Latvia · Business & founder
Temporary Residence Permit for Innovative Product Creation (Startup Visa)
Open
Last verified July 2026
Open, with no capital threshold. It is a genuinely cheap route that gets overshadowed by all the noise around golden visas.
For a founder who will genuinely move, this delivers what the EUR 250k property route cannot. Real residence, one that actually accrues toward permanent residence and citizenship, at a fraction of the cost. The only real financial test is subsistence of EUR 500/month.
Qualifying routes
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Innovative product creation or development
No minimum capital. Requires an accepted three-year business plan.
The facts
- Total landed cost
- State fees only, low four figures, plus the cost of actually running the venture.
- Route type
- Business & founder
- Timeline
- 1–4 months (Includes the innovation assessment)
- Physical presence
- Expected to run the business from Latvia in substance
- Family
- SpouseMinor children
- Permanent residency
- 5 years, with the standard physical presence test. Unlike the investor routes, a founder who actually lives in Latvia can meet it.
- Citizenship
- 5 further years of PR, so roughly 10 years total.
- Language test
- Latvian language, history and Constitution exams
- Dual citizenship
- Not permitted. You would have to renounce.
- Requirements
- three-year business plan accepted by the assessment commissionsubsistence of EUR 500/monthclean criminal record
What can go wrong
- The innovation test is a real gate. A consultancy or trading company will not qualify.
- It requires genuine presence and substance, which is the point, but that rules out passive holders.
- Latvia's dual citizenship whitelist still applies at the citizenship stage.