The shortlist gap: what 691 people asked for, and what 108 visa routes actually offer

Between 24 March and 23 August 2026, 691 people completed the free Transita quiz. Each one told us their citizenship, education, work history, income, age and the countries they were considering, and each one got back a ranked set of visa routes drawn from our database of 108 active pathways across 16 countries.

That leaves us with two things almost nobody else has in the same place. A record of what real people believe their options are, and a structured, source-verified record of what the options actually require. This is what happens when you put the two side by side.

Every figure below comes from the production database. The methodology section at the end names the table and the query behind each one, and the sample size wherever it matters.

1. The shortlist gap is real, and it is large

People pick destinations before they know whether they qualify. When two countries sit on the same shortlist, they are treated as roughly interchangeable options. They are not.

The cleanest way to see this is a head to head. Take everyone who named both country A and country B, then count how often each one actually produced a qualifying route in their ranked results. Same people, same profiles, same ranking pass, so the comparison is like for like.

| Pair | People who named both | A surfaced a route | B surfaced a route | |---|---|---|---| | United States vs Canada | 199 | US 30% | Canada 81% | | New Zealand vs Australia | 198 | NZ 17% | Australia 31% | | Ireland vs Canada | 177 | Ireland 16% | Canada 76% | | Ireland vs Spain | 177 | Ireland 14% | Spain 54% | | France vs Spain | 122 | France 13% | Spain 46% | | Italy vs Spain | 119 | Italy 22% | Spain 47% | | Switzerland vs Germany | 113 | Switzerland 9% | Germany 48% | | Singapore vs United Kingdom | 75 | Singapore 8% | UK 47% |

Canada out-delivers the United States by a factor of 2.7 among the people who wanted both. Ireland, Switzerland and Singapore are the three destinations that most often appear on a shortlist and then produce nothing.

2. The reason is structural, not personal

Those three countries are not harder because their officials are stricter. They are harder because of how their route catalogue is built.

Ireland has five active routes in our database. One needs $2.2m in net worth, two need an Irish employer to sponsor you, one is a post-study permission that assumes you already did a degree in Ireland, and the last is a working holiday capped at age 35 and open to six nationalities. There is no general skilled route you can apply to from the outside on the strength of your CV.

Switzerland is the same shape. Four of its five permit routes require a job offer before you can start, and the fifth is a settlement permit that presumes years of prior residence. Singapore gates four of its six passes behind either an employer or a salary floor of $207,600 to $277,200.

Germany, Spain and Canada are reachable more often because they run routes that score a person rather than a contract. That is the whole difference.

3. The employer job offer is the single biggest blocker

Across the ranked results we produced, there were 2,410 individual blocker statements attached to matched routes, spread over 482 quizzes. We grouped them by what they were about.

| Blocker theme | Share of statements | Share of affected quizzes | |---|---|---| | Job offer or employer sponsorship | 31% | 77% | | Income, funds or net worth | 22% | 57% | | Language test | 17% | 44% | | Work experience | 13% | 41% | | Degree or credential recognition | 13% | 44% | | Caps, quotas, draws and backlogs | 7% | 29% | | Age limits | 4% | 17% |

The structured requirement data agrees. Of the 108 active routes, 42 hard-require an employer sponsor before an application can start. That is the most common single gate in the catalogue, and it is the one an applicant can do least about on their own timeline.

4. The degree line is a cliff, not a slope

27% of the people who took the quiz do not hold a bachelor's degree. 55 of the 108 routes require one.

We tested every profile against every route on the four requirements we can check deterministically: minimum education, minimum years of experience, a salary floor the person's income band cannot reach, and a hard age cap.

| Highest education | People | Routes cleared, of 108 | Routes blocked by the degree rule alone | |---|---|---|---| | PhD | 8 | 94.6 | 0 | | Master's | 155 | 86.3 | 2.0 | | Professional degree | 20 | 85.4 | 2.0 | | Bachelor's | 302 | 80.0 | 5.3 | | Associate | 49 | 42.7 | 43.3 | | High school | 133 | 40.7 | 42.1 |

The step between an associate degree and a bachelor's is worth about 37 routes. Nothing else in the profile moves the number that far. For the 182 people in the bottom two rows, roughly 43 routes were closed by the degree requirement and by nothing else, meaning their experience, income and age all cleared.

There are 19 routes in the catalogue open to someone with no degree above associate level, no job offer, no large capital and no specific nationality. That is the real size of the door for a quarter of the people asking.

5. Americans have the most miscalibrated shortlist

100 American citizens completed the quiz. Their most-wanted destinations and their most-delivered destinations are not the same list.

| Destination | Times an American named it | Times it surfaced a route | Times it ranked first | |---|---|---|---| | Spain | 67 | 49 | 19 | | Netherlands | 65 | 47 | 23 | | Portugal | 58 | 39 | 9 | | United Kingdom | 57 | 30 | 8 | | Ireland | 56 | 6 | 1 | | Germany | 55 | 27 | 5 | | Canada | 53 | 38 | 24 | | Australia | 52 | 16 | 5 | | New Zealand | 49 | 11 | 1 | | Switzerland | 30 | 1 | 0 |

Ireland is the fifth most-requested destination for Americans and it took the top slot once in 100 quizzes. Switzerland was named 30 times and surfaced a route once. Meanwhile Canada was named by only half of them and ranked first more often than anything else.

The pattern is consistent with the structural reading above. Americans gravitate toward English-speaking or culturally familiar destinations, and those happen to be the ones that run employer-gated catalogues.

What we are not claiming

Our ranked results return the top three routes per profile, so a country failing to appear on a long shortlist is partly a ranking artefact and not always a verdict on eligibility. That is exactly why the headline comparisons in section 1 are pairwise, holding the person and the shortlist constant.

Match scores are estimates produced against verified requirement data, not legal determinations. The quiz also only asks about a country if the person selected it, so we cannot say how often someone qualified somewhere they never considered. We can only say that inside their own shortlist, the options were nowhere near equivalent.

The sample is self-selected: people who found a visa eligibility tool and finished a quiz. It skews toward the United States, the United Kingdom and India by current location, and toward people aged 24 to 32.

Methodology

Source: Transita production database, read 23 August 2026. Requirement data in visas.eligibility_criteria, last verified between 2 May and 8 August 2026, zero unverified rows.

| Figure | Source | |---|---| | 691 quizzes, 24 Mar to 23 Aug 2026 | count(*), min/max(created_at) on quiz_results | | 108 active routes, 16 countries | count(*), count(distinct country_code) on visas where is_active | | Head to head appearance rates | quiz_results.answers->'targetCountries' for the shortlist, quiz_results.results[].country for what surfaced, restricted to rows with at least one result | | 2,410 blocker statements, 482 quizzes | jsonb_array_elements(results) -> 'blockers' on quiz_results | | Blocker themes | case-insensitive word-boundary regex over the blocker text; a statement can match more than one theme, so shares do not sum to 100 | | 42 of 108 require a job offer | eligibility_criteria->>'requiresJobOffer' = 'true' on visas where is_active | | 55 of 108 require a bachelor's or above | eligibility_criteria->>'minEducation' in ('bachelor','master','phd') | | 19 genuinely open routes | no job offer, no degree requirement above associate, no net worth gate, no nationality gate, salary floor under $60k | | Routes cleared by education level | 667 profiles cross joined against 108 routes, testing minEducation, minWorkExperienceYears, minSalaryUSD against the top of the person's income band, and maxAge. Income bands are tested at their ceiling, so a route only counts as blocked when the band cannot reach the floor at all | | American shortlist table | quiz_results filtered to answers->>'citizenship' = 'American' with at least one result, n=100 |

24 of the 691 quizzes came through the couples flow, which uses a different answer schema and does not produce a ranked route list. Those rows are excluded from every profile-level figure, which is why the education analysis runs on 667.

If you want to check where you actually stand rather than where you assume you do, the quiz is free and takes about 45 seconds.