Country-wide policy
Antigua and Barbuda Publishes Its Law in Two Places That Disagree
The government's laws site carries a Revised Edition whose chapters were revised to 1992, and a separate collection of Acts and Statutory Instruments as printed year by year. The Revised Edition is where search engines land, and for immigration it is wrong: it still presents the Immigration and Passport Act, Cap. 208, as the law, although section 87(1) of the Immigration and Passport Act 2014 repealed it outright. There is no consolidated edition of the 2014 Act carrying its 2015, 2021 and 2023 amendments, so the rules in force exist only as an Act plus three amending Acts applied by hand. The same shape repeats for citizenship by investment, where the current Regulations are a Schedule inside an amending Act and six Statutory Instruments have been applied to them since.
Topics it changes
- Visiting as a tourist
- Residency on passive income
- Residency as a retiree
- Residency through work
- Residency through investment
- Residency as a student
- Residency through ancestry
- Residency through marriage
- Residency under a regional treaty
- Becoming a citizen
- When you become a tax resident
- Access to healthcare
- Driving and licence exchange
- Bringing your belongings
What it requires
- Treat the Revised Edition chapter as a starting point and check whether a later Act has repealed or replaced it
- For immigration, read the Immigration and Passport Act 2014 with Act 2 of 2015, Act 20 of 2021 and Act 9 of 2023 applied to it
- For citizenship by investment, read the Schedule to the Citizenship by Investment (Amendment) Act 2016 with six later Statutory Instruments applied to it
- Expect a Revised Edition chapter to carry its own scanning errors, because the chapters are images of printed pages with a recognised text layer
At a glance
- Revised Edition cut-off
- 1992
The chapters are published as volumes of a Revised Edition whose first volume is headed Revised Edition 1992. Individual chapters carry later amendment tables.
- Immigration: chapter still published, Act repealed
- Cap. 208, repealed in 2014
Section 87(1) of the Immigration and Passport Act 2014.
- Consolidated text of the Act in force
- None exists
The 2014 Act is published as enacted. Its 2015, 2021 and 2023 amendments are published separately and nothing merges them.
- Citizenship by investment: where the Regulations are
- A Schedule inside an amendment Act
Section 5 of the Citizenship by Investment (Amendment) Act 2016 substituted a new Schedule to the principal Act containing the Citizenship by Investment Regulations 2016.
- Format of the Revised Edition chapters
- Scanned images with a recognised text layer
Each page is a bitmap. Quotations taken from these chapters are quotations of a recognition, and every one on this site says so.
Two collections, one of them stale
The Laws of Antigua and Barbuda site offers chapters of a Revised Edition and, separately, Acts and Statutory Instruments year by year. The chapters are the usable thing for most purposes: they are consolidated, they carry amendment tables, and they are organised by subject. They are also, for the three or four subjects a person relocating actually asks about, out of date in ways the page does not disclose. Cap. 208 is a repealed Act published without a note of repeal. Cap. 27, the Labour Code, does not carry the 2011 amendment reported to have exempted CARICOM skilled nationals from the work permit, nor the amendments of 2017 and 2019. Cap. 271, the Medical Benefits Act, sets a contribution rate of two and one-half per cent while the Scheme collects three and one-half. Cap. 460, the Vehicles and Road Traffic Act, was substantially re-plumbed in 2025. In each case the current rule is in the annual collection, and in each case it has to be applied to the chapter by hand.
Scans, and what they cost
The Revised Edition chapters are not typeset documents. Each page is a bitmap with a recognised text layer behind it, and the recognition is of 1992-vintage print. The consequences are concrete and they shape what this site can say about Antigua and Barbuda. Division F of the Labour Code loses the right-hand margin of most lines, so the work permit rule cannot be quoted whole. Paragraph 1(b) of the Second Schedule to the Citizenship Act - the seven-year window for naturalisation - disappears entirely from the captured text, so the period is reported with a note instead of a quotation. The Constitution and the Citizenship Act carry misprints, "Consititution" and "commented", which are preserved in every quotation because a corrected quotation is not one. Every citation this site takes from a Revised Edition chapter is marked as a reading of a recognised scan.
The investment Regulations problem
Citizenship by investment is the subject where the publication problem does real damage, because the figures move and the money is large. The Citizenship by Investment Unit publishes a legislation page listing the Act of 2013, amendment Acts of 2016 and 2018, and amendment Regulations of 2013, 2014, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 twice and 2024. The principal Regulations are not on it. They are the Schedule substituted into the 2013 Act by section 5 of the Citizenship by Investment (Amendment) Act 2016, and two of the later Statutory Instruments say so in terms. One instrument in the chain is missing from both collections: Statutory Instrument 2019 No. 10 amends a regulation 15, Limited Time Offer, by inserting a subregulation after an existing subregulation (1), and no instrument we reached created regulation 15. Reading only the Unit's page gives a wrong answer; reading only the laws site gives an incomplete one.
What the law says
«The Immigration and Passport Act, Cap. 208 is repealed.»Four words that invalidate the chapter the Revised Edition still publishes under that number.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The government's law site, carrying two distinct collections: chapters of a Revised Edition whose base cut-off is 1992, and Acts, Bills and Statutory Instruments as printed year by year. The Revised Edition chapters are scanned page-images with a recognition layer; the annual Acts from about 2014 are born-digital.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: The Revised Edition does not show repeal. It still publishes the Immigration and Passport Act as a chapter although the 2014 Act repealed it outright, with nothing on the page to say so, and that chapter is what a search engine surfaces first. It carries no later amendments either, and there is no consolidated text of any post-1992 Act, so a rule must always be cited as the section of the resulting Act naming the instrument that put it there. Its instrument collection is incomplete: the instrument that inserted one regulation of the investment rules is in neither collection. And its scans are lossy - a schedule paragraph disappears from extraction entirely and one Act loses its right margin - so a quotation from a chapter must be declared as a recognition and a negative claim must never rest on one alone.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
«AN ACT to revise and reform the law providing for the control of the entry and departure of** persons into and from Antigua and Barbuda; to repeal, the Immigration Act Cap. 208 and for incidental and connected purposes.»Quoted with the stray emphasis marker the capture carries. The long title describes Cap. 208 as the "Immigration Act" while section 87 calls it the "Immigration and Passport Act"; the chapter number settles which is meant.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The government's law site, carrying two distinct collections: chapters of a Revised Edition whose base cut-off is 1992, and Acts, Bills and Statutory Instruments as printed year by year. The Revised Edition chapters are scanned page-images with a recognition layer; the annual Acts from about 2014 are born-digital.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: The Revised Edition does not show repeal. It still publishes the Immigration and Passport Act as a chapter although the 2014 Act repealed it outright, with nothing on the page to say so, and that chapter is what a search engine surfaces first. It carries no later amendments either, and there is no consolidated text of any post-1992 Act, so a rule must always be cited as the section of the resulting Act naming the instrument that put it there. Its instrument collection is incomplete: the instrument that inserted one regulation of the investment rules is in neither collection. And its scans are lossy - a schedule paragraph disappears from extraction entirely and one Act loses its right margin - so a quotation from a chapter must be declared as a recognition and a negative claim must never rest on one alone.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
«The Minister may, by notice published in the Gazette, appoint a day on which this Act shall
come into force and the Minister may appoint different days for the coming into force of the
different provisions of this Act.»We did not find the commencement notice. Parliament has amended the Act three times since and its 2023 Schedule 7 speaks of applicants already holding residence permits, so the Act is treated here as in force and the gap in the record is stated.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The government's law site, carrying two distinct collections: chapters of a Revised Edition whose base cut-off is 1992, and Acts, Bills and Statutory Instruments as printed year by year. The Revised Edition chapters are scanned page-images with a recognition layer; the annual Acts from about 2014 are born-digital.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: The Revised Edition does not show repeal. It still publishes the Immigration and Passport Act as a chapter although the 2014 Act repealed it outright, with nothing on the page to say so, and that chapter is what a search engine surfaces first. It carries no later amendments either, and there is no consolidated text of any post-1992 Act, so a rule must always be cited as the section of the resulting Act naming the instrument that put it there. Its instrument collection is incomplete: the instrument that inserted one regulation of the investment rules is in neither collection. And its scans are lossy - a schedule paragraph disappears from extraction entirely and one Act loses its right margin - so a quotation from a chapter must be declared as a recognition and a negative claim must never rest on one alone.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
«The schedule to the principal Act comprising the Antigua and Barbuda Citizenship by Investment Regulations 2013 is repealed and replaced with the following new schedule –»This is where the Citizenship by Investment Regulations 2016 are. The Unit's own legislation page lists every other instrument in the chain and not this one.
«“principal Regulations” mean the Antigua and Barbuda Citizenship by Investment Regulations 2016 published as a Schedule to the Act, as amended.»The instrument saying in terms where the principal Regulations live. Statutory Instrument 2019 No. 10 uses the same formula.
Practical notes
This record exists because the same mistake is available to anyone researching Antigua and Barbuda and it is invisible: the repealed chapter looks exactly as authoritative as the live one, and it is the one that ranks first.
Where a figure on this site comes from an agency page rather than from an instrument - the Medical Benefits Scheme's contribution rates, the Customs and Excise Division's concessions - the record says so and names the agency. Where the agency and the instrument disagree, both figures are published with their sources.
The absence of a commencement notice for the Immigration and Passport Act 2014 and for the Citizenship by Investment Act 2013 is recorded on the relevant topics rather than hidden. Both were looked for in the Statutory Instruments collection and on the administering agency's own site.
The extraction service does not only lose text from these scans, it occasionally invents it. The stored reading of the Constitution, Cap. 23, carries a Chinese-language algebra question spliced into the middle of a passage about the Attorney-General's membership of the House, and the stored reading of the Citizenship by Investment Act 2013 carries a block of Chinese accounting-table text on its second page. Neither appears in the documents themselves. Every quotation this site takes from those two readings was measured against the nearest fabricated run and the closest sits over a thousand characters away.