Kenya

The Class K permit for ordinary residents. Regulation 19(4) of the Kenya Citizenship and Immigration Regulations requires an assured annual income of at least USD 24,000 at your full and free disposition, derived from outside Kenya. You also need to be 35 or over. For a passive family, this is strictly better than the Class G investor permit, which needs USD 100,000 of at-risk capital. The annual fee is the same and so is the seven-year clock. The difference is USD 24k of passive income instead of USD 100k of capital. The trade-off is that Class K carries no work rights.

Not on Class K. It is designed precisely for people living on income from outside Kenya, so it prohibits taking employment or running a local business. For most passive UHNW families, that is not a trade-off at all. If you do need local work rights, you use the Class G investor permit instead, with its USD 100,000 capital requirement. There is no upper age gate on Class K, so it also works as a retirement route for anyone over 35.

In practice, the answer is substantially no, but this is not written into law. The Revenue Authority's position is that income is taxable only if it is accrued in or derived from Kenya, so a resident individual's foreign dividends, interest and capital gains fall outside the charge. That said, this rests on KRA practice and Tax Tribunal rulings against a broadly worded section 3(1), not on statute itself. Do not build a structure that only works if Kenya stays territorial. The charging section could be read differently down the line. There is no inheritance tax, since Estate Duty was abolished in 1982, and capital gains tax stands at 15%.

Permanent residence comes after seven years on permits plus three years of continuous residence, with a KES 50,000 application fee and KES 750,000 due on issue. There is no permanent-residence-by-investment shortcut. Citizenship by registration follows after seven years too, but it comes with a statutory Kiswahili or local-dialect speaking test and a discretionary requirement that the applicant has made a substantive contribution to national development. Both Class K and Class G run on the same seven-year clock, which is why the cheaper Class K is usually the better instrument.

This is genuinely unresolved, and it needs settling before anyone starts a seven-year clock. Kenya allows dual citizenship in principle, but whether registered, non-birth citizens may keep a foreign citizenship comes down to section 8 of the Citizenship Act, and sources conflict on the answer. Because this determines whether a Kenyan passport would cost your client an existing nationality, it needs Kenyan counsel before anyone commits. General statements that Kenya allows dual citizenship are not enough to rely on here.

Its volatility is demonstrated, not theoretical. The Finance Bill 2024 was withdrawn on 26 June 2024 after protests in which at least 23 people died and Parliament was stormed, and KES 999bn was cut from the budget. Kenyan tax policy can be reversed by street protest within weeks. The KES 250,000 annual permit fee and the USD 100,000 Class G capital threshold are also administrative figures. They have been raised before, and can be raised again, without any change in the underlying law. Treat them as policy settings rather than fixed law.

You must be aged 35 or over and show an assured annual income of at least USD 24,000 at your full and free disposition, sourced from outside Kenya. Government costs run to roughly KES 300,000 in year one for a family of four. That breaks down as KES 250,000 permit fee, KES 20,000 processing, and KES 10,000 per dependant, or around USD 2,000-2,300. No capital is placed at risk. There is no explicit published day-count for maintaining the permit.