Panama Residency by Nationality

The 2026 country table

Permits approved by nationality, January to July 2026:^[2]

Both tables on this page come from the same pair of SNM reports. The 2026 table is the country table of the January-to-July report. The 2025 table is Cuadro 5 of the full-year report. The reports list countries under their Spanish names. Estados Unidos is the United States. Gran Bretaña is Great Britain.^[1][2]

The full table names forty-seven countries plus its catch-all. The rows above are the top eighteen. They sum to 19,995. The next largest, Costa Rica, sits at 221, and the twenty-nine remaining named countries run down to Austria at 13. Together they hold 1,863 approvals, a sum this page derives from the report’s own rows. The final line is the report’s “otros países” catch-all, 225, for countries too small to name. The three parts reconcile: 19,995 plus 1,863 plus 225 equals the 22,083 total. After India at 246, every remaining named country sits below the catch-all line.^[2]

Colombia alone is 30.0% of all approvals. The top four countries together carry 65.4% of the total. More than a quarter of the Colombian permits, 1,851, were approved in July alone. That reflects the administrative surge the statistics page explains.^[2]

Readers from the United States hold 1,738 approvals. That ranks fourth, at 7.9% of the total. Nicaragua sits one rank ahead at 2,291. Venezuela and Colombia sit above both.^[2]

The 2025 comparison

The 2025 report presents its country table differently. It counts processed files and splits each country into approved and denied. The like-for-like column is the approved one. The raw total column cannot be compared to 2026 at all. It mixes approvals and denials into one number.^[1]

The rows follow the report’s own order, which ranks by total files, not by approvals alone.^[1]

Colombia’s share barely moves. It ran 30.1% of 2025 approvals and runs 30.0% of the 2026 window. The next rows shift more. Nicaragua’s 2,291 in seven months already nearly matches its full-year 2025 count of 2,425. Mid-table countries shuffle ranks between the two years. Spain, Brazil, and Canada each sit within a few places of their 2025 rank in the 2026 table.^[1][2]

The 2025 table runs deeper than the ten rows shown. It carries forty-seven countries plus an others line, at 553 approved.^[1]

Two caveats keep this comparison honest. The 2026 window is seven months against 2025’s twelve. July 2026 was also an administrative surge month. The 2026 column carries a one-month bump that the 2025 column spreads across a full year.^[2]

What the table does not say

A country’s rank measures how many of its nationals already passed through the process, not an applicant’s odds. Approval rates run near 97% for the pool as a whole. Volume tracks applicant flow, not selectivity.^[2]

The reports publish the country cut and the category cut as separate tables. Neither report crosses the two. A country total therefore mixes every program its nationals used, from regularization files to relocation visas.

For planning, the table answers one question well: how many people from a country completed the process in a given period. It says nothing about how long they waited. Processing clocks live on the timeline page. It says nothing about what any applicant filed either. Document sets live on the requirements page.

Which pathway a nationality uses is category-level detail. See residency by category. The permit-type split, temporary against permanent, sits on its own page.

Last reviewed: 2026-09-09