Belgium

Whether a short visit to Belgium needs a visa is not in any Belgian instrument. Regulation (EU) 2018/1806 carries two annexes: nationals of the countries in Annex I need a visa to cross the external border, and nationals of the countries in Annex II are exempt for stays of no more than 90 days in any 180-day period. What Belgium does write for itself is the limit on the stay. Article 6 of the Act of 15 December 1980 says a foreigner who entered lawfully may not stay more than ninety days, and then says those ninety days are counted over any 180-day period across the territory of every state party to the external-borders convention - not across Belgium alone.

Belgium does not sort long stays into named classes at all. Article 10 of the Act of 15 December 1980 lists the people admitted to stay longer than three months as of right, and that list is about family, refugee status and the recovery of Belgian nationality. Everybody else falls under article 9, which says only that they must be authorised by the Minister or his delegate, and which states no ground, no amount and no category at all. There is therefore no passive-income permit to find, and there is also nothing in the Act that rules one out: the discretion is the whole of the rule. Article 13 then makes any authorisation limited in time unless the Act expressly says otherwise.

The Act of 15 December 1980 has chapters of its own for students, researchers, trainees, European volunteers, seasonal workers, intra-corporate transferees, Blue Card holders and employees. None of them turns on age and none of them is addressed to someone who has stopped working. A retired applicant is in exactly the position of anyone else with an income: article 9, and a discretion. Reaching pension age does appear in Belgian law in one place a reader here will care about, and it is the nationality code, where it excuses an applicant from proving economic participation.

Belgium's single permit is not one decision taken by one authority. Chapter VIIbis of the Act of 15 December 1980 says the application for a work authorisation is made to the competent regional authority, and that making it counts as making an application to stay. The federal minister then decides the residence side, within four months of being told the file is complete, and if he does not decide in time the applicant is authorised to stay. The sting is in the next provision: that residence authorisation is valid only on condition that the regional authority takes a final decision authorising the work. A reader who learns what Belgium requires has learned half of it, and the other half is written by a region this record does not reach.

Nothing in the Act of 15 December 1980 is addressed to an investor, and the Act states no sum anywhere. Self-employment runs through a different instrument altogether. The Act of 19 February 1965 requires every foreigner carrying on a self-employed activity in Belgium to hold a professional card; the card may only be issued to someone already admitted to stay or to settle, must be applied for at the same time as the residence application where residence itself needs an authorisation, and falls away of right the moment the residence permit is withdrawn. That Act is now four texts rather than one: the federal version, a Flemish version, a Walloon version and a German-speaking Community version, and the Justel record states on its face that it has been repealed for the Flemish Region and for Brussels-Capital. What replaced it in those two regions is regional law, and no regional instrument was read here.

A third-country national who wants to study in Belgium applies at the Belgian post for where they live abroad. The exception is narrow and worth knowing: someone already lawfully in Belgium, on a short stay or on another title, may apply at their commune instead, but only before their current permission expires and only if they are already enrolled full time in a higher education institution. The file is a list: passport, the fee, an attestation from the institution, proof of means, sickness insurance covering all risks, a medical certificate and, over eighteen, a police record extract less than six months old. The Act does not set the amount of means; the King does. After the degree, the student may ask for up to twelve months in Belgium to look for work or start a business.

Belgian descent is written in article 8 of the nationality code, and it stops sooner than most readers expect. A child born in Belgium to a Belgian parent is Belgian. A child born abroad is Belgian if the Belgian parent was born in Belgium - but if that parent was also born abroad, the child is Belgian only where the parent made a declaration claiming it within five years of the birth, or where the child would otherwise hold no nationality at all by eighteen. There is no grandparent route: the article reaches a parent and goes no further. What the Act of 15 December 1980 does carry is a route back for people who lost Belgian nationality, and it is generous in one specific way - a foreigner who meets the conditions to recover it is admitted to stay as of right, without needing the twelve months of residence that recovery itself requires.

Family reunification with a third-country national in Belgium is in article 10 of the Act of 15 December 1980, and it is conditional in four separate ways. The sponsor must hold an unlimited right of residence and have been admitted or authorised to stay for at least two years - one year if the family ties already existed before the sponsor arrived, and no waiting at all where only children are joining. Both spouses must be over twenty-one. The sponsor must show sickness insurance, housing considered normal for a family of comparable size, and stable, regular, sufficient means, which article 10, § 5 fixes at 110 per cent of the guaranteed average minimum monthly income under article 3 of collective agreement no. 43 of 2 May 1988, plus ten per cent for each further dependent. The family of a Belgian is not in this article at all: article 40ter puts them in the Union chapter, and which half of that article applies turns on whether the Belgian has lived in another member state.

Title II, chapter I of the Act of 15 December 1980 is a separate statute inside the statute. A Union citizen may stay three months with no condition or formality beyond the document named in article 41, and may stay longer if they work or are looking for work with a real chance of being engaged, or have resources sufficient not to become a burden on social assistance together with sickness cover, or are enrolled in an educational establishment. The resources are not a figure: the Act pegs them to the level below which a person would qualify for social assistance, judged on the individual's own circumstances. No treaty gives nationals of any Latin American or Caribbean state a right to enter and stay in Belgium on nationality. What the Union decides for a reader of this corpus is the visa at the border, and nothing after it.

The ordinary way to become Belgian is not naturalisation. It is a declaration under article 12bis of the nationality code, and there are five doors into it. Five years of principal residence in Belgium on legal residence, with knowledge of one of the three national languages, proof of social integration and proof of economic participation - 468 working days in the last five years, or six quarters of self-employed contributions. Five years and marriage to a Belgian for at least three years of living together, on lighter integration terms. Five years for someone who cannot work because of disability or who has reached pension age, with no language or integration condition at all. Or ten years, with the language and proof of taking part in the life of the host community. Naturalisation survives in article 19 but has become something else entirely: it now requires exceptional merit in science, sport or socio-cultural life, and a reason why the declaration route is almost impossible for you. Nothing in the Code asks you to give up the nationality you have.

Belgian income tax is governed by the Code des impôts sur les revenus 1992. The federal legislation database carries that Code's record and does not carry its text. At the head of the record, and again in the place where the text should be, it prints that updating this text has been suspended since 2002, and refers the reader to the table of amendments or to the tax administration's own FisconetPlus database. The record shows the consolidation as updated to 9 April 2010, while the amendment table on the same page runs on without it: Acts of 2024, 2025 and 2026 are listed there, each changing articles of a text the database no longer serves. So this record says nothing about the residence test. Not that Belgium has none, and not which article carries it - we did not read the Code, because the place Belgium publishes its law does not have it, and FisconetPlus answered a JavaScript shell behind a CAPTCHA. A blocked text is a fact about our access and never a fact about the law, and on this record the blockage is the whole of what can honestly be said.

Belgium's right to a bank account is in its own statute rather than only in the Union directive behind it. Book VII of the Wetboek van economisch recht says no consumer may be discriminated against on grounds of nationality or residence when applying for, obtaining or holding a payment account; that every credit institution must offer the basic banking service; and that every consumer legally resident in a member state has a right to it, as does a Belgian living outside a member state who was struck from the Belgian population register no more than ten years ago. The price is capped at twelve euro a year and the institution must decide within ten working days of a complete application form. The limit is the same statute's own: the institution must refuse where opening the account would breach the money-laundering Act of 18 September 2017, and that Act is where the identity documents come from.

Belgian compulsory health insurance has a long list of people entitled to benefits in kind, and the last general entry is the one that matters to a newcomer: people entered in the National Register of natural persons. Two exclusions sit immediately under it. The first is anyone who is, or can be, covered by another health insurance scheme, Belgian or foreign. The second is written as a residence test: foreigners who are not admitted of right to stay more than three months, and those not authorised to settle or to stay more than six months. Health cover also runs the other way: a work permit and a student permit are both conditional on holding sickness insurance covering all risks in Belgium, so a new arrival has to bring cover before the system will give them any.

Two instruments decide this and neither of them names a country. The royal decree of 23 March 1998 says who may obtain a Belgian licence - people entered in the population register, the foreigners' register or the waiting register of a Belgian commune who have their normal residence in Belgium - and then says those same people may only drive under a Belgian or a European licence. So registration is the moment a non-European licence stops working. Whether you then exchange it without taking the tests is decided by article 23, § 2, 1° of the Act of 16 March 1968, which exempts a holder whose foreign national licence was issued under the rules applicable to international road traffic, or whose licence's validity is recognised under agreements made by the King. Neither instrument carries a list of states. The answer depends on which conventions your country joined and which agreements Belgium made with it, and those are not in the text read here.

Belgium does not decide this. Personal property imported by someone transferring their normal residence from a third country into the customs territory enters free of import duties, on conditions set by a directly applicable Union regulation: six months' possession and, for durable goods, use at the former residence; a continuous twelve months of normal residence outside the customs territory; and entry for free circulation within twelve months of the move. Alcohol, tobacco, commercial means of transport and trade equipment other than portable instruments of the applied or liberal arts get no relief at all.