American citizens received 80,424 first EU residence permits in 2024, up 1.9% from 78,911 in 2023 and the highest annual total in Eurostat's series going back to 2013. The increase came as overall EU permit issuance declined, making Americans one of the few nationality groups to record year-over-year growth.
Eurostat is the only destination-country statistical system that publishes harmonized, country-disaggregated migration data on U.S. nationals. The decade ending in 2025 reveals four overlapping American stories in Europe that pull in different directions.
The count of US citizens in Czechia hit 10,701 on Jan. 1, 2025, a 49% rise in five years, with Prague and a one-year trade-license route doing most of the pulling.
American naturalizations in Italy reached 824 in 2024, up from 280 in 2014, a five-year compound annual growth rate of roughly 15.6% per Eurostat data. In March 2025, Italy closed the descent route that produced most of those numbers.
Portugal issued 4,345 first residence permits to Americans in 2024, up from 550 in 2015, an eightfold increase over nine years with a five-year compound annual growth rate of roughly 31%. The stock figure tracks the same trajectory: 12,443 U.S. citizens held valid Portuguese permits at end of 2024, compared to 2,503 in 2016.
Swedish citizenship grants to Americans collapsed from a range of 460 to 795 annually between 2014 and 2021 to just 35 in 2022, 2 in 2023, and 14 in 2024, according to Eurostat's MIGR_ACQ series. The decline is not a reflection of broader Swedish naturalization trends: Sweden recorded the EU's highest naturalization rate in 2024 at 7.5 acquisitions per 100 non-national residents, granting 63,000 citizenships that year. Americans simply stopped appearing in the count.
Fresh Eurostat figures show where Americans, Brits, Indians and other non‑EU nationals are securing first residence permits – and how Spain, Germany and the Netherlands have become the main gateways to Europe. Europe’s 3.57 million new residents In 2024, European countries issued about 3.57 million first residence permits to non‑EU citizens, covering moves for work, […]
