NextSpring

Croatia Does Not Offer Registration to a Union Citizen, It Requires It - Within Eight Days of the Third Month

Answer

The general rule applies to you

No exception is recorded for citizens of Austria on this topic. That is the answer, not a gap - everything below is the rule you get, unchanged.

154 exceptions recorded across 56 countries · none match Austria to Croatia · Residency under a regional treaty

A national of an EEA member state or Switzerland does not enter Croatia under the Zakon o strancima at all: that Act is about third-country nationals, and a separate statute of 2019 carries the Union free movement right. Three months of stay need only a passport or identity card and no report to anybody. Past three months the right continues on the Directive's own grounds - work or self-employment, sufficient means and insurance, study, or joining a family member - but Croatia then does something Czechia does not: article 15(1) makes the person report temporary residence to the police, and gives them eight days from the end of the third month to do it. The certificate is issued without delay once they have. The means test is deliberately soft: article 13(2) forbids the authorities from asking for more than the amount that would qualify a person for social welfare in Croatia, and requires the applicant's personal position to be taken into account. Five years of continuous lawful residence gives permanent residence as of right, evidenced by a card valid for ten years, and absences of up to six months a year do not break the five.

Verified with official sourceMonitor - can change2026-10-10

At a glance

Stay with no formalities
Up to 3 months

Article 11(1) of the EEA nationals Act, which asks only for a valid travel document or identity card and that the person not become an unreasonable burden on social welfare.

Reporting a short stay
Not required

Article 11(2) of the EEA nationals Act.

Reporting a longer stay
Required, within 8 days of the third month ending

Article 15(1) of the EEA nationals Act.

How much money is enough
No more than the amount that would qualify you for Croatian social welfare

Article 13(2) of the EEA nationals Act, which also requires the person's individual position to be taken into account.

Work permit
None - an EEA national and their family may work without one

Article 6(2) of the EEA nationals Act.

Permanent residence
5 years of continuous lawful residence

Article 27(1) of the EEA nationals Act; article 27(2) lets absences of up to six months a year, or twelve continuous months for a listed reason, pass without breaking it.

Residence card for permanent residence
Valid for 10 years

Article 27(4) of the EEA nationals Act.

Health insurance
Must be regulated once residence is registered

Article 6(4) of the EEA nationals Act, which sends it to the statute on the health insurance of foreign nationals.

Requirements

  • A valid passport or national identity card
  • Past three months, one of the four grounds in article 13(1)
  • A report of temporary residence to the police within eight days of the third month ending
  • For the self-sufficient and for students, means and health insurance, assessed against the Croatian social welfare threshold

What applies to you

Nothing changes for a citizen of Austria

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

Text layer - verbatim verifiedZakon o državljanima država članica Europskog gospodarskog prostora i članovima njihovih obitelji · Članak 1. stavak 1.
«(1) Ovim se Zakonom propisuju uvjeti ulaska, kretanja, boravka i rada državljana država članica Europskoga gospodarskog prostora (u daljnjem tekstu: EGP) i članova njihovih obitelji.»

Our translation - not official

(1) This Act lays down the conditions of entry, movement, residence and work of nationals of member states of the European Economic Area (hereinafter: EEA) and of members of their families.

Why none of the Zakon o strancima applies: a Union citizen is governed by a statute of their own.

Read it at the source
About this source

Croatia's official gazette, at narodne-novine.nn.hr. An act takes legal effect on publication here and carries the gazette's issue number and date as part of its identity - the Zakon o strancima is NN 133/2020 and nothing else. Every item since 1990 is addressable twice: as /clanci/sluzbeni/<year>_<month>_<issue>_<seq>.html, and, for anything published since about 2016, by ELI at /eli/sluzbeni/<year>/<issue>/<seq>, which answers a 302 to the first form. The ELI-era pages also carry RDFa in the head: eli#amended_by and eli#changed_by list every amending act of a statute, which is how the amendment chain of a recent act is established rather than guessed. Items published before ELI - the Zakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu of 1991 among them - carry no metadata at all. The site serves plain HTTP to an ordinary client with no proxy and no warm-up. Its search form is ASP.NET and needs a POST with viewstate, but the complete yearly register is downloadable without one: /get_index_file.aspx?year=<YYYY>&type=csv returns every item of that year as tab-separated title, document type, issuing body and link, and 1990 to 2026 is 22 MB. That register is what makes a negative answer about an amendment possible.

Standing: Issues the instrument

Cannot be cited for: **It publishes acts as enacted and does not consolidate them.** There is no consolidated text of any Croatian statute on this site. The whole gazette has carried 222 items with 'pročišćeni tekst' in the title since 1990, and since 2016 they are statutes of professional chambers, party statutes and collective agreements; the last consolidated text of an Act was the Zakon o državnim službenicima in 2012. So what is read here is the act as published plus each amending act, and an article number quoted from an amending act is an instruction to amend rather than an article of the resulting law - it must be cited as the article of the amended Act, naming what put it there. A consequence worth stating plainly: because nothing on this site is a consolidation, no citation of it carries a consolidation cut-off, and an apparently current article may have been replaced by a later amending act published in a different issue. The register at /get_index_file.aspx is title-indexed, so an amending act whose title does not name the statute it amends will not be found by searching it. The gazette cannot be cited for anything it does not publish: the shortage-occupation decision under article 101(1) of the Zakon o strancima is made by the Employment Service's governing council and does not appear here, nor does the evidence the ministry competent for demography and emigration requires for the certificate on which the whole diaspora residence route turns, nor the average monthly net salary that every means threshold in Croatian immigration law is a fraction of, which the state statistics office publishes separately. zakon.hr and informator.hr carry consolidated Croatian texts and are commercial publishers, not government ones; they are not cited here.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedZakon o državljanima država članica Europskog gospodarskog prostora i članovima njihovih obitelji · Članak 1. stavak 3.
«(3) Odredbe ovoga Zakona koje se odnose na državljane država članica EGP-a odnose se i na državljane Švicarske Konfederacije.»

Our translation - not official

(3) The provisions of this Act that relate to nationals of EEA member states also relate to nationals of the Swiss Confederation.

Switzerland is inside the same regime.

Read it at the source
About this source

Croatia's official gazette, at narodne-novine.nn.hr. An act takes legal effect on publication here and carries the gazette's issue number and date as part of its identity - the Zakon o strancima is NN 133/2020 and nothing else. Every item since 1990 is addressable twice: as /clanci/sluzbeni/<year>_<month>_<issue>_<seq>.html, and, for anything published since about 2016, by ELI at /eli/sluzbeni/<year>/<issue>/<seq>, which answers a 302 to the first form. The ELI-era pages also carry RDFa in the head: eli#amended_by and eli#changed_by list every amending act of a statute, which is how the amendment chain of a recent act is established rather than guessed. Items published before ELI - the Zakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu of 1991 among them - carry no metadata at all. The site serves plain HTTP to an ordinary client with no proxy and no warm-up. Its search form is ASP.NET and needs a POST with viewstate, but the complete yearly register is downloadable without one: /get_index_file.aspx?year=<YYYY>&type=csv returns every item of that year as tab-separated title, document type, issuing body and link, and 1990 to 2026 is 22 MB. That register is what makes a negative answer about an amendment possible.

Standing: Issues the instrument

Cannot be cited for: **It publishes acts as enacted and does not consolidate them.** There is no consolidated text of any Croatian statute on this site. The whole gazette has carried 222 items with 'pročišćeni tekst' in the title since 1990, and since 2016 they are statutes of professional chambers, party statutes and collective agreements; the last consolidated text of an Act was the Zakon o državnim službenicima in 2012. So what is read here is the act as published plus each amending act, and an article number quoted from an amending act is an instruction to amend rather than an article of the resulting law - it must be cited as the article of the amended Act, naming what put it there. A consequence worth stating plainly: because nothing on this site is a consolidation, no citation of it carries a consolidation cut-off, and an apparently current article may have been replaced by a later amending act published in a different issue. The register at /get_index_file.aspx is title-indexed, so an amending act whose title does not name the statute it amends will not be found by searching it. The gazette cannot be cited for anything it does not publish: the shortage-occupation decision under article 101(1) of the Zakon o strancima is made by the Employment Service's governing council and does not appear here, nor does the evidence the ministry competent for demography and emigration requires for the certificate on which the whole diaspora residence route turns, nor the average monthly net salary that every means threshold in Croatian immigration law is a fraction of, which the state statistics office publishes separately. zakon.hr and informator.hr carry consolidated Croatian texts and are commercial publishers, not government ones; they are not cited here.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedZakon o državljanima država članica Europskog gospodarskog prostora i članovima njihovih obitelji · Članak 11. stavak 1.
«(1) Državljanin države članice EGP-a ima pravo boraviti u Republici Hrvatskoj do tri mjeseca od dana ulaska u Republiku Hrvatsku ako posjeduje valjanu putnu ispravu ili osobnu iskaznicu, dok nije neprimjeren teret sustavu socijalne skrbi.»

Our translation - not official

(1) A national of an EEA member state has the right to reside in the Republic of Croatia for up to three months from the day of entry into the Republic of Croatia if he possesses a valid travel document or identity card, for as long as he is not an unreasonable burden on the social welfare system.

Three months on a document and a condition, with no procedure attached.

Read it at the source
About this source

Croatia's official gazette, at narodne-novine.nn.hr. An act takes legal effect on publication here and carries the gazette's issue number and date as part of its identity - the Zakon o strancima is NN 133/2020 and nothing else. Every item since 1990 is addressable twice: as /clanci/sluzbeni/<year>_<month>_<issue>_<seq>.html, and, for anything published since about 2016, by ELI at /eli/sluzbeni/<year>/<issue>/<seq>, which answers a 302 to the first form. The ELI-era pages also carry RDFa in the head: eli#amended_by and eli#changed_by list every amending act of a statute, which is how the amendment chain of a recent act is established rather than guessed. Items published before ELI - the Zakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu of 1991 among them - carry no metadata at all. The site serves plain HTTP to an ordinary client with no proxy and no warm-up. Its search form is ASP.NET and needs a POST with viewstate, but the complete yearly register is downloadable without one: /get_index_file.aspx?year=<YYYY>&type=csv returns every item of that year as tab-separated title, document type, issuing body and link, and 1990 to 2026 is 22 MB. That register is what makes a negative answer about an amendment possible.

Standing: Issues the instrument

Cannot be cited for: **It publishes acts as enacted and does not consolidate them.** There is no consolidated text of any Croatian statute on this site. The whole gazette has carried 222 items with 'pročišćeni tekst' in the title since 1990, and since 2016 they are statutes of professional chambers, party statutes and collective agreements; the last consolidated text of an Act was the Zakon o državnim službenicima in 2012. So what is read here is the act as published plus each amending act, and an article number quoted from an amending act is an instruction to amend rather than an article of the resulting law - it must be cited as the article of the amended Act, naming what put it there. A consequence worth stating plainly: because nothing on this site is a consolidation, no citation of it carries a consolidation cut-off, and an apparently current article may have been replaced by a later amending act published in a different issue. The register at /get_index_file.aspx is title-indexed, so an amending act whose title does not name the statute it amends will not be found by searching it. The gazette cannot be cited for anything it does not publish: the shortage-occupation decision under article 101(1) of the Zakon o strancima is made by the Employment Service's governing council and does not appear here, nor does the evidence the ministry competent for demography and emigration requires for the certificate on which the whole diaspora residence route turns, nor the average monthly net salary that every means threshold in Croatian immigration law is a fraction of, which the state statistics office publishes separately. zakon.hr and informator.hr carry consolidated Croatian texts and are commercial publishers, not government ones; they are not cited here.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedZakon o državljanima država članica Europskog gospodarskog prostora i članovima njihovih obitelji · Članak 11. stavak 2.
«(2) Državljanin države članice EGP-a nije dužan prijaviti kratkotrajni boravak policijskoj upravi odnosno policijskoj postaji.»

Our translation - not official

(2) A national of an EEA member state is not obliged to report a short stay to the police administration or police station.

The exemption that makes article 15(1) the surprise it is.

Read it at the source
About this source

Croatia's official gazette, at narodne-novine.nn.hr. An act takes legal effect on publication here and carries the gazette's issue number and date as part of its identity - the Zakon o strancima is NN 133/2020 and nothing else. Every item since 1990 is addressable twice: as /clanci/sluzbeni/<year>_<month>_<issue>_<seq>.html, and, for anything published since about 2016, by ELI at /eli/sluzbeni/<year>/<issue>/<seq>, which answers a 302 to the first form. The ELI-era pages also carry RDFa in the head: eli#amended_by and eli#changed_by list every amending act of a statute, which is how the amendment chain of a recent act is established rather than guessed. Items published before ELI - the Zakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu of 1991 among them - carry no metadata at all. The site serves plain HTTP to an ordinary client with no proxy and no warm-up. Its search form is ASP.NET and needs a POST with viewstate, but the complete yearly register is downloadable without one: /get_index_file.aspx?year=<YYYY>&type=csv returns every item of that year as tab-separated title, document type, issuing body and link, and 1990 to 2026 is 22 MB. That register is what makes a negative answer about an amendment possible.

Standing: Issues the instrument

Cannot be cited for: **It publishes acts as enacted and does not consolidate them.** There is no consolidated text of any Croatian statute on this site. The whole gazette has carried 222 items with 'pročišćeni tekst' in the title since 1990, and since 2016 they are statutes of professional chambers, party statutes and collective agreements; the last consolidated text of an Act was the Zakon o državnim službenicima in 2012. So what is read here is the act as published plus each amending act, and an article number quoted from an amending act is an instruction to amend rather than an article of the resulting law - it must be cited as the article of the amended Act, naming what put it there. A consequence worth stating plainly: because nothing on this site is a consolidation, no citation of it carries a consolidation cut-off, and an apparently current article may have been replaced by a later amending act published in a different issue. The register at /get_index_file.aspx is title-indexed, so an amending act whose title does not name the statute it amends will not be found by searching it. The gazette cannot be cited for anything it does not publish: the shortage-occupation decision under article 101(1) of the Zakon o strancima is made by the Employment Service's governing council and does not appear here, nor does the evidence the ministry competent for demography and emigration requires for the certificate on which the whole diaspora residence route turns, nor the average monthly net salary that every means threshold in Croatian immigration law is a fraction of, which the state statistics office publishes separately. zakon.hr and informator.hr carry consolidated Croatian texts and are commercial publishers, not government ones; they are not cited here.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedZakon o državljanima država članica Europskog gospodarskog prostora i članovima njihovih obitelji · Članak 15. stavak 1.
«(1) Državljanin države članice EGP-a koji namjerava boraviti duže od tri mjeseca u Republici Hrvatskoj dužan je, najkasnije u roku od osam dana od isteka tri mjeseca boravka, prijaviti privremeni boravak nadležnoj policijskoj upravi odnosno policijskoj postaji prema mjestu boravka.»

Our translation - not official

(1) A national of an EEA member state who intends to reside in the Republic of Croatia for longer than three months is obliged, at the latest within eight days of the expiry of the three months of residence, to report temporary residence to the competent police administration or police station according to the place of residence.

A duty, not an option. The Czech Act offers the equivalent certificate on request and demands nothing.

Read it at the source
About this source

Croatia's official gazette, at narodne-novine.nn.hr. An act takes legal effect on publication here and carries the gazette's issue number and date as part of its identity - the Zakon o strancima is NN 133/2020 and nothing else. Every item since 1990 is addressable twice: as /clanci/sluzbeni/<year>_<month>_<issue>_<seq>.html, and, for anything published since about 2016, by ELI at /eli/sluzbeni/<year>/<issue>/<seq>, which answers a 302 to the first form. The ELI-era pages also carry RDFa in the head: eli#amended_by and eli#changed_by list every amending act of a statute, which is how the amendment chain of a recent act is established rather than guessed. Items published before ELI - the Zakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu of 1991 among them - carry no metadata at all. The site serves plain HTTP to an ordinary client with no proxy and no warm-up. Its search form is ASP.NET and needs a POST with viewstate, but the complete yearly register is downloadable without one: /get_index_file.aspx?year=<YYYY>&type=csv returns every item of that year as tab-separated title, document type, issuing body and link, and 1990 to 2026 is 22 MB. That register is what makes a negative answer about an amendment possible.

Standing: Issues the instrument

Cannot be cited for: **It publishes acts as enacted and does not consolidate them.** There is no consolidated text of any Croatian statute on this site. The whole gazette has carried 222 items with 'pročišćeni tekst' in the title since 1990, and since 2016 they are statutes of professional chambers, party statutes and collective agreements; the last consolidated text of an Act was the Zakon o državnim službenicima in 2012. So what is read here is the act as published plus each amending act, and an article number quoted from an amending act is an instruction to amend rather than an article of the resulting law - it must be cited as the article of the amended Act, naming what put it there. A consequence worth stating plainly: because nothing on this site is a consolidation, no citation of it carries a consolidation cut-off, and an apparently current article may have been replaced by a later amending act published in a different issue. The register at /get_index_file.aspx is title-indexed, so an amending act whose title does not name the statute it amends will not be found by searching it. The gazette cannot be cited for anything it does not publish: the shortage-occupation decision under article 101(1) of the Zakon o strancima is made by the Employment Service's governing council and does not appear here, nor does the evidence the ministry competent for demography and emigration requires for the certificate on which the whole diaspora residence route turns, nor the average monthly net salary that every means threshold in Croatian immigration law is a fraction of, which the state statistics office publishes separately. zakon.hr and informator.hr carry consolidated Croatian texts and are commercial publishers, not government ones; they are not cited here.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedZakon o državljanima država članica Europskog gospodarskog prostora i članovima njihovih obitelji · Članak 13. stavak 1. točka 2.
«u druge svrhe, a ima dostatna sredstva za uzdržavanje za sebe i članove svoje obitelji kako ne bi tijekom boravka u Republici Hrvatskoj postali teret za sustav socijalne skrbi te ima zdravstveno osiguranje»

Our translation - not official

for other purposes, and has sufficient means of support for himself and the members of his family so that during their residence in the Republic of Croatia they do not become a burden on the social welfare system, and has health insurance

The self-sufficiency ground, which is the Union route for a person living on their own money.

Read it at the source
About this source

Croatia's official gazette, at narodne-novine.nn.hr. An act takes legal effect on publication here and carries the gazette's issue number and date as part of its identity - the Zakon o strancima is NN 133/2020 and nothing else. Every item since 1990 is addressable twice: as /clanci/sluzbeni/<year>_<month>_<issue>_<seq>.html, and, for anything published since about 2016, by ELI at /eli/sluzbeni/<year>/<issue>/<seq>, which answers a 302 to the first form. The ELI-era pages also carry RDFa in the head: eli#amended_by and eli#changed_by list every amending act of a statute, which is how the amendment chain of a recent act is established rather than guessed. Items published before ELI - the Zakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu of 1991 among them - carry no metadata at all. The site serves plain HTTP to an ordinary client with no proxy and no warm-up. Its search form is ASP.NET and needs a POST with viewstate, but the complete yearly register is downloadable without one: /get_index_file.aspx?year=<YYYY>&type=csv returns every item of that year as tab-separated title, document type, issuing body and link, and 1990 to 2026 is 22 MB. That register is what makes a negative answer about an amendment possible.

Standing: Issues the instrument

Cannot be cited for: **It publishes acts as enacted and does not consolidate them.** There is no consolidated text of any Croatian statute on this site. The whole gazette has carried 222 items with 'pročišćeni tekst' in the title since 1990, and since 2016 they are statutes of professional chambers, party statutes and collective agreements; the last consolidated text of an Act was the Zakon o državnim službenicima in 2012. So what is read here is the act as published plus each amending act, and an article number quoted from an amending act is an instruction to amend rather than an article of the resulting law - it must be cited as the article of the amended Act, naming what put it there. A consequence worth stating plainly: because nothing on this site is a consolidation, no citation of it carries a consolidation cut-off, and an apparently current article may have been replaced by a later amending act published in a different issue. The register at /get_index_file.aspx is title-indexed, so an amending act whose title does not name the statute it amends will not be found by searching it. The gazette cannot be cited for anything it does not publish: the shortage-occupation decision under article 101(1) of the Zakon o strancima is made by the Employment Service's governing council and does not appear here, nor does the evidence the ministry competent for demography and emigration requires for the certificate on which the whole diaspora residence route turns, nor the average monthly net salary that every means threshold in Croatian immigration law is a fraction of, which the state statistics office publishes separately. zakon.hr and informator.hr carry consolidated Croatian texts and are commercial publishers, not government ones; they are not cited here.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedZakon o državljanima država članica Europskog gospodarskog prostora i članovima njihovih obitelji · Članak 13. stavak 2.
«(2) Prilikom ocjenjivanja jesu li sredstva za uzdržavanje iz stavka 1. točaka 2. i 3. ovoga članka dostatna uzet će se u obzir osobni položaj državljanina države članice EGP-a i člana njegove obitelji i neće se zahtijevati da posjeduje iznos veći od visine sredstava potrebnih za ostvarivanje prava po osnovi socijalne skrbi u Republici Hrvatskoj sukladno posebnim propisima.»

Our translation - not official

(2) In assessing whether the means of support under paragraph 1 points 2 and 3 of this article are sufficient, account shall be taken of the personal position of the national of the EEA member state and of the member of his family, and he shall not be required to possess an amount greater than the amount of means needed to qualify for rights on the basis of social welfare in the Republic of Croatia in accordance with special regulations.

A ceiling on the test rather than a floor, and the reason no figure appears on this record.

Read it at the source
About this source

Croatia's official gazette, at narodne-novine.nn.hr. An act takes legal effect on publication here and carries the gazette's issue number and date as part of its identity - the Zakon o strancima is NN 133/2020 and nothing else. Every item since 1990 is addressable twice: as /clanci/sluzbeni/<year>_<month>_<issue>_<seq>.html, and, for anything published since about 2016, by ELI at /eli/sluzbeni/<year>/<issue>/<seq>, which answers a 302 to the first form. The ELI-era pages also carry RDFa in the head: eli#amended_by and eli#changed_by list every amending act of a statute, which is how the amendment chain of a recent act is established rather than guessed. Items published before ELI - the Zakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu of 1991 among them - carry no metadata at all. The site serves plain HTTP to an ordinary client with no proxy and no warm-up. Its search form is ASP.NET and needs a POST with viewstate, but the complete yearly register is downloadable without one: /get_index_file.aspx?year=<YYYY>&type=csv returns every item of that year as tab-separated title, document type, issuing body and link, and 1990 to 2026 is 22 MB. That register is what makes a negative answer about an amendment possible.

Standing: Issues the instrument

Cannot be cited for: **It publishes acts as enacted and does not consolidate them.** There is no consolidated text of any Croatian statute on this site. The whole gazette has carried 222 items with 'pročišćeni tekst' in the title since 1990, and since 2016 they are statutes of professional chambers, party statutes and collective agreements; the last consolidated text of an Act was the Zakon o državnim službenicima in 2012. So what is read here is the act as published plus each amending act, and an article number quoted from an amending act is an instruction to amend rather than an article of the resulting law - it must be cited as the article of the amended Act, naming what put it there. A consequence worth stating plainly: because nothing on this site is a consolidation, no citation of it carries a consolidation cut-off, and an apparently current article may have been replaced by a later amending act published in a different issue. The register at /get_index_file.aspx is title-indexed, so an amending act whose title does not name the statute it amends will not be found by searching it. The gazette cannot be cited for anything it does not publish: the shortage-occupation decision under article 101(1) of the Zakon o strancima is made by the Employment Service's governing council and does not appear here, nor does the evidence the ministry competent for demography and emigration requires for the certificate on which the whole diaspora residence route turns, nor the average monthly net salary that every means threshold in Croatian immigration law is a fraction of, which the state statistics office publishes separately. zakon.hr and informator.hr carry consolidated Croatian texts and are commercial publishers, not government ones; they are not cited here.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedZakon o državljanima država članica Europskog gospodarskog prostora i članovima njihovih obitelji · Članak 6. stavak 2.
«(2) Državljanin države članice EGP-a i član njegove obitelji mogu u Republici Hrvatskoj raditi bez dozvole za boravak i rad odnosno bez potvrde o prijavi rada koje se izdaju sukladno propisu kojim se uređuje boravak državljana trećih zemalja.»

Our translation - not official

(2) A national of an EEA member state and a member of his family may work in the Republic of Croatia without a residence and work permit or a work registration certificate issued under the regulation governing the residence of third-country nationals.

The labour market test, the Employment Service opinion and the employer ratio in article 99 of the Zakon o strancima all fall away.

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About this source

Croatia's official gazette, at narodne-novine.nn.hr. An act takes legal effect on publication here and carries the gazette's issue number and date as part of its identity - the Zakon o strancima is NN 133/2020 and nothing else. Every item since 1990 is addressable twice: as /clanci/sluzbeni/<year>_<month>_<issue>_<seq>.html, and, for anything published since about 2016, by ELI at /eli/sluzbeni/<year>/<issue>/<seq>, which answers a 302 to the first form. The ELI-era pages also carry RDFa in the head: eli#amended_by and eli#changed_by list every amending act of a statute, which is how the amendment chain of a recent act is established rather than guessed. Items published before ELI - the Zakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu of 1991 among them - carry no metadata at all. The site serves plain HTTP to an ordinary client with no proxy and no warm-up. Its search form is ASP.NET and needs a POST with viewstate, but the complete yearly register is downloadable without one: /get_index_file.aspx?year=<YYYY>&type=csv returns every item of that year as tab-separated title, document type, issuing body and link, and 1990 to 2026 is 22 MB. That register is what makes a negative answer about an amendment possible.

Standing: Issues the instrument

Cannot be cited for: **It publishes acts as enacted and does not consolidate them.** There is no consolidated text of any Croatian statute on this site. The whole gazette has carried 222 items with 'pročišćeni tekst' in the title since 1990, and since 2016 they are statutes of professional chambers, party statutes and collective agreements; the last consolidated text of an Act was the Zakon o državnim službenicima in 2012. So what is read here is the act as published plus each amending act, and an article number quoted from an amending act is an instruction to amend rather than an article of the resulting law - it must be cited as the article of the amended Act, naming what put it there. A consequence worth stating plainly: because nothing on this site is a consolidation, no citation of it carries a consolidation cut-off, and an apparently current article may have been replaced by a later amending act published in a different issue. The register at /get_index_file.aspx is title-indexed, so an amending act whose title does not name the statute it amends will not be found by searching it. The gazette cannot be cited for anything it does not publish: the shortage-occupation decision under article 101(1) of the Zakon o strancima is made by the Employment Service's governing council and does not appear here, nor does the evidence the ministry competent for demography and emigration requires for the certificate on which the whole diaspora residence route turns, nor the average monthly net salary that every means threshold in Croatian immigration law is a fraction of, which the state statistics office publishes separately. zakon.hr and informator.hr carry consolidated Croatian texts and are commercial publishers, not government ones; they are not cited here.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Text layer - verbatim verifiedZakon o državljanima država članica Europskog gospodarskog prostora i članovima njihovih obitelji · Članak 27. stavak 1.
«(1) Državljanin države članice EGP-a ima pravo na stalni boravak nakon pet godina neprekidnog zakonitog boravka u Republici Hrvatskoj.»

Our translation - not official

(1) A national of an EEA member state has the right to permanent residence after five years of continuous lawful residence in the Republic of Croatia.

A right, not a discretion, and with no language condition.

Read it at the source
About this source

Croatia's official gazette, at narodne-novine.nn.hr. An act takes legal effect on publication here and carries the gazette's issue number and date as part of its identity - the Zakon o strancima is NN 133/2020 and nothing else. Every item since 1990 is addressable twice: as /clanci/sluzbeni/<year>_<month>_<issue>_<seq>.html, and, for anything published since about 2016, by ELI at /eli/sluzbeni/<year>/<issue>/<seq>, which answers a 302 to the first form. The ELI-era pages also carry RDFa in the head: eli#amended_by and eli#changed_by list every amending act of a statute, which is how the amendment chain of a recent act is established rather than guessed. Items published before ELI - the Zakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu of 1991 among them - carry no metadata at all. The site serves plain HTTP to an ordinary client with no proxy and no warm-up. Its search form is ASP.NET and needs a POST with viewstate, but the complete yearly register is downloadable without one: /get_index_file.aspx?year=<YYYY>&type=csv returns every item of that year as tab-separated title, document type, issuing body and link, and 1990 to 2026 is 22 MB. That register is what makes a negative answer about an amendment possible.

Standing: Issues the instrument

Cannot be cited for: **It publishes acts as enacted and does not consolidate them.** There is no consolidated text of any Croatian statute on this site. The whole gazette has carried 222 items with 'pročišćeni tekst' in the title since 1990, and since 2016 they are statutes of professional chambers, party statutes and collective agreements; the last consolidated text of an Act was the Zakon o državnim službenicima in 2012. So what is read here is the act as published plus each amending act, and an article number quoted from an amending act is an instruction to amend rather than an article of the resulting law - it must be cited as the article of the amended Act, naming what put it there. A consequence worth stating plainly: because nothing on this site is a consolidation, no citation of it carries a consolidation cut-off, and an apparently current article may have been replaced by a later amending act published in a different issue. The register at /get_index_file.aspx is title-indexed, so an amending act whose title does not name the statute it amends will not be found by searching it. The gazette cannot be cited for anything it does not publish: the shortage-occupation decision under article 101(1) of the Zakon o strancima is made by the Employment Service's governing council and does not appear here, nor does the evidence the ministry competent for demography and emigration requires for the certificate on which the whole diaspora residence route turns, nor the average monthly net salary that every means threshold in Croatian immigration law is a fraction of, which the state statistics office publishes separately. zakon.hr and informator.hr carry consolidated Croatian texts and are commercial publishers, not government ones; they are not cited here.

We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source

Practical notes

Nationals of the Union and the wider Economic Area are outside the Zakon o strancima entirely: article 1(1) of that Act covers third-country nationals, and a separate statute, NN 66/2019, covers them. It has been amended by NN 53/2020, NN 144/2020 and NN 114/2022, none of which touches articles 11, 13, 15 or 27.

The amount that qualifies a person for Croatian social welfare is set by the social welfare legislation, which is not read here, so this record states the rule rather than a figure.

NN 144/2020 added articles 69.a to 69.f for United Kingdom nationals covered by article 10 of the Withdrawal Agreement. Those provisions are not read in this record.

Article 15(2) lists the five purposes a Union citizen may register for, which are not identical to the four grounds of right in article 13(1): registration adds life partnership.

Sources1 · all accessed 2026-10-10
  • issues
    NN 66/2019, Zakon o državljanima država članica Europskog gospodarskog prostora i članovima njihovih obitelji

    Narodne novine

    About this source

    Croatia's official gazette, at narodne-novine.nn.hr. An act takes legal effect on publication here and carries the gazette's issue number and date as part of its identity - the Zakon o strancima is NN 133/2020 and nothing else. Every item since 1990 is addressable twice: as /clanci/sluzbeni/<year>_<month>_<issue>_<seq>.html, and, for anything published since about 2016, by ELI at /eli/sluzbeni/<year>/<issue>/<seq>, which answers a 302 to the first form. The ELI-era pages also carry RDFa in the head: eli#amended_by and eli#changed_by list every amending act of a statute, which is how the amendment chain of a recent act is established rather than guessed. Items published before ELI - the Zakon o hrvatskom državljanstvu of 1991 among them - carry no metadata at all. The site serves plain HTTP to an ordinary client with no proxy and no warm-up. Its search form is ASP.NET and needs a POST with viewstate, but the complete yearly register is downloadable without one: /get_index_file.aspx?year=<YYYY>&type=csv returns every item of that year as tab-separated title, document type, issuing body and link, and 1990 to 2026 is 22 MB. That register is what makes a negative answer about an amendment possible.

    Standing: Issues the instrument

    Cannot be cited for: **It publishes acts as enacted and does not consolidate them.** There is no consolidated text of any Croatian statute on this site. The whole gazette has carried 222 items with 'pročišćeni tekst' in the title since 1990, and since 2016 they are statutes of professional chambers, party statutes and collective agreements; the last consolidated text of an Act was the Zakon o državnim službenicima in 2012. So what is read here is the act as published plus each amending act, and an article number quoted from an amending act is an instruction to amend rather than an article of the resulting law - it must be cited as the article of the amended Act, naming what put it there. A consequence worth stating plainly: because nothing on this site is a consolidation, no citation of it carries a consolidation cut-off, and an apparently current article may have been replaced by a later amending act published in a different issue. The register at /get_index_file.aspx is title-indexed, so an amending act whose title does not name the statute it amends will not be found by searching it. The gazette cannot be cited for anything it does not publish: the shortage-occupation decision under article 101(1) of the Zakon o strancima is made by the Employment Service's governing council and does not appear here, nor does the evidence the ministry competent for demography and emigration requires for the certificate on which the whole diaspora residence route turns, nor the average monthly net salary that every means threshold in Croatian immigration law is a fraction of, which the state statistics office publishes separately. zakon.hr and informator.hr carry consolidated Croatian texts and are commercial publishers, not government ones; they are not cited here.

    We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source