El Salvador

El Salvador keeps a rentista category and writes its threshold as a multiple of the minimum wage rather than as a sum, so the number moves whenever the Ministry of Labour reissues the wage decree and never needs amending. Four monthly minimum wages for the commerce-and-services sector, rising to six where two or more people come with you. The income has to come from or be generated abroad, it has to be monthly, permanent and stable, and the status forbids paid work of any kind in the country with two narrow exceptions - work for the state or a municipality in a specialised field, and teaching. The grant is one year at a time, which is shorter than most of the law's other temporary categories, and after one year of it permanent residence can be applied for.

Ninety days, and then ninety more if you ask for them. The migration law caps the tourist period at ninety calendar days and allows one extension of up to another ninety, granted on a showing that the stay has a reasonable purpose - so the ordinary ceiling is six months, reached by one application rather than by leaving and returning. A second extension of ninety days exists but only for disaster, epidemic, natural phenomenon or declared public calamity. Nothing in the law counts tourist days across trips, which is the opposite of Peru and Colombia. Two things are not in the reader's control: the visa itself never fixes how long you may stay, because the law gives that decision to the officer at the border, and the list of nationalities that need a visa is the one document the migration directorate does not publish as a readable page.

The pensioner's threshold is three monthly minimum wages for commerce and services, one lower than the rentista's, and the pension has to be monthly, permanent, stable and from abroad. What makes the category worth the paperwork is article 146: exemption from income tax on the sums declared as coming from abroad, one duty-free household shipment up to twenty thousand dollars CIF, and one duty-free vehicle up to twenty-five thousand dollars CIF, repeatable once every five years. The vehicle can be sold on free of those duties, but only after five years and with the Ministry of Finance's authorisation. Switch to another status inside four years and every exempted tax falls due. Paid work is forbidden apart from specialised work for the state or a municipality and teaching, and the law tells the directorate in terms to go and check.

Work is a permission attached to a temporary residence, not a status of its own, and who grants it depends on whether you are employed or self-employed. Self-employment is authorised by the migration directorate and limited to the activities it names. Employment by someone else needs a favourable opinion from the Ministry of Labour, which has thirty working days to give it and whose silence counts as consent - a deemed-approval rule that is rarer in the region than it ought to be. Central Americans by origin are outside that machinery altogether: the migration directorate issues their work and stay permit on its own. Losing the job does not make you irregular; it starts a ninety-working-day clock to find another, and five days to leave if you do not. Temporary residence of any kind is capped at five years in total, and since March 2026 a temporary resident has to be physically in the country at least ninety days a year.

There are two real investor thresholds in Salvadoran law and both are small. Ten thousand dollars subscribed and paid as a shareholder in a Salvadoran company, or two thousand five hundred dollars of assets in a sole trader's business, each buying two years of temporary residence renewable. Both are reserved to foreigners who are not Central American by origin - Central Americans reach the same place on easier terms through their own route. A third, open-ended category exists for the investor proper, with no sum in the law at all: the requirement is registration of the foreign capital with the Ministry of Economy's National Investment Office, which decides what counts. Alongside all this sits the programme the country is known for. In 2023 the law gained a naturalisation ground for foreigners who meet the requirements of government programmes to attract investors or donors, and in 2025 a permanent-residence ground for foreigners who join government-promoted programmes, exempt from the two-year absence rule, with its own fee of six hundred and ninety dollars. Those three amendments are the whole of the legal footing we could find. The million-dollar figure, the thousand places a year and the fee for dependants are published by the programme's promoters and by nothing we could read as an instrument.

One year at a time, renewable, for technical, university or specialised study at an institution recognised by the Ministry of Education, or for unpaid research. Two things set it apart from the student routes elsewhere in the region. It permits paid work - part-time, or for the duration of a contract presented - as long as that does not undercut the student status, which most countries either forbid outright or hedge with a weekly hour limit. And it is a dead end by design: the law says in terms that this kind of residence does not enable permanent residence, and that the holder must leave once the purpose of the stay is finished unless they change category. The study institution is made to report enrolment and withdrawal to the directorate and to the Ministry of Education within thirty days.

El Salvador has no residence category based on descent from a Salvadoran, and reading the two closed lists in the migration law is what shows it: twenty-three grounds for temporary residence in article 109, thirteen for permanent residence in article 152, and none of them is descent. The reason is that the Constitution already puts descent one level higher. Anyone born abroad to a Salvadoran father or mother is Salvadoran by birth - not eligible to become Salvadoran, but Salvadoran - and the migration law gives them a right of entry as a national on documentary proof of the parent's nationality and of the filiation, even where the birth was never registered in the country. So the question a would-be applicant should be asking is not which visa a Salvadoran parent unlocks but how to register a birth. The line stops at one generation in the constitutional text: article 90 reaches the child of a Salvadoran and says nothing about a grandchild.

Marriage and an unmarried union are treated alike, and the route is unusually generous at the point where most countries are harshest: the law says the foreign spouse keeps the temporary residence even after the marriage is dissolved or the Salvadoran spouse dies, and a partner in an unmarried union keeps it to the end of its term. The price of that is a check at the front: the directorate is required to verify family roots and to ask for further information to prevent fraud of law. Two years of temporary residence, renewable; permanent residence after one uninterrupted year of it; naturalisation after two years of residence counted either side of the wedding. The Constitution and the migration law agree on that last figure, which they do not always.

Two different things travel under the name CA-4 and only one of them is about residence. The older one is free movement for nationals of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, who cross between the four on an identity card rather than a passport; it was extended to air travel in 1997 and it is movement, not settlement. The newer one is the 2005 Convenio creating the Central American Single Visa, which is about third-country nationals and which says in terms that it does not carry residence. What actually gives a Central American a place in El Salvador is the country's own law, and it is generous at every step: the labour-market opinion is waived, temporary residence runs two years for any lawful activity, permanent residence is available directly on regular entry with no prior temporary residence at all, the permit fees are half the foreigner rate, and after a year of permanent residence a Central American can become Salvadoran by birth - not naturalised - without renouncing anything.

Five years of residence for anyone, one year for Spaniards and Spanish Americans, two for the spouse of a Salvadoran - and separately, for Central Americans, a route that is not naturalisation at all but a declaration of Salvadoran nationality by birth. The Constitution sets the periods and the migration law repeats them, with one difference that matters: the Constitution says 'residencia' and the law, since the 2023 rewrite, says 'residencia definitiva' for the one-year Spanish and Spanish American route while counting temporary and permanent residence together for the five-year and two-year ones. The 2023 rewrite also added a fifth ground the Constitution does not contain, for foreigners meeting the requirements of government investor or donor programmes. The requirement most likely to stop an application is documentary rather than temporal: the file must include a certificate from the applicant's own country stating that that country permits dual nationality. Naturalised status is the weaker kind - it is lost by two consecutive years back in the country of origin or five years anywhere abroad, and by a final conviction for a serious intentional crime, after which it can never be recovered.

Two things make El Salvador unusual and they work in the same direction. The threshold is two hundred consecutive days in a calendar year rather than the hundred and eighty-three almost everyone else uses, so a stay that would make you resident in Peru, Colombia or Mexico leaves you outside the Salvadoran net - and once you have been domiciled for more than a calendar year you may be away a hundred and sixty-five days without losing the status. And the tax itself is territorial. Article 15 of the income tax law, headed 'Renta mundial', was repealed, and what is left is article 16, which defines Salvadoran-source income by where the property, the activity, the capital and the service are. Becoming tax resident here therefore does not expose foreign income to Salvadoran tax in the way it would in Colombia, Mexico or Brazil. The rate scale for a resident runs from an exempt band up to thirty per cent; a non-domiciled individual pays a flat thirty per cent on Salvadoran-source income.

El Salvador is one of the few countries in this set where the documents a foreigner may present to open an account are written into a statute rather than left to each bank's compliance desk. The Ley para Facilitar la Inclusión Financiera created a simplified savings account and an electronic money record, and for both it says the same thing: the Salvadoran identity document, or, for foreigners, a passport or a temporary or permanent resident card. A passport is enough, which means the simplified account does not require residence. The price of that is a ceiling - accumulated transactions in a month may not exceed four monthly urban minimum wages for commerce and services, and no single transaction may exceed one - and three further limits: one such account per person per institution, electronic use only, and a balance untouched for five years passing to the State. Neither account needs a Salvadoran tax number. What none of this settles is the ordinary current account, whose conditions each bank sets, and we read no instrument governing those.

Two systems, and only one of them has a membership. The Constitution makes the health of the inhabitants of the Republic a public good and obliges the State to give free assistance to the sick who lack resources - 'habitantes', not citizens, and not residents - which is the foundation of the public hospital network. The contributory scheme, the Instituto Salvadoreño del Seguro Social, is attached to employment rather than to nationality or status: it applies to every worker who depends on an employer, whatever the form of the relationship or how the pay is set, and the law sets no condition of nationality anywhere in it. The employer pays 7.50 per cent and the worker 3 per cent of pay for general health and occupational risks. Someone with no employer is not shut out but is not automatically in either: voluntary insurance exists, authorised by regulation, and the voluntary member pays both halves.

Ninety days on the foreign licence, and only in your own vehicle. The traffic regulation gives the Vice-Ministry of Transport power to authorise a visitor with a foreign licence to drive vehicles they own for a maximum of ninety days, after which they are obliged to get a Salvadoran one - and it asks them to report their date of arrival to the traffic directorate and show the licence, which is a step almost nobody mentions. Diplomatic and consular staff are excepted. The exchange itself is startlingly light. An ordinary first licence needs literacy, a learner permit, a completed learning period and theory, practical and visual examinations. A holder of a foreign licence needs an application and a sight test. There is no treaty list, no reciprocity condition and no country-by-country table of the kind Chile, Uruguay and Colombia operate. The one real condition is upstream: the regulation says a licence is a privilege of residents of the Republic.

The Ley de Equipajes gives every traveller used personal effects free of duty plus a thousand dollars of new goods, rising by five hundred in December and January, and a flat thirty per cent option on anything above that. What it does not give a foreigner is a household shipment. Its household allowance - fifteen thousand dollars CIF, and never a vehicle - is defined for the retornante, and the regulation defines a retornante as a Salvadoran who lived abroad three years or more and is coming home for good. For a foreigner settling in El Salvador the only duty-free household route in the statute book is elsewhere: article 146 of the migration law, which gives the resident pensioner and the resident rentista twenty thousand dollars CIF of household effects once, and a vehicle up to twenty-five thousand dollars CIF once every five years. Anyone arriving on a work permit, a marriage, an investment or a student place is outside both.