Belarus · Residency by investment
Permanent Residence for Investors
Open under Article 53 of Law No. 105-Z of 4 January 2010 on the legal status of foreign citizens. The threshold is expressed in base units, not in a fixed sum, so it moves every January: the base unit rose to BYN 45 on 1 January 2026, which puts the qualifying investment at BYN 675,000.
It is one of the few routes anywhere that goes straight to permanent residence on an investment, with no temporary stage, and the threshold is modest by European standards. It is also almost entirely a route for people whose life is already oriented east: the presence requirement is real, the process runs in Russian, and the passport at the end costs you the one you hold.
Qualifying routes
Fifteen thousand base units, by any means not prohibited by law — a business, intellectual property, or participation in a public-private partnership. At the 2026 base unit of BYN 45 that is BYN 675,000, roughly USD 232,000.
The facts
- Minimum investment
- 675k BYN
- Total landed cost
- The qualifying investment plus state duties and legal and translation costs. The headline figure is re-indexed each January with the base unit, so a deal costed in 2025 at BYN 630,000 costs BYN 675,000 in 2026 on identical facts.
- Route type
- Residency by investment
- Timeline
- 3–9 months (The investment route grants permanent residence directly, without the usual years on a temporary permit first.)
- Physical presence
- Permanent residence is expected to be real. Holders are generally required to spend at least half of each year in Belarus, and the residence that counts toward citizenship allows absences of no more than 90 days in any calendar year.
- Family
- SpouseMinor children
- Permanent residency
- This is the permanent permit, granted directly on the investment ground rather than after a temporary one.
- Citizenship
- Five years of continuous residence after the permanent permit is issued, under Article 14 of the Law on Citizenship.
- Language test
- Knowledge of one of the state languages — Belarusian or Russian — to the level needed for communication. Russian is the language of daily life and of the process.
- Dual citizenship
- Belarus does not recognise dual citizenship. Article 14 requires that the applicant either hold no other citizenship, or lose it on acquiring Belarusian citizenship, or at minimum have applied to the foreign authority to terminate it. This is the single hardest condition in the route and it is not waivable in the ordinary course.
- Requirements
- investment of at least fifteen thousand base units in objects of investment activity in Belarusdocumentary evidence of the investment and its lawful sourcemedical certificates and a clean criminal recordregistration at a place of residence in Belarus
- THE THRESHOLD MOVES EVERY JANUARY. It is fifteen thousand base units, not a fixed sum. The base unit went from BYN 42 to BYN 45 on 1 January 2026, taking the qualifying investment from BYN 630,000 to BYN 675,000.
- Permanent residence here means residence. Plan on half the year in the country, and on no more than 90 days of absence a year if the permit is meant to build toward citizenship.
- Belarus has publicly ruled out citizenship by investment. The Interior Ministry's citizenship and migration department has said there are no plans to offer citizenship in exchange for investment, whatever periodic parliamentary discussion suggests. Treat any offer of a Belarusian passport for money as false.
- There is no controlled foreign company regime today, but the tax authorities described the policy debate as being in an active phase as of July 2026. A structure built on its absence has no published lead time.
- Belarus sits inside the same sanctions perimeter as Russia for most practical purposes. Visa stopped servicing cards of three Belarusian banks across the EU, UK, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein in March 2026, and Mastercard cut off Alfa-Bank and Belgazprombank cards in the EU, UK and EFTA from 21 April 2026. Foreign cards work unevenly inside Belarus depending on which bank owns the terminal. Cross-border settlement and correspondent banking are the binding constraint, not the tax rate.