How the checking works

No black box: this page describes exactly what the pipeline does, and the pipeline is the only thing that writes this site.

1. Facts come only from official pages

Every requirement on this site was read off an official government page (ministries, immigration services, official program sites, or the official legal gazette), and stores a verbatim quote from that page plus its URL. Third-party blogs are never used as sources.

2. A machine re-checks the quotes weekly

Each week the tracker re-downloads every source page (19 countries, 30+ pages) and verifies each stored quote still appears on its page. The date shown next to a fact is the last day the quote was actually re-found — not the day someone last felt like updating the site.

3. Lost evidence is flagged, never patched

If a quote disappears, the fact flips to unverified — check official source the same day and the event lands in the change log. We do not guess the new value; re-verification against the changed page is done by a human-guided re-curation, then the fact returns with a fresh quote.

4. What "not stated" means

Some cells say the official page doesn't state a figure. That is the honest truth about the official page — many programs publish fees but not income floors, or vice versa. Sites that fill those gaps anyway are guessing; we don't.

5. Known limits

• Several countries' official pages block automated access or render only in a browser; those countries are excluded rather than sourced from blogs (the notable ones: Japan, Greece, Italy, Hungary, Czechia, Iceland, UAE, South Korea, Malaysia, Costa Rica, Argentina, Brazil).
• A quote can survive a page edit that changes meaning elsewhere on the page; the page-changed entries in the change log exist to catch attention on edits even when quotes survive.
• Verification proves what the page says, not how consulates apply it in practice.

Last full check: 2026-09-04.