Residency5 min read
The passport you may already qualify for: citizenship by descent
Before pricing a second passport, check whether you are owed one. The routes are free, the documents are the whole job, and one of the most-used ones was narrowed sharply in 2025.
This is the cheapest second citizenship available and the least written about, because nobody sells it. If a parent, grandparent or in some cases a great-grandparent held a particular citizenship, you may already be entitled to it — not as a favour, but as a legal fact that has been true your whole life and simply has not been registered.
The work is documentary rather than financial. It is also time-sensitive in a way people underestimate: two of the routes below have closed or narrowed since 2022, and eligibility rules that had stood for a century were changed with months of notice.
Two different things get called descent
- Transmission. The citizenship was never lost — it passed down the line automatically, and you are asking the state to recognise a status you already hold. Ireland and Italy are the major examples. You are not applying to become a citizen; you are proving you always were one.
- Restoration. The ancestor lost the citizenship — through emigration, a discriminatory law, or a political event — and the modern state offers it back to descendants. Germany, Spain, Lithuania and parts of the Polish and Romanian regimes work this way. Here you are applying, and there is usually a deadline.
The distinction matters because it decides whether a delay costs you anything. Transmission claims generally do not expire. Restoration windows do, and several have closed with no replacement.
The routes
| Country | How far back it reaches | The condition that decides most cases |
|---|---|---|
| Ireland | Grandparent born on the island of Ireland. Further back only if your parent was registered before you were born | Registration order. A parent who registers after your birth cannot pass it to you — this is the single most common disqualification |
| Italy | Narrowed in 2025 to a parent or grandparent born in Italy. Previously effectively unlimited | Whether the ancestor naturalised elsewhere before the next generation was born. Separately, female-line transmission before 1948 still requires a court application |
| Poland | Unlimited in principle, via an unbroken chain from an ancestor who was a citizen under the post-1920 law | Loss events — foreign naturalisation or foreign military service under the pre-1951 rules break the chain permanently |
| Hungary | Unlimited, via simplified naturalisation for descendants of Hungarian citizens | A Hungarian language interview. The ancestry is often the easy half |
| Germany | Restoration for descendants of those persecuted between 1933 and 1945, plus correction of historic gender discrimination in the transmission rules | Which category you fall in. The persecution route is generous and has no fee; the gender-correction route turns on birth dates in 1975 and 1993 |
| Greece | Unlimited via an ancestor registered in a Greek municipality | Finding the municipal register entry. Where it exists the case is strong; where it does not, there is often no route at all |
| Lithuania, Latvia | Descendants of citizens who left before the 1940 occupation | Whether the departure falls inside the qualifying period, and whether the country permits you to keep your existing nationality |
| Slovakia, Czechia, Croatia, Romania | Varies — several extended to great-grandchildren in recent reforms | Documentary continuity across borders that moved. Records may sit in a different country than the one you are applying to |
| Portugal, Spain (Sephardic) | Closed. Both routes for descendants of Sephardic Jews have ended to new applicants | Historic only. Any guide still describing these as open is out of date |
| Spain (Democratic Memory) | Closed. The window for grandchildren of exiles ran for a fixed period and expired | Historic only |
| United Kingdom | Generally one generation — a parent who was a British citizen otherwise than by descent | Whether your British parent was themselves 'by descent'. If so, the line usually stops before you, subject to narrow registration provisions |
The two facts that decide almost every case
1. Did the ancestor naturalise elsewhere, and when?
Under the law of most of these countries as it stood a century ago, acquiring a new citizenship meant losing the old one automatically. So the decisive question is not whether your great-grandmother was Italian or Polish. It is whether she became American, British or Argentine before your grandparent was born. If she did, the chain broke at that moment and everything below it is outside the line. If she did it afterwards, or never did, the line holds.
This is why a naturalisation certificate — or a formal statement that no record of naturalisation exists — is usually the first document to obtain. It decides whether the rest of the work is worth doing.
2. Was the line ever female, and when?
Most of these nationality laws discriminated by sex until surprisingly recently, and the reforms were rarely fully retroactive. Italian citizenship could not pass through a mother to a child born before 1948, and claims through that line still go to court rather than to a consulate. German law has separate provisions for children of German mothers born before 1975 and unmarried German fathers before 1993. British law has its own set of dates. If the line passes through a woman, find the cut-off date before doing anything else — it changes the route, the cost and the forum.
What the process actually costs
Government fees are modest to nil in most of these countries. The real costs are three:
- Records. Birth, marriage and death certificates for every person in the chain, in long-form official versions, from the civil registry of whichever country held them at the time. Borders moved; the archive you need may be in a neighbouring state.
- Apostilles and certified translations. Per document, in both directions. This is usually the largest line item and it scales with the number of generations.
- Time. Appointment backlogs at popular consulates run into years, and processing after submission adds months more. Where a domestic route exists — applying inside the country rather than at a consulate — it is often dramatically faster, which is itself a reason to plan a stay.
Before you start: two checks
Does the country allow you to keep what you have? Several of these permit dual nationality freely; a few do not, and a small number require you to renounce. Separately, check the rule from the other direction — your existing citizenship may itself restrict holding another.
Does acquiring it create an obligation? Usually not: citizenship and tax residence are unrelated concepts, and only the United States taxes non-resident citizens as a matter of course. But some countries attach military service obligations to male citizens up to a given age, and a few attach registration or voting requirements. Read the duties, not only the rights.
If a route is open to you, take it before pricing anything else. An EU passport obtained through a grandparent does everything a purchased Caribbean passport does and more, and the difference in cost is roughly two hundred thousand dollars — which is the honest comparison the investment programmes are competing against and rarely make.
The personal side, tracked properly
Citizenships, residences, presence by country and the filings each one creates — held as a record rather than a folder of scanned certificates.
See the Personal OSResidency information is general and for orientation only. Eligibility, timelines and outcomes are determined by the relevant authorities, and applications are handled by licensed local partners.