Luxembourg · Citizenship by descent
Recovery of Luxembourgish Nationality by 1900 Ancestry (Article 89)
DEFINITIVELY CLOSED. New applicants had to request the ancestry certificate from the Ministry of Justice by 31 December 2018. Those who met that deadline then had until 31 December 2025 to sign the recovery declaration before a civil registrar. Both deadlines have now passed. As of July 2026 this route is fully extinct. Numerous agencies still advertise it.
For over a decade this was the most generous ancestry route in the EU. No residence requirement, no language test, and an ancestor cutoff of 1900 that reached back five or six generations. It is now gone. Its final deadline passed only in December 2025, recently enough that a great deal of live marketing material is now simply wrong. If an agency offers you this in 2026, it is either negligent or lying.
Qualifying routes
Closed to new certificate requests since 31 December 2018. The final declaration deadline expired 31 December 2025.
The facts
- Total landed cost
- n/a. The route no longer exists.
- Route type
- By ancestry
- Physical presence
- None was required. That was precisely why it was so attractive, and why so many US and Brazilian descendants used it.
- Family
- N/a. Closed
- Permanent residency
- Not applicable
- Citizenship
- n/a. Closed.
- Language test
- None was required under this route.
- Dual citizenship
- Permitted
- Requirements
- n/a. Closed to all new applicants.
- Still widely advertised by citizenship agencies despite being closed. Treat any 2026 offer as a red flag about the adviser.
- The two-stage structure catches people out. Even holders of a valid pre-2019 certificate lost the right if they did not sign the declaration by 31 December 2025.
- What remains is narrower. There is the option procedure for adult descendants of a Luxembourgish parent, adoptive parent or grandparent, and there is ordinary naturalisation after 5 years' residence with a Luxembourgish language test.