Barbados Welcome Stamp

The Barbados Welcome Stamp is a 12-month remote-work visa created under the Remote Employment Act, 2020, and announced by Prime Minister Mia Mottley in June 2020. It lets non-Barbadian remote workers earning at least US$50,000 a year (plus their families) live in Barbados for a year, tax-free on foreign income, in exchange for a non-refundable fee of US$2,000 per individual or US$3,000 per family, paid on approval.

According to Barbados Immigration Department data reported by Barbados Today (25 Oct 2025) and the Ministry of Tourism (30 Apr 2024), the programme had received 5,164 applications and approved 3,058 of them by April 2024, drawing applicants from 136 nationalities (led by the US, UK, Canada, Nigeria and India) and generating at least US$6 million in visa-fee revenue since 2020.

The same Immigration Department data shows a large gap between approval and actual uptake: of 2,897 applications approved between 2020 and 2023, 1,516 approved applicants never paid the fee and a further 375 paid but never activated their visa, leaving only about 1,007 who actually arrived and took up residence — roughly a third of those approved. No independent economic-impact evaluation of the programme exists; a 2021 UNDP Accelerator Lab review described the topic as raising 'more questions than answers' rather than offering a rigorous assessment, and widely cited tourism-revenue estimates (e.g. US$100 million) are unaudited industry claims, not government-verified figures.

Barbados was one of the first Caribbean states to formalise a stand-alone remote-work visa, and its government continues to publish detailed uptake statistics years after launch — a level of ongoing transparency that is rare among comparable schemes, even though the underlying data all originates from a single government source.

Read the full analysis: https://www.foreign.gov.bb/side-post/barbados-welcome-stamp-programme/