An estimated 2.2 million people will leave the United States in 2025, 180,000 of whom were American citizens. The numbers were derived from Pew Research Center data and cited in a new briefing from Global Citizen Solutions’ Global Intelligence Unit.
Numbers involve inherent uncertainty. In 1957, the United States discontinued its Permanent Abroad Tracking Program and no longer required citizens to register their foreign residence, making it impossible to accurately count the number of immigrants.
What is not up for debate is the direction of the trend. The briefing tracks citizenship renunciations, overseas residency registrations, and longitudinal survey data to document what researchers describe as the biggest change in U.S. immigration in decades.
This finding is worth understanding for real estate professionals, especially those who work with international buyers, high-end clients, or globally mobile households.
The number of abandoners has increased rapidly, and the price has become even cheaper.
Gallup’s long-term tracking data tells a surprising story.
During the Bush and Obama administrations, approximately 10 percent to 11 percent of Americans expressed a desire to immigrate. This number rose to 16% during the first President Trump’s tenure, and rose further in the following years, reaching 1 in 5 Americans by November 2025.
For women aged 15 to 44, this figure reached 40%, up from just 10% in 2014 and four times higher than other age and gender groups at the time.
Behavioral data points in the same direction. Before 2009, fewer than 400 Americans renounced their citizenship each year. By 2024, that number had grown to 4,820, a 48% increase over the previous year and the third-highest annual total ever.
In the first quarter of 2025, 1,285 Americans officially moved abroad, an increase of 102% compared to the same period last year. The worldwide queue to book a waiver now exceeds 30,000 people.
Abandonment costs have also come down. On April 13, following continued legal pressure, the State Department lowered the surrender fee from $2,350 to $450, reverting to the rate that was in place from 2010 to 2014. Analysts widely expect this change to accelerate this trend.
Europe is the top destination
Europe absorbs the largest share of American migrants, with more than 1.5 million Americans estimated to live across the continent, according to Global Citizen Solutions.
The top EU and EFTA countries with valid residence permits for Americans as of December 2023 were Germany (81,509), Spain (44,804), France (38,181), Italy (36,549), the Netherlands (33,107), Switzerland (19,579), and Portugal (13,948). The majority held permits for more than a year, indicating permanent or semi-permanent migration rather than long-term tourism.
Portugal ranks first in Global Citizen Solutions’ Global Retirement Report, and Spain tops the Global Digital Nomad Index for U.S. citizens. Greece, Italy and Malta also attract significant numbers across income and lifestyle profiles.
Recently, one of the important pathways has become narrower. The Italian ancestry citizenship route, historically one of the most popular routes for Americans, was restricted by Law 74/2025 to only children and grandchildren of Italian citizens.
Italy’s Constitutional Court upheld this restriction in a ruling released on March 12, confirming that an estimated 60 million to 80 million people around the world who were eligible in previous generations are no longer eligible under the automatic framework. The change prompted a flurry of last-minute applications and accelerated interest in alternative routes.
What’s driving the surge and who’s actually leaving?
The World Information Agency is cautiously pushing back on the “run away from the crisis” paradigm. Americans who act on immigrants’ interests are better informed, financially secure, and more likely to calculate their quality of life intentionally rather than by emergency escape.
Structural pressures they cite include the US’s additional poverty allowance, which will reach 12.9 percent in 2023 (the second consecutive year of increases), persistent inflation in housing and health care, political polarization, climate-related costs ($92.9 billion in damages from weather and climate disasters in 2023 alone), and gun violence rates that remain far higher than the rest of the country.
“The United States remains a high-income country by every conventional measure,” said Laura Madrid, a senior researcher at the Global Intelligence Unit. “But structural pressures on ordinary Americans, including rising poverty, persistent inflation in housing and health care, deepening political polarization, and a security crisis unlike any seen in peer countries, are impacting people’s decisions about where to build their lives.”
The pool of qualified movers is larger than most people realize.
An estimated 7 million to 10 million Americans already hold dual citizenship, according to Global Citizen Solutions, but the U.S. government doesn’t track that number and its own estimates vary widely.
Up to 30 million people could be eligible for ancestry-based European passports through Italy, Ireland, Poland, Germany, Hungary and other countries. These options have existed for years, but only now are many Americans actively pursuing them.
The Caribbean Citizenship by Investment program continues to attract people seeking a faster route to obtaining a second passport and greater global mobility. Following a regional agreement between the five participating countries, the minimum investment amount will start at $200,000, increasing from $100,000 until mid-2024.
American passports are also losing ground. The United States has fallen from No. 1 in 2021 to No. 14 in 2025, according to Global Citizen Solutions’ Global Passport Index, which tracks travel freedom and lifestyle values in 199 countries.
What this means for real estate professionals
While immigration trends may seem far removed from everyday domestic real estate transactions, their downstream effects are real.
Households seriously considering moving overseas often liquidate their U.S. real estate holdings to free up capital, while also permanently withdrawing from the buyer pool. Internationally mobile clients have increasingly specific needs, such as understanding foreign real estate ownership rules, tax treaty implications, and timing the sale of a U.S. home to align with visa and residency milestones.
Agents with international referral networks and familiarity with global mobility considerations, or who have relationships with immigration attorneys and asset managers, are well-positioned to serve this client segment and maintain relationships with clients that may span multiple countries.
Americans leaving are not a monolithic group. Some retirees are attracted by southern Europe’s low cost of living and universal health insurance. The shift to distributed work during the pandemic has left some remote workers disconnected from geographic constraints.
Additionally, some wealthy individuals pursue formal second citizenship as a financial and personal planning tool. Each profile has distinct real estate needs and distinct opportunities for agents to meet them.
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