. The flags are on the table above.
• Statistics come from national authorities and are reported with national definitions, so two countries are comparable only up to the common Eurostat definition.
• These figures cover the EU and EFTA. The United Kingdom and non-EFTA countries are outside this page.

How to cite these figures

Eurostat lets anyone reuse its statistics, commercially or not, as long as the source is named. For a dataset it asks for this form: Source: [DOI of the Eurostat dataset], [access date]. Our figures are extracts for US citizens. Cite the dataset you used and the day you read it, for example:

Source: https://doi.org/10.2908/MIGR_RESFIRST, 28 October 2026

Source: https://doi.org/10.2908/MIGR_RESVALID, 28 October 2026

Source: https://doi.org/10.2908/MIGR_ACQ, 28 October 2026

The figures on this page are Eurostat's values for US citizens, unchanged. The change column and the shares in the reasons chart are our arithmetic on them. The SSA figures are copied as published. Eurostat is not responsible for how this page presents its data.

The other source:

• US Social Security Administration, Annual Statistical Supplement, 2026, Table 5.J11, beneficiaries in foreign countries, December 2025. The December 2024 figures come from the 2025 edition of the same table.

To cite this page:

EasyFranceNow, "Where Americans settle in Europe: official numbers by country", https://easyfrancenow.com/data/americans-in-europe, data read 28 October 2026.

Download all the figures as a CSV. Every row has its source, the query address, the day it was read and a flag for provisional values. The same columns as the France file.

Methodology

• Eurostat. We read the datasets migr_resfirst (first permits by reason, length of validity and citizenship), migr_resvalid (valid permits on 31 December) and migr_acq (acquisitions of citizenship by former citizenship, age definition complete, all ages, both sexes, number), citizenship United States, every reporting country, from 2015 to the latest year, on 28 October 2026. Eurostat last updated them on 22 October 2026, 28 September 2026 and 27 March 2026. Definitions come from Eurostat's metadata files for residence permits and acquisitions of citizenship. Queries: first permits, valid permits, acquisitions.
• Checking the rows. These datasets have seven or eight dimensions, so a wrong row is the likely mistake. The script reads the order of the dimensions from the answer and stops if it is not the one it selects with. We also compared 447 cells of the three datasets with the tables shown on the Eurostat Data Browser (default view, citizenship Total, read on 28 October 2026): there was no difference, flags included. Two values were checked against other sources: France's valid permits at the end of 2023 (38,181) and its first permits in 2024 (13,122, the Interior Ministry's own figure).
• Countries. The 27 EU member states and Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. We leave out the EU aggregates other than the 27-country total, the United Kingdom and Serbia.
• Social Security. Table 5.J11 of the Annual Statistical Supplement, editions 2026 and 2025, read in a browser on 28 October 2026 because the page refuses automated readers. Its note says: "Countries with 500 or more beneficiaries are shown separately. The total and continent subtotals include all foreign residents."
• Provisional values. A value is provisional when Eurostat flags it p or ep. A letter after a figure on this page is Eurostat's own flag.
• What we do not do. We add no figure of our own, we sum no countries and we do not say how many Americans live in any country. The only totals are the ones Eurostat and the SSA publish.
• Updates. Eurostat updates these datasets once a year. The date on this page is the day we last read the sources.

The same figures for France alone, with the Interior Ministry series, INSEE and the visa counts, are on Americans in France: the official numbers. For a comparison written for people planning a move, see France, Portugal or Spain for Americans. How we check facts in general is on how we verify.

What each number means: the definitions of every measure on these pages, from the publishers' own metadata.