Retiring to Barbados
Answer
The general rule applies to you
No exception is recorded for citizens of Antigua and Barbuda on this topic. That is the answer, not a gap - everything below is the rule you get, unchanged.
91 exceptions recorded across 34 countries · none match Antigua and Barbuda to Barbados · Residency as a retiree
Barbados has no retirement visa and no retiree programme with a name. What it has is one paragraph of the Immigration Act: a permitted entrant who desires to reside in retirement in Barbados and has sufficient means of support to maintain himself and his dependants may, on application to the Minister, be granted permission to become an immigrant. Immigrant status is the strong status - the Immigration Department describes it as the equivalent of a permanent visa, allowing a person to live and work in Barbados indefinitely - and it is granted by the Minister on an open test with no stated income figure, no stated asset figure and no stated age. The only numbers published are fees, and the Department's figures are not the figures in the Regulations.
At a glance
- Minimum income the Act states
- None. The test is sufficient means of support to maintain yourself and your dependants
- Minimum age the Act states
- None
- Status granted
- Immigrant, under the Immigration Act
- Fee on application, as the Regulations prescribe
- $200.00
- Fee on application, as the Department charges
- $300.00 BDS
Taken from the Department's work permit page, which states the same application fee for its applications; its permanent residence page states Bds. $300.00 and a final fee of $1200 Bds. The Regulations prescribe $200 on application and $800 on the grant.
- Loss of the status
- Section 7A of the Act provides for loss of the status of immigrant
The pages carrying the detail of section 7A survived extraction; the pages carrying sections 3 to 5 did not, so the permanent resident test is not quoted here.
Requirements
- Being a permitted entrant - that is, already admitted under section 13 of the Immigration Act
- A desire to reside in retirement in Barbados
- Sufficient means of support to maintain yourself and your dependants
- An application to the Minister in the prescribed form, which is Form A under the Immigration (Forms and Fees) Regulations
- If over 60 and applying through the Department: means of support, income, and proof of property
- A medical report, a police certificate of character from each country lived in for at least six months in the past three years, photographs and the fees
In detail
An open test, and what the Department asks for instead
Section 6(1)(d) says only that the applicant desires to reside in retirement in Barbados and has sufficient means of support to maintain himself and his dependants. No figure, no age, no asset test. The Immigration Department's immigrant status page translates that into documents: if the applicant is over age 60 he must produce means of support, income, and proof of property. That is the Department filling in an open statutory test, and it is the nearest thing to a threshold that Barbados publishes.
Retirement is a route to immigrant status, not to a renewable permit
This is the structural difference from most of the region. There is no annual retirement permit to renew and no pension certificate to lodge. The retiree route in section 6 ends in immigrant status, which the Immigration Department describes as the equivalent of a permanent visa allowing a person to live and work in Barbados indefinitely. The cost of that is that it is discretionary from the start: section 6 says the Minister may grant permission, and an applicant who fits the description has no right to it.
Country-level policy
Barbados publishes its law in three places that do not agree with each other about how current it is, and none of them says so on its face. The Supreme Court's statute library carries the Chapters, printed by the Government Printer, with a Law Revision Order year in the running head of each page - 2007 on the newest pages of the Immigration Act and the Income Tax Act, 1997 on the Income Tax pages that carry the residence and domicile rules. The Attorney General's Office carries annual Acts and statutory instruments, and its series of annual Acts stops at 2020. The Government Printing Department publishes the Official Gazette, which is where an Act of 2021 or later is actually found. A reader looking for the law in force has to use all three, and an amendment made between 2021 and today is invisible in the first two.
On 21 April 2026 the Government laid the Immigration Bill, 2026 and the Barbados Citizenship Bill, 2026. The Immigration Bill would repeal Chapter 190 outright and replace it: a points test for permanent residence, an express route for the spouse of a citizen and for a retired person with sufficient financial resources, a right for a direct descendant of a citizen to be registered as a permanent resident, automated passport control kiosks, advance passenger information shared with intelligence agencies, and a lengthening of the long-stay permit from three years to five. Both Bills were still before the House of Assembly when this was written and neither has commenced. Nothing in this record is law. It is here because the Act they would replace is the Act every other Barbados record rests on, and because what the Bills do not contain is itself a finding: neither of them implements the 2025 free movement arrangement.
What applies to you
Nothing changes for a citizen of Antigua and Barbuda
We have no rule recorded that treats your citizenship differently here, so the general rule above is the one that applies to you. That is an answer, not a gap.
What the law says
«desires to reside in retirement in Barbados and has sufficient means of support to maintain himself and his dependants,»The whole of the retirement route. There is no further qualification anywhere in the Act, and no regulation we read puts a figure on "sufficient means".
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The statute library of the Barbadian judiciary, publishing the Chapters of the Laws of Barbados and the subsidiary legislation as PDFs printed by the Government Printer. It is the only place the consolidated Chapters are published as a browsable set, and it carries the Constitution, the Immigration Act Chapter 190, the Income Tax Act Chapter 73, the Customs Act Chapter 66, the Exchange Control Act Chapter 71 and the Caribbean Community Acts.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its editions are old and dated per page rather than per Act: the Immigration Act and the Income Tax Act print Law Revision Order years of 2007 on their newest pages and 1997 or 2002 on others, and no page says what the Act looks like today. It must not be cited for anything amended after about 2008 without checking the amending Act - section 17(1) of the Immigration Act was substituted in 2020 and this edition does not show it. Several of its files are scans with no text layer: the Barbados Citizenship Act Chapter 186 is unreadable and the Road Traffic Act Chapter 295 is largely so, and neither may be quoted from this publisher. Extraction of the Immigration Act PDF silently loses four pairs of pages, so an absence in it is not evidence of absence in the Act. It must also not be relied on for completeness, and the gap is the publisher's rather than ours: its Immigration Act lists sections 15, 16, 18, 19, 21, 22, 30 and 31 in its own arrangement of sections and prints none of them. Two independent extractions of the file agree, every page but the last carries a text layer, and the headings Charging of member of crew, Persons unlawfully entering, Applications for work permits and Deportation orders each appear exactly once, in the contents. A negative claim read off this Chapter - that the Act says nothing about something - can be neither trusted nor disproved from it.
We re-read it every 180 days. More about this source
«may, on application to the Minister in the prescribed form, be granted by the Minister permission to become an immigrant.»"May", and the Minister's. Nothing in section 6 obliges the Minister to grant it to a person who meets the description.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The statute library of the Barbadian judiciary, publishing the Chapters of the Laws of Barbados and the subsidiary legislation as PDFs printed by the Government Printer. It is the only place the consolidated Chapters are published as a browsable set, and it carries the Constitution, the Immigration Act Chapter 190, the Income Tax Act Chapter 73, the Customs Act Chapter 66, the Exchange Control Act Chapter 71 and the Caribbean Community Acts.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its editions are old and dated per page rather than per Act: the Immigration Act and the Income Tax Act print Law Revision Order years of 2007 on their newest pages and 1997 or 2002 on others, and no page says what the Act looks like today. It must not be cited for anything amended after about 2008 without checking the amending Act - section 17(1) of the Immigration Act was substituted in 2020 and this edition does not show it. Several of its files are scans with no text layer: the Barbados Citizenship Act Chapter 186 is unreadable and the Road Traffic Act Chapter 295 is largely so, and neither may be quoted from this publisher. Extraction of the Immigration Act PDF silently loses four pairs of pages, so an absence in it is not evidence of absence in the Act. It must also not be relied on for completeness, and the gap is the publisher's rather than ours: its Immigration Act lists sections 15, 16, 18, 19, 21, 22, 30 and 31 in its own arrangement of sections and prints none of them. Two independent extractions of the file agree, every page but the last carries a text layer, and the headings Charging of member of crew, Persons unlawfully entering, Applications for work permits and Deportation orders each appear exactly once, in the contents. A negative claim read off this Chapter - that the Act says nothing about something - can be neither trusted nor disproved from it.
We re-read it every 180 days. More about this source
«On application for permission to become an immigrant $200.00»Item 16 sets $800.00 on the granting of the application. The Schedule was last substituted by S.I. 2005/18 and the regulations note amendments to 2007/28.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The Government's law portal, with four sections: annual Acts, annual statutory instruments, consolidated statutes and subsidiary legislation, and indices. The annual series is where an Act is found as enacted, with its assent and commencement dates on its face - the Remote Employment Act 2020-23 and the Caribbean Community (Movement of Skilled Nationals) (Amendment) Act 2020-3 both come from here. Files are served from a flat /attachments/ path.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: The annual Acts and statutory instruments series stops at 2020. An Act of 2021 or later is not here at all, so the absence of an instrument on this site proves nothing about years after 2020 - for that, the Official Gazette is the publisher to use. Its consolidated statutes list is a partial mirror of the judiciary's and does not carry the Immigration Act or the Citizenship Act. It consolidates and does not issue, so a commencement date read here is the Act's own statement rather than a gazette record.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
Practical notes
The Immigration Department also runs a Special Entry and Reside Permit, marketed to retired property owners and people of high net worth. That rests on section 13(7) of the Act and is recorded under the investor topic, because the criteria that are published for it are investment and asset criteria rather than retirement ones.
The fee divergence is real and goes in one direction: the Regulations prescribe $200 on application and $800 on the grant, and the Department publishes $300 on application and $1,200 on the grant for the comparable statuses on its own pages. We found no amending instrument raising the prescribed figures.
This record rests on sections 6 and 13(7) of the Immigration Act Chapter 190, the Immigration (Forms and Fees) Regulations, 1979 and the Immigration Department's immigrant status and permanent residence pages. It does not rest on section 5, whose pages were lost in extraction.
- consolidatesImmigration Act, Chapter 190 of the Laws of Barbados
Supreme Court of Barbados - Laws of Barbados · consolidated to 2007
About this source
The statute library of the Barbadian judiciary, publishing the Chapters of the Laws of Barbados and the subsidiary legislation as PDFs printed by the Government Printer. It is the only place the consolidated Chapters are published as a browsable set, and it carries the Constitution, the Immigration Act Chapter 190, the Income Tax Act Chapter 73, the Customs Act Chapter 66, the Exchange Control Act Chapter 71 and the Caribbean Community Acts.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its editions are old and dated per page rather than per Act: the Immigration Act and the Income Tax Act print Law Revision Order years of 2007 on their newest pages and 1997 or 2002 on others, and no page says what the Act looks like today. It must not be cited for anything amended after about 2008 without checking the amending Act - section 17(1) of the Immigration Act was substituted in 2020 and this edition does not show it. Several of its files are scans with no text layer: the Barbados Citizenship Act Chapter 186 is unreadable and the Road Traffic Act Chapter 295 is largely so, and neither may be quoted from this publisher. Extraction of the Immigration Act PDF silently loses four pairs of pages, so an absence in it is not evidence of absence in the Act. It must also not be relied on for completeness, and the gap is the publisher's rather than ours: its Immigration Act lists sections 15, 16, 18, 19, 21, 22, 30 and 31 in its own arrangement of sections and prints none of them. Two independent extractions of the file agree, every page but the last carries a text layer, and the headings Charging of member of crew, Persons unlawfully entering, Applications for work permits and Deportation orders each appear exactly once, in the contents. A negative claim read off this Chapter - that the Act says nothing about something - can be neither trusted nor disproved from it.
We re-read it every 180 days. More about this source
- administersImmigrant Status
Barbados Immigration Department
About this source
The department that applies the Immigration Act: it controls entry and departure at the ports and processes applications for citizenship, permanent residence, immigrant status, work permits and entry visas. Its pages set out the documents it actually asks for under each statutory head, name the section each application is made under, and state the fees it charges. It also hosts the prescribed forms.
Standing: Applies the rule
Cannot be cited for: It states practice, not law, and its fees are not the fees the Immigration (Forms and Fees) Regulations prescribe - it publishes $300 on application where the Regulations say $200, and $1,200 or $1,500 on the grant where the Regulations say $800. It must not be cited for what an instrument requires, for the length of any statutory period, or for the entry visa fee in United States dollars, which no instrument we found carries. Its visa guidance points to a list published by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs rather than carrying one.
We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source
- consolidatesImmigration (Forms and Fees) Regulations, 1979
Office of the Attorney General of Barbados
About this source
The Government's law portal, with four sections: annual Acts, annual statutory instruments, consolidated statutes and subsidiary legislation, and indices. The annual series is where an Act is found as enacted, with its assent and commencement dates on its face - the Remote Employment Act 2020-23 and the Caribbean Community (Movement of Skilled Nationals) (Amendment) Act 2020-3 both come from here. Files are served from a flat /attachments/ path.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: The annual Acts and statutory instruments series stops at 2020. An Act of 2021 or later is not here at all, so the absence of an instrument on this site proves nothing about years after 2020 - for that, the Official Gazette is the publisher to use. Its consolidated statutes list is a partial mirror of the judiciary's and does not carry the Immigration Act or the Citizenship Act. It consolidates and does not issue, so a commencement date read here is the Act's own statement rather than a gazette record.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source