Egypt

At USD 250,000 for the non-refundable donation route, it is the cheapest citizenship-by-investment programme anywhere and one of only two genuine programmes in Africa. But you are buying a rank-85 passport with roughly 50 visa-free destinations. No Schengen, no UK, no US. The price has been unchanged since the 17 April 2023 repricing, which cut it by two-thirds as deliberate policy to attract hard currency during an FX crisis. The honest use case is narrow. It works as a second nationality, political insurance for someone holding a worse passport. It is not a mobility upgrade.

No. That pitch is dead, and any adviser still making it is wrong. Egypt is a genuine E-2 treaty country, but the NDAA (P.L. 117-263, signed 23 December 2022) requires anyone who obtained treaty-country citizenship by investment to have been domiciled there for a continuous three years before applying for an E-1 or E-2 visa. Grandfathering applies only where citizenship was obtained before 27 December 2022. The single most-marketed reason to buy an Egyptian passport no longer works.

It is a currency bet dressed up as a deposit. The USD 500,000 is refunded after three years in Egyptian pounds, without interest. You take the devaluation risk yourself, effectively lending half a million dollars to a state with a chronic FX shortage. The EGP went from about 8.85 to the dollar in 2016 to roughly 50.5 in July 2026. If you are determined to use Egypt, the USD 250,000 donation is more honest about what it actually costs you.

Officially there is no required residency period. GAFI says so plainly, and this route delivers citizenship directly without any prior residency. But an industry source reports a minimum two-day visit during the application, plus a further month, or two visits totalling four weeks, after approval. That conflict is unresolved, and it matters. Pin down the actual presence expectation in writing before you commit. Note that Egypt offers no permanent residency at all, even through its separate property-residency tiers.

Egypt permits dual citizenship, so this is genuinely additive. On tax, Egypt is quasi-territorial. Residents are taxed on foreign income only where their centre of commercial, industrial or professional activity is in Egypt, which for a passive investor is effectively territorial. There is no wealth tax and no inheritance, estate or gift tax, and the top personal rate is 27.5% on income above EGP 1.2m. For a purely passive holder, the personal tax exposure is light.

No. Egypt has no permanent residency at all, and the tiered property-residency permits, from USD 50,000 for one year, USD 100,000 for three years, USD 200,000 for five, renew only while the investment is held and stop when it is sold. They lead nowhere and do not feed the CBI route. Foreign buyers are also capped at two residential properties of up to 4,000 sqm each, with a five-year resale bar. It is a lifestyle convenience for someone who already wants a Red Sea property, not a status strategy.

It is more liability than feature. Egypt does not take part in CRS, the international system that lets banks and tax authorities share account information. That might sound like secrecy, but it is exactly the profile that draws closer scrutiny from banks and revenue services elsewhere. It will not last forever, either. Add tiny programme volumes, an industry source reports just 36 approvals in 2025, to the fact that GAFI publishes the process and the USD 10,000 state fee but not the investment amounts. The result is that Egyptian citizenship is best treated as a specialised political insurance instrument, one you should only take out with a written, GAFI-referenced quotation in hand.

Not everyone is accepted. Applications are processed for only around 15 nationalities, and Syrian applications have been suspended since December 2024. Confirm that your nationality is on the accepted list before you start anything. On timing, GAFI states three to six months, but practitioners report six to twelve months in practice. Because every published investment figure comes from agents rather than official sources, insist that the amount be confirmed in writing before you transfer any funds.