Most migration waves become visible in official statistics years after they begin. Inside advisory practice, they show up first, in legal consultations, school-planning discussions, inheritance questions, and the quiet administrative decisions households make long before anyone relocates.
That is where a new white paper by Get Golden Visa, titled Leaving to Belong: The Silent Migration of LGBTQ+ Americans (2026 edition), begins.
Drawing on inquiry patterns tracked between late 2024 and 2026, the paper identifies two cohorts reshaping LGBTQ+ residency demand and introduces a new tool for measuring where that demand is heading: the inaugural LGBTQ+ Residency Confidence Index.
A Different Kind of Demand
The headline figure is a 3.1× increase in US-based LGBTQ+ residency inquiries across the study window, with spikes clustering around periods of legal or institutional uncertainty. Just as telling is what those inquiries contained: the large majority discussed residency as a long-term continuity structure rather than an immediate relocation plan.
These households are not preparing exits. They are building what advisors increasingly hear described as a structural Plan B prepared long before it may ever be needed, optimizing for durable legal recognition, healthcare continuity, and institutional stability rather than reacting to any single political development.
The Silver Exodus
The report’s most striking finding is demographic: the fastest-growing inquiry cohort is not young digital nomads but same-sex couples aged 55 and above, typically married, financially established, and approaching retirement, a pattern the paper terms the Silver Exodus.
“This cohort is not making emotional decisions. The emotional decisions were made decades ago. What they are doing now is administrative,” notes Werner Gruner, partner and director of Get Golden Visa’s Portugal office. The paper unpacks what drives them, from survivor protections to cross-border inheritance, and identifies a second, quieter pattern among young families that it calls the Kindergarten Exit.
At the other end of the family timeline, inquiries involving children below school age rose 41% over the study window, as parents explore residency pathways before school enrollment and institutional records anchor the household to a single jurisdiction.
Advisors describe it as the earliest-closing planning window in the report. Dr. Uchenna Lizmay Umeh, a pediatrician and contributor to the paper, estimates that roughly half of the LGBTQ+ families she has spoken with over the past year have at least discussed leaving the United States.
A New LGBTQ+ Residency Index
To measure where LGBTQ+ households can realistically secure long-term legal continuity, the paper introduces the inaugural LGBTQ+ Residency Confidence Index 2026. It is not a rights ranking or a lifestyle index; it scores seven jurisdictions with accessible residency pathways on how dependable they are for LGBTQ+ families, across five dimensions from legal recognition to long-term institutional stability.
Portugal tops the 2026 edition, but the margins are narrow, and the reasons behind each ranking are where the real insight lies.
The full index, category scores, and methodology appear in the report, built on anonymized advisory data and public legal and institutional sources.
How the Research Was Built
The paper’s observations are based on anonymized residency-planning consultations, inbound advisory inquiries originating primarily from the United States, contributor interviews, comparative analysis of residency pathways, and public-domain legal and institutional data. No client identities, exact inquiry totals, or transaction volumes are disclosed.
The findings are presented as directional signals rather than population-wide measurements, and the report explicitly notes this limitation. Its purpose is to identify behavioral patterns visible inside advisory practice before they become measurable in lagging public datasets.
The Index itself draws on ILGA-Europe and ILGA-World legal recognition frameworks, publicly available healthcare and governance indicators, and residency-pathway analysis, all weighted for consistency across the five categories.
Download the full white paper for the complete LGBTQ+ Residency Confidence Index rankings, the data behind the Silver Exodus and Kindergarten Exit, and contributor insights from LGBTQ+ families who made the move.
For a confidential consultation, get in touch with Get Golden Visa.
