How to Get a Residency Permit in Georgia

Georgia has offered a residence permit to foreign buyers of property since 2019, and it remains one of the least demanding routes of its kind anywhere: no minimum stay, no language test, no interview, and a decision in roughly thirty days. Your spouse and minor children come with you on the same investment.

One thing changed, and it changed by half. On 1 March 2026 the qualifying property value rose from $100,000 to $150,000. Any guide, broker or forum post still quoting the old figure is out of date, and sizing a purchase against it is the single most expensive mistake you can make here. This page sets out the new rule, what the number actually means, and — using our own Georgian portfolio — exactly what it takes to clear it.

The threshold, and what it really measures

The row that catches people is the third. The threshold is measured on an accredited appraiser’s valuation, not on your invoice. Those are two different numbers, and the appraisal can come in below what you paid — particularly on a new-build bought from a developer at list price, where the sale price includes a marketing margin an appraiser will not recognise.

The practical consequence is simple and almost nobody acts on it: buy with headroom, not exactly at the line. A purchase at $152,000 that appraises at $146,000 does not qualify, and by the time you discover that, you own the apartment. Commission the appraisal before you commit, not after.

The change is documented in the June 2025 amendments.

What $150,000 buys: our Georgian portfolio against the threshold

Most residency guides stop at quoting the number. Here is what it means against real inventory. These are the twelve Georgian projects we sell, ranked by the total cost of their smallest published unit, against the threshold:

One project out of twelve clears $150,000 at its entry unit. We are the agent selling all twelve and we would rather you knew that before you started than after you had reserved something.

This is the practical effect of the March 2026 increase and it is not widely understood. Under the old $100,000 rule, three of these projects cleared at entry size. At $150,000, one does. The threshold did not just rise — it moved above the entire mid-market of Batumi new-build, which is where most foreign buyers were shopping.

The two Wyndham releases at 90% and 91% are the interesting cases. Both miss by roughly $15,000, which is close enough to be solved by buying a slightly larger unit rather than a different project.

How much floor area you need at each project

Since almost nothing clears at entry size, the real question is how much apartment $150,000 buys. Divide the threshold by each project’s rate per square metre:

Read those two columns together and the counter-intuitive result appears: the cheapest square metre requires the most square metres. At Horizon Grand Residence you need a 142 m² apartment to reach the threshold; at Wyndham Gonio Aqua you need 34.8 m². For the same $150,000 you are choosing between a large apartment in a cheaper building and a small one in an expensive building — and both produce the identical permit.

Which of those is the better purchase depends entirely on what you want the property to do afterwards. If you want space, a family home or a long-let, the cheap-metre end gives you four times the apartment. If you want a small, liquid, brand-managed unit that is easy to let short-term and easy to resell to another foreign buyer, the expensive-metre end does that. The permit is indifferent; you should not be.

Do you even need a permit?

Worth asking before you spend $150,000 on one. Two facts sit behind this decision:

If you simply want to spend time in Georgia, the 365-day visa-free stay already does most of what people imagine a permit does, and it costs nothing. The permit becomes worth having when you want a formal status rather than a tolerated one: to work or run a business without ambiguity, to keep a stable base across years without border runs, to bring family on a single application, or to build toward permanent residency.

One nuance matters here. A March 2026 regulatory update separated visa-free entry from the right to work, which left remote work for a foreign employer during a visa-free stay in a legal grey area. That change has made formal residency more attractive than it was, and it is the reason a lot of long-stay remote workers are now looking at this route who previously ignored it. Our guide to living in Georgia as a foreigner covers the practical side of that decision.

The appraisal, in detail

Because the entire application turns on one document, it is worth understanding how it behaves. An accredited appraiser values the property on its own merits — comparable transactions, condition, floor, aspect, building quality and location — and produces a figure that is deliberately independent of what any particular buyer agreed to pay.

That independence is the point, and it is also where applications fail. A developer’s list price on a new-build typically embeds a marketing and sales margin; an appraiser looking at comparable resales in the same building will not reproduce it. The gap is usually modest, but on a purchase sized precisely at the threshold a five per cent difference is the whole application.

Three things you can do about it. Ask the developer or agent what recent units in the same building have appraised at, since on a completed scheme that information exists. Commission your own appraisal before exchange rather than relying on an assurance, because an appraisal you have read is worth more than one you have been promised. And build in a margin — buying at $165,000 to clear $150,000 costs more, but it converts a binary risk into a comfortable one.

An appraisal also has a shelf life. If your application slips by several months while you chase a criminal record certificate, check whether the valuation is still within its validity window before you submit, rather than discovering it at the counter.

The five residency routes

The property route is the one this page focuses on because it is the only one you can arrange entirely from abroad, without an employer, a university place or a family connection. It is also the only one where the qualifying bar is a number rather than a relationship.

Documents you will need

Two documents cause almost every delay we see. The criminal record certificate has to come from your home country, be translated into Georgian and notarised, and it has a validity window — start it early, because obtaining it abroad is often the longest single step. And the appraisal must come from an accredited appraiser; a valuation from an estate agent, a developer’s price list or a bank’s internal figure will not be accepted.

The process, step by step

Title itself registers at the National Agency of Public Registry, often within one to three working days — genuinely among the fastest processes in any market we deal with. The residency application goes to the Public Service Development Agency, and the thirty-day clock starts when a complete file is submitted, not when you start assembling it.

Our legal checklist for buying in Georgia covers steps two and three in detail.

Renewal, year by year

The permit is annual, and the renewal is not automatic. Each year you demonstrate that the basis on which it was granted still holds: you still own the qualifying property, it is still registered in your name, and you still satisfy the general conditions. In practice this is a light exercise compared with the first application — the heavy documents are already on file — but it is an exercise, and it has a deadline.

Plan the calendar rather than reacting to it. Renewals are handled well in advance of expiry, and letting a permit lapse is considerably more work than renewing it, because a lapsed status is a fresh application assessed against whatever the rules say at that moment. Given the threshold has risen three times, that distinction matters more in Georgia than it would elsewhere.

The question we are asked most often is what happens over the longer run. A permanent residence route does exist for holders of long-standing temporary status, and it is the natural destination for someone who intends to stay. We are deliberately not printing a qualifying period here, because the immigration rules in this country have changed repeatedly and a number published today may not hold when you become eligible. Confirm the current requirement with the PSDA at the point it becomes relevant to you, and treat any figure you read in a forum post as a starting point for a question rather than an answer.

Combining several properties

The threshold applies to your total holdings, not to a single title, so two or three smaller properties can be added together to reach $150,000. Each has to be properly registered and separately valued, and the combined appraised total is what counts.

This route has real appeal at first glance — three $50,000 studios instead of one $150,000 apartment gives you three rental incomes and a diversified position. Weigh two things against it. Each property carries its own appraisal cost, its own registration, its own service charge and its own management overhead, so the running friction is roughly tripled. And the aggregate is only as reliable as its weakest valuation: if one of the three appraises low, the total drops below the line and the application fails, whereas a single larger property gives you one number to manage rather than three.

Our view is that combining works well when you already own something in Georgia and are topping up to reach the threshold, and works badly as a deliberate strategy from a standing start.

If you bought under the old $100,000 rule

You are generally not affected. Existing permit holders can normally continue renewing under the threshold that applied when they were granted, for as long as they keep the qualifying property. The $150,000 figure applies to new applicants from 1 March 2026 onward.

Two cautions. If you sell the qualifying property, you lose the basis for the renewal, and re-entering the system means meeting the current threshold rather than the historic one. And because immigration rules here have moved three times, “generally” is the operative word — confirm your own position at each renewal rather than assuming continuity.

Joint ownership, and who should be on the title

Where a couple is buying together, how the title is held affects the application. If the property is registered in one name, that person is the applicant and the spouse is included as a dependant. If it is registered jointly, each owner’s share is valued separately, and a half share of a $150,000 property is a $75,000 holding — which does not clear the threshold on its own.

That arithmetic surprises people, and it is worth settling before the purchase rather than after registration. A couple buying a $160,000 apartment jointly may find that neither of them individually qualifies, where one of them holding the whole title and sponsoring the other as a dependant would have worked. Changing a registered title afterwards is possible but it is a fresh transaction with fresh costs.

The same logic applies to buying through a company. Corporate ownership is straightforward in Georgia, but the property route is designed around individual ownership, and a property held by a legal entity does not automatically give its shareholders a personal qualifying basis. If a company structure matters to you for other reasons, resolve the interaction with the residency route before you buy, not afterwards.

What the permit does not give you

Worth being blunt, because the marketing around this route rarely is.

• It is not citizenship, and it is not a passport. It is an annually renewable temporary status.
• It is not permanent. It lapses if you sell the property and do not replace the qualifying basis.
• It is not visa-free travel elsewhere. A Georgian residence card is not a Schengen document and confers no EU rights.
• It does not make you tax-resident automatically, and it does not end tax residency in your home country. Those are separate tests with separate rules.
• It does not guarantee renewal. Renewal depends on continuing to satisfy the conditions.
• It is not a yield. Buying an apartment you would not otherwise want, in order to obtain a permit, means owning that apartment afterwards.

That last point is the one we would press hardest. The permit is a genuine benefit, and it is not worth overpaying for a bad asset to get. If the property makes sense on its own terms and clears $150,000, the residency is a bonus on a sound purchase. If it only makes sense as a permit, you have paid $150,000 for a document.

Your tax position once resident

Holding a residence permit does not by itself make you a Georgian tax resident — that turns on days present and other tests — but most people asking about one are also asking about tax, so here is the position.

Rates and conditions are set out in the PwC summary of Georgian personal income tax. Take advice in both Georgia and your home country before restructuring anything on the strength of a permit.

How Georgia compares with other property-linked routes

Even after the fifty per cent increase, Georgia is roughly 3.6 times cheaper to enter than the Dubai Golden Visa, with faster processing and no requirement to set foot in the country. That combination is why it remains the most accessible property-linked residency among the markets we cover, and why the increase — while significant — has not changed its relative position.

What has changed is who it suits. At $100,000 this was a route for the mid-market buyer. At $150,000 it is a route for someone making a considered purchase at the upper end of the Batumi market, or buying deliberately larger than they otherwise would.

What it costs to apply

The application costs themselves are small relative to the purchase — this is not a market where fees swallow a meaningful share of the investment. What people underestimate is the document volume: every foreign-issued paper needs translating into Georgian and notarising, and for a family application with a spouse and two children that is a stack rather than a handful. Getting it done in batches, in one visit, is materially cheaper and faster than one document at a time.

Common mistakes

• Sizing the purchase against $100,000. The figure changed on 1 March 2026 and a great deal of published material has not caught up.
• Assuming the invoice is the valuation. The appraisal governs, and it can come in lower.
• Buying exactly at the threshold with no headroom for a low appraisal.
• Commissioning the appraisal after committing rather than before.
• Leaving the criminal record certificate to last. It is usually the longest step.
• Buying agricultural land, which does not qualify and which non-citizens generally cannot own anyway.
• Treating the permit as permanent rather than an annually renewable status tied to continued ownership.
• Buying a property you do not want purely to obtain the permit.

Who this route actually suits

The honest summary is that this route is excellent for people who were going to buy in Georgia anyway and can stretch to the threshold, and poor for people whose only objective is the document. The reason is simply that $150,000 buys a great deal of Batumi apartment — between 35 and 142 square metres depending on the project — and that apartment is what you will still own in five years, long after the novelty of the residence card has worn off.

It is also worth saying that the increase from $100,000 has made the route more honest rather than less. At the old figure, a lot of buyers were pushed toward the smallest qualifying studio in the cheapest available building, which is rarely a good asset. At $150,000 the qualifying purchase is closer to a property somebody would want on its merits, and the buyers we see now are asking better questions than the buyers we saw two years ago.

Frequently asked questions

How much do I need to invest for Georgian residency? $150,000 by accredited appraisal since 1 March 2026, up from $100,000. The threshold applies to your total non-agricultural property holdings, so several properties can be combined.

Is the $150,000 based on what I paid? No. It is based on an accredited appraiser’s valuation, which can differ from your purchase price. Buy with headroom and commission the appraisal before you commit.

Does my family get residency too? Yes. A spouse and minor children can be included on the same qualifying investment.

Do I have to live in Georgia? No. There is no minimum stay requirement, and no language test or interview.

How long does it take? Around 30 calendar days from submission of a complete application, with expedited options available. Registering the property title itself usually takes one to three working days.

Is it permanent residency? No. It is a temporary permit, renewable annually while you hold the qualifying property. A permanent route exists for long-term holders — confirm the current qualifying period when you apply.

Which of your Georgian projects qualify at entry size? One of twelve: Wyndham Gonio Rivera, whose 130–150 m² apartments start well above the threshold. Everything else requires a larger-than-entry unit — between 34.8 m² and 141.8 m² depending on the project’s rate per square metre.

What happens if I sell the property? You lose the basis for renewal. If you want to keep the status you need to replace the qualifying investment, and a new application would be assessed against the threshold current at that time.

Can I get citizenship this way? Not directly. This is a residence permit, not a citizenship programme, and the two are governed by separate rules.

Related reading

• Living in Georgia as a foreigner: costs, housing and lifestyle
• Buying property in Georgia: legal tips before you sign
• Property for sale in Georgia
• Apartments for sale in Georgia
• Talk to us about structuring a purchase to clear the threshold