Chile · Residency by investment
Temporary Residence for Investors
Open
Last verified July 2026
This lives under Ley 21.325 as art. 10(n), with the amount fixed by art. 62 of Decreto 177 at USD 500,000. Contrary to widespread claims, Chile did not abolish its investor visa. Take-up, though, is minimal.
This is the only route to Chile's 175-destination passport that a UHNW family can buy into. The naturalisation clock starts from your first temporary residence stamp, not from permanent residency, so five years really can mean five. The catch is that Chile does not want this to be a residency product, and it has priced and administered it accordingly.
Qualifying routes
$500k
Investment in the production of goods or services
Article 62 of Decreto 177 spells out the amount in words, five hundred thousand. Passive real estate holding does not qualify on the face of the text. The investment has to fund production.
The facts
- Minimum investment
- $500k
- Total landed cost
- USD 500k investment plus roughly USD 10–25k in legal, InvestChile sponsorship and corporate costs
- Route type
- Residency by investment
- Timeline
- 4–12 months (The InvestChile carta de patrocinio is the bottleneck. It must be obtained before the visa is granted.)
- Physical presence
- No quantified absence limit is published for temporary residence. It is left to discretion. After permanent residency, more than two years' absence causes tacit revocation. That can be extended once, by a two-year prórroga costing about USD 75.
- Family
- Spouse or civil partnerDependent children
- Permanent residency
- 24 months normally, reduced to 12 months for executed investments. In practice, this is a 12-month permanent residency route.
- Citizenship
- 5 years, counted from the first Estampado Electrónico of temporary residence rather than from the permanent residency date. That is a materially favourable detail.
- Language test
- None at present. See watch-outs below.
- Dual citizenship
- Permitted
- Requirements
- USD 500,000 invested in a productive activityA carta de patrocinio from InvestChile, under art. 63(b)The application must be filed from outside ChileA clean criminal record
What can go wrong
- Take-up is tiny. Only 44 cartas de patrocinio were issued through August 2023. The 2,062 figure that circulates in marketing material actually refers to visa-acceleration requests, a different service entirely. You will be a rare case, and rare cases move slowly.
- The investment must fund production of goods or services. Buying an apartment does not qualify. There is no tier or points system, whatever some descriptions suggest.
- The InvestChile carta de patrocinio is mandatory and discretionary. The application must be made from outside Chile.
- MAJOR RISK: a bill that would double the naturalisation residence requirement from 5 to 10 years is live and moving forward. It passed the Camara de Diputados unanimously on 26 November 2024. The Senate Sala approved it in general in second tramite on 7 January 2025 by 42 votes, and it passed to the Comision de Gobierno, Descentralizacion y Regionalizacion for discussion en particular. It also adds new grounds to refuse or cancel a carta de nacionalizacion, including repeated incivilities. Its status after early 2025 is not established. With the Kast government in office since 11 March 2026, assume the odds of passage are elevated. Any plan built around a five-year timeline needs the boletin's current status checked first. A ten-year requirement would roughly halve this route's value.
- Chile has no digital nomad visa, and never has. Article 10 of Ley 21.325 is a closed list. The article 20 fallback requires a contract with a Chilean counterparty, perfected before a consulate, which is useless if you bill only foreign clients.
- Chile's CFC rules (art. 41 G) were tightened by Ley 21.713, effective 1 January 2025, and now extend the control presumption to spouses, civil partners and second-degree relatives. They kick in the moment the art. 3 three-year window closes. The two rules interact directly, so they need to be modelled together from the start.