Residency5 min read
Citizenship by investment, priced honestly
Almost everything written about buying a passport quotes a price that has been withdrawn or a benefit that has been revoked. Here is the current position, the real total cost, and the question to ask before any of it.
Three things happened to this industry in about two years. The five Caribbean programmes agreed a common minimum that roughly doubled the entry price. Malta's scheme — the only one inside the EU — was found to breach EU law. And Vanuatu, long the cheapest and fastest, lost the visa-free access to Europe that was the entire reason people bought it.
The consequence is that most of the comparison content on this subject is describing a market that no longer exists. Below is where it now stands, what the true cost is once you stop reading the headline contribution figure, and the question that should come before any of it.
What changed
- A common minimum across the Caribbean. The five programmes — St Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada and St Lucia — agreed in 2024 to a $200,000 floor, mandatory applicant interviews, and tighter shared due diligence. Undercutting each other on price is, formally at least, over.
- Malta. The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled against Malta's investor naturalisation scheme, holding that granting citizenship of a member state — and therefore EU citizenship — in exchange for predetermined payments, without a genuine link, is incompatible with EU law. The residence programme is a separate product and is unaffected.
- Vanuatu. The EU moved from partial to full suspension of visa-free travel for Vanuatu passport holders, on security and due-diligence grounds. The passport still exists; the benefit most buyers wanted does not.
- Turkey. The property threshold was raised to $400,000 and has not come back down.
- Everything else that closed earlier. Cyprus, Moldova, Montenegro and Bulgaria all ended their programmes between 2020 and 2022. Any guide still listing them is at least four years stale.
The real cost
The number quoted is the contribution. The number you pay is the contribution plus five other things, and for a family the difference is not marginal.
| Cost line | What it is | Typically overlooked? |
|---|---|---|
| Contribution or investment | The headline figure — a non-refundable donation, or a real-estate purchase held for a fixed period | No |
| Government processing fees | Per applicant, including each dependant, separate from the contribution | Yes |
| Due diligence fees | Per adult applicant, non-refundable even if you are refused | Yes |
| Agent and legal fees | Mandatory in every programme — you cannot apply directly | Partly |
| Passport and oath fees | Small, per person, at the end | Yes |
| Exit cost on the investment route | Real estate bought at programme prices resells into a market of programme sellers | Almost always |
Two practical consequences. First, the real-estate route is usually more expensive than the donation once you account for the holding period and the resale discount, despite appearing to return your capital. Second, the per-person fees mean a family of four is not four times a single applicant, but it is much further from one times than the marketing suggests.
What it does not do
It does not change your tax position
Citizenship and tax residence are unrelated concepts almost everywhere. Acquiring a St Lucian passport while living in Berlin makes you a German tax resident who owns a St Lucian passport. If the objective is the tax bill, the product you want is residence somewhere that does not tax foreign income, and it costs a fraction of this.
It does not release an American
The United States taxes citizens on worldwide income wherever they live. A second passport changes nothing until you renounce — and renouncing is a formal, irreversible act with its own exit-tax regime attached. That is a separate calculation entirely, and it is the calculation that should be done first, because a second citizenship is a precondition for it rather than a solution to it. Nobody may render themselves stateless.
It does not open banking automatically
The opposite, frequently. Compliance teams know exactly which passports are purchasable, and several institutions apply enhanced due diligence to holders of them — particularly where the passport's country of issue is not the customer's country of residence. Presenting a recently acquired economic citizenship as your primary identity document tends to lengthen an account opening rather than shorten it, and under the reporting standard your bank applies, a citizenship that conflicts with your declared tax residence is precisely the mismatch that gets flagged.
When it is genuinely the right product
There are real cases, and they are narrower than the market implies:
- Your current passport constrains your ability to travel for business, and no residence-based route reaches a better one in a workable timeframe. This is the strongest case by a distance.
- You hold one citizenship from a country with meaningful political risk and want a second, unrelated legal identity as insurance. Insurance is the right frame: you are paying a premium against a tail risk.
- You are a US person who has already decided to renounce, and need somewhere to be a citizen of first.
- A specific treaty or trade benefit attaches to the citizenship and is material to your business — for example an E-2 treaty nationality that unlocks a US route you cannot otherwise access. Note that several programmes' nationals are excluded from that benefit where citizenship was obtained by investment, so verify it rather than assume it.
The cheaper routes to the same passport
Two of them, and both are almost always underweighted because nobody earns a commission on them.
- Descent. If a parent, grandparent or occasionally a great-grandparent was a citizen of an EU country, you may already qualify for a passport that no programme sells. Citizenship by descent covers which lines are open and the 2025 restriction that closed one of the most popular.
- Residence and time. Five to ten years of actually living somewhere reaches the same endpoint for the cost of living there, which you were paying anyway. Naturalisation by residence sets out the timelines and the presence conditions that decide it.
The programmes that survived this cycle are the ones with real due diligence and real prices. Treat a programme that is still cheap and still fast as a programme that has not been reviewed yet.
Decide residence before you decide citizenship
Where you are resident, what presence you can evidence, and what each position obliges you to file — the half of this decision that actually changes your bill.
See how residency worksResidency 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.