On Feb. 25, 2025, while
Of course, Trump's plan hinges on buyers for the visas. Following the announcement, social (archived) media (archived) posts circulated claiming that the visas would not bring in $50 trillion because there were not enough people outside the U.S. who could afford to buy them.
There are varying estimates of how many people in the world have a net worth — the value of assets owned by an individual minus their liabilities — high enough to buy a Trump "gold card" visa at the $5 million asking price. Publicly available figures for high-net-worth individuals often do not break the data down enough to be useful for this kind of calculation, as detailed below.
Additionally, Trump's suggested "gold card" visa could potentially make it more difficult for high-net-worth individuals to gain citizenship in the U.S. During the Feb. 25 news conference, Trump officials confirmed that the "gold card" visa would replace the existing EB-5 visa.
That visa offered people who made "necessary" investments (generally, more than $1 million) in a "commercial enterprise" in the U.S. and planned to create or preserve 10 permanent jobs for U.S. workers a path to citizenship, usually starting with a green card.
During the Feb. 25 news conference, Trump said of the "gold card" visa:
We are going to be doing something else that's going to be very good. We're going to be selling a gold card. You have a green card, this is a gold card. We're going to be putting a price on that card of about $5 million and that's going to give you green card privileges plus it's going to be a route to citizenship and wealthy people will be coming into our country by buying this card. They will be wealthy, they will be successful and they will be spending a lot of money and paying a lot of taxes and employing a lot of people and we think is going to be extremely successful. It's never been done before, anything like this, but it's something that we're going to be putting out over the next, would you say two weeks?
Many countries, including Canada, also offer an investment visa similar to the EB-5 that Trump's "gold card" would replace. At least 15 other countries have such "golden visas," according to La Vida Golden Visas, a company that advises people on residency and citizenship through investment.
Uncertainty reigns over how profitable $5M 'gold cards' could be
Whether the proposed "gold card" could make $50 trillion across 10 million sales, as Trump claimed, is uncertain.
According to three different reports on high-net-worth individuals from 2023 and 2021, the number of people outside the U.S. able to spend $5 million on a visa could be anywhere between 1.5 million and more than 32 million.
UBS, a multinational investment bank based in Switzerland, said in its Global Wealth Report 2024 that in 2023, 58 million people worldwide had a "total wealth" of more than $1 million (p. 23,
However, UBS said via email that it could not provide any further breakdown of the figures, which the report said came from its own database and the Forbes Billionaire list.
Hence, it was not possible based on UBS's figures to say how many of the 33.2 million people with a total wealth over $1 million also had a total wealth of $5 million or more — the price of Trump's "gold card" visa.
Another 2023 report titled "Intelligent Strategies for Winning with the Ultra-Wealthy" gave somewhat lower numbers for worldwide millionaires. According to Figure 3 in the report, in December 2023, only 22.8 million people had a net worth of more than $5 million.
Of the 22.8 million individuals, 14.9 million lived outside the U.S., per the report's Figure 2. Also according to Figure 3 in the report, individuals with a net worth over $5 million made up 10.1% of the total number of millionaires.
Using these figures, the report estimated that 10.1% of the 14.9 million people living outside the U.S. — 1.5 million people — had a net worth higher than $5 million.
It was possible to find only one breakdown of wealth by country — a 2021 report from the Swiss bank Credit Suisse,
Subtracting the U.S. figures from brackets covering ranges of 5-10, 10-50, 50-100, 100-500 and 500+ million, the total number of people with a net worth of $5 million or higher outside the U.S. in 2021 was 3.3 million — more than twice Capgemini's estimate for 2023.
Credit Suisse said it compiled its data from household balance sheets reported for specific countries, "standard econometric techniques" used to estimate net wealth levels and wealth/GDP ratios. GDP, or gross domestic product, is the value of goods and services produced in a country during a specific time period. The wealth distribution of countries in the databook was either directly reported or extrapolated from other directly reported data for the region.
It was not clear how the differing methodologies affected Capgemini and Credit Suisse's results, nor how they accounted for their differences.
Given the above, there appears to be no clear answer to the question of exactly how much money a Trump "gold card" visa plan could make — or whether it will tap into a market of wealthy individuals looking to come to the U.S. that the EB-5 program couldn't reach.