There Is No Means Route: Article 40(1) Lists the Grounds and Not One of Them Is an Income
Answer
The general rule applies to you
No exception is recorded for citizens of Costa Rica on this topic. That is the answer, not a gap - everything below is the rule you get, unchanged.
172 exceptions recorded across 63 countries · none match Costa Rica to Lithuania · Residency on passive income
Article 40(1) of the Įstatymas dėl užsieniečių teisinės padėties is a closed list of the grounds on which a temporary residence permit may be issued. It runs from point 1 to point 16, with lettered insertions, and it contains no ground of means, savings, pension or passive income: the nearest things to it are the business routes of article 45, which ask for a company and a payroll, and the named-activity routes in the same article for a high-performance sportsperson, a performer, an accredited journalist and a cleric. Remote work appears in the Act exactly once, and in the opposite place from where a reader would look for it: article 58(17) says an alien has the right to work in Lithuania if he does not come to Lithuania and intends to work remotely under a contract with an undertaking operating here. That is a carve-out from the work-permit regime for somebody staying abroad, not a residence route for somebody arriving. The one group for whom an income is enough are the nationals of seven states named in article 40(1)(16) and article 49-5, who may be admitted for work or for any other lawful activity, self-employment included.
At a glance
- Residence on passive income alone
- None in article 40(1) of the Įstatymas dėl užsieniečių teisinės padėties, whose grounds end at point 16
The Act was searched in full for the stems pensij, pasyvi, santaup and rentier. The first occurs only in article 43(1)(7), where a dependent parent of a permanent resident may join them, and in the detention and free-movement chapters; the other three do not occur at all.
- Residence as a remote worker
- None. Article 58(17) treats remote work as the case where the person does not come to Lithuania
Article 58 is the right-to-work article, not a ground for a permit; the grounds are in article 40(1).
- Nearest route for a person of independent means
- The business grounds in article 45(1), which require a company
Article 45(1)(1) requires equity of at least 28,000 euro and a payroll; see the investor record.
- Who escapes the absence
- Nationals of Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, New Zealand and South Korea
Article 40(1)(16) and article 49-5(1)(3) of the Įstatymas dėl užsieniečių teisinės padėties, which reach any other lawful activity, including self-employment.
Requirements
- There is no residence permit for living on an income from abroad
- The business routes of article 45 ask for a company, a payroll and capital, not for an income
- Nationals of seven named states may be admitted for any lawful activity, including self-employment
Country-level policy
Lithuania keeps two origin claims apart and treats them almost alike. One is the right to restore citizenship, which belongs to anyone who held Lithuanian citizenship before 15 June 1940 and to their descendants, has no time limit and does not depend on where they live. The other is Lithuanian descent, defined in article 2(6) of the Pilietybės įstatymas as a person whose parents or grandparents, or one of them, are or were Lithuanians, and who himself considers himself a Lithuanian and declares it in writing. Two generations, and the last element of the test is a declaration rather than a proof. Both claims appear twice in the Įstatymas dėl užsieniečių teisinės padėties: in article 40(1) points 1 and 2 as grounds for a five-year temporary residence permit, and again in article 53(1) points 1 and 2 as grounds for a permanent one - with no prior residence in Lithuania at all. Article 26(2) then disapplies the conditions everyone else meets: health insurance, sufficient means, the written undertaking about 7 square metres of housing, and the list of trips and foreign residences. Article 53(6) ties the state language and constitutional examinations to the five-year routes in points 8 to 8-2, so these applicants never sit them, and article 53(7) gives their family members a permanent permit too. The same shortcut exists on the Union side: article 104(1) gives an EU national who is of Lithuanian descent the right of permanent residence without the five years. What descent does not buy is the passport. Article 10(2) of the Pilietybės įstatymas opens the simplified citizenship route to a person of Lithuanian descent only if he is not a citizen of another state.
Among the eighteen grounds in article 40(1) of the Įstatymas dėl užsieniečių teisinės padėties, point 16 is not a category of work or means but a list of nationalities: Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, New Zealand and South Korea. Article 49-5 says what those nationals may be admitted for, and it is wider than anything else in the Act - employment, or being a participant in or head of a trading company, or engaging in any other lawful activity, with the pursuit of self-employment named in terms. For every other third-country national the Act reaches self-employment only through the business tiers of article 45, which require capital and a payroll, or through four named occupations: a high-performance sportsperson or coach, a performer, an accredited journalist and a cleric. The privileges attached to the seven are consistent. The permit is three years, against two under article 44. The quota in article 57-1 does not touch it, because article 44(2) ties the quota to article 44(1) points 2 and 3. The permit carries no wage condition of its own: article 44(1)(2) makes an employer's undertaking to pay a wage meeting article 62(5) a condition of the ordinary work permit, and article 49-5 states no wage at all, though article 62(5) still governs the pay of any alien actually employed here. Article 62(4) frees a holder from the rule that an alien may work only for the employer who undertook to employ him and only in the job he was hired for. And article 43(6)(2) exempts him from the two-year wait before family members may join. The Act names the seven states itself; there is no list a minister can extend.
What applies to you
Nothing changes for a citizen of Costa Rica
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
«Leidimas laikinai gyventi gali būti išduodamas ar keičiamas užsieniečiui, jeigu: 1 ) jis turi teisę atkurti Lietuvos Respublikos pilietybę Lietuvos Respublikos pilietybės įstatymo nustatyta tvarka; 2 ) jis yra lietuvių kilmės asmuo;»Our translation - not official
A temporary residence permit may be issued or changed for an alien if: 1) he has the right to restore citizenship of the Republic of Lithuania under the procedure laid down by the Law on Citizenship of the Republic of Lithuania; 2) he is a person of Lithuanian descent;
Where the closed list begins.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The Seimas Chancellery's legal acts information system at e-seimas.lrs.lt, and in practice the only reachable public face of the Lithuanian statute book. Every instrument has a document identifier - TAIS.<number> for anything registered before 2014, a 32-character hex identifier after it - and lives at /portal/legalAct/lt/TAD/<id>. That page is a JavaScript shell: it carries the metadata, the article tree and the list of consolidated versions by date, and no statutory text at all. The text is in an iframe at /rs/actualedition/<id>/<editionId>/, where <editionId> names one consolidated version; /portal/legalAct/lt/TAD/<id>/asr always resolves to the version in force today and is where the current edition identifier is found. Those identifiers are stable - the same one comes back on repeated requests - but they change when a new consolidation is published, so a stored URL is a URL to one point-in-time text and not to 'the current law'. Each consolidation prints its own validity window on its first line: 'Suvestinė redakcija nuo 2026-07-01 iki 2026-10-31'. The same address also serves the text as PDF and as ODT under /format/ISO_PDF/ and /format/OO3_ODT/. The HTML is Word-generated and extracts cleanly by direct fetch; the Aliens Act came out at 567,031 characters with all 146 of its articles present.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: **The consolidations are a statutory product of the register and are not themselves the official publication of the act.** Article 19(3) of the Teisėkūros pagrindų įstatymas says that registration and publication of a legal act in the Register of Legal Acts information system is deemed the official publication of the act - of the act, not of a consolidation of it. Article 2(5) defines a consolidated version as a text prepared on the basis of the official text of the original act and the official texts of the acts amending it, which makes it derivative by definition, and article 6(6) makes the Seimas Chancellery, as the Register's data manager, responsible for preparing and publishing it properly and gives it 5 or 10 working days to do so. So these are consolidations prepared under a statutory duty by the body legally accountable for them and published in the official register - stronger than the informative consolidations of Slovakia or Romania - but nothing in the statute calls a consolidated version authentic, and the legal force is in the act as registered. **This is also not the Register itself.** The Teisės aktų registras has its own public interface at www.e-tar.lt, which from this infrastructure answers every request with a Cloudflare interstitial rather than a page, so the register's own copy could not be read and every Lithuanian reading here is the Seimas Chancellery's. **A consolidation that is in force is not the only one published.** e-seimas serves future consolidations alongside the current one - on 10 October 2026 the Aliens Act had editions dated 2026-11-01 and 2027-01-01 already on the site, the income tax law had one for 2027-01-01 - so reading the newest edition rather than the one whose window contains today gives next year's law. **The extraction inserts spaces inside the publisher's numbering**: a paragraph marked '1.' arrives as '1 .', and article 44-1 arrives as '44 1'. Quotations here are taken from the stored text and carry those spaces; they are an artefact of our reading, not of the publisher. **Amendment annotations are interleaved with the text**, so a quotation that crosses a paragraph boundary picks up lines of the form 'Straipsnio dalies pakeitimai: Nr. XIII-2348, 2019-07-16, paskelbta TAR 2019-07-29'. It cannot be cited for anything the Collection does not carry: the amount of subsistence funds a residence permit requires, which article 27 of the Aliens Act leaves to an order of the Minister of Social Security and Labour; the annual immigration quota, which article 57-1 leaves to the same minister; the average monthly gross wage every salary threshold is measured against, which the State Data Agency publishes; the maximum basic-account fee, which the Bank of Lithuania recalculates every three years; the list of target territories behind article 4(4) of the income tax law; or anything about how the Migration Department actually decides, which is published, where it is published at all, on migracija.lrv.lt.
We re-read it every 45 days. More about this source
«jis yra Australijos, Japonijos, Jungtinės Didžiosios Britanijos ir Šiaurės Airijos Karalystės, Jungtinių Amerikos Valstijų, Kanados, Naujosios Zelandijos, Pietų Korėjos pilietis, kuris ketina dirbti ar užsiimti kita teisėta veikla Lietuvos Respublikoje.»Our translation - not official
he is a national of Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the United States of America, Canada, New Zealand or South Korea who intends to work or to engage in other lawful activity in the Republic of Lithuania.
Where it ends. Point 16 is the last, and it is a nationality rather than a means test.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The Seimas Chancellery's legal acts information system at e-seimas.lrs.lt, and in practice the only reachable public face of the Lithuanian statute book. Every instrument has a document identifier - TAIS.<number> for anything registered before 2014, a 32-character hex identifier after it - and lives at /portal/legalAct/lt/TAD/<id>. That page is a JavaScript shell: it carries the metadata, the article tree and the list of consolidated versions by date, and no statutory text at all. The text is in an iframe at /rs/actualedition/<id>/<editionId>/, where <editionId> names one consolidated version; /portal/legalAct/lt/TAD/<id>/asr always resolves to the version in force today and is where the current edition identifier is found. Those identifiers are stable - the same one comes back on repeated requests - but they change when a new consolidation is published, so a stored URL is a URL to one point-in-time text and not to 'the current law'. Each consolidation prints its own validity window on its first line: 'Suvestinė redakcija nuo 2026-07-01 iki 2026-10-31'. The same address also serves the text as PDF and as ODT under /format/ISO_PDF/ and /format/OO3_ODT/. The HTML is Word-generated and extracts cleanly by direct fetch; the Aliens Act came out at 567,031 characters with all 146 of its articles present.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: **The consolidations are a statutory product of the register and are not themselves the official publication of the act.** Article 19(3) of the Teisėkūros pagrindų įstatymas says that registration and publication of a legal act in the Register of Legal Acts information system is deemed the official publication of the act - of the act, not of a consolidation of it. Article 2(5) defines a consolidated version as a text prepared on the basis of the official text of the original act and the official texts of the acts amending it, which makes it derivative by definition, and article 6(6) makes the Seimas Chancellery, as the Register's data manager, responsible for preparing and publishing it properly and gives it 5 or 10 working days to do so. So these are consolidations prepared under a statutory duty by the body legally accountable for them and published in the official register - stronger than the informative consolidations of Slovakia or Romania - but nothing in the statute calls a consolidated version authentic, and the legal force is in the act as registered. **This is also not the Register itself.** The Teisės aktų registras has its own public interface at www.e-tar.lt, which from this infrastructure answers every request with a Cloudflare interstitial rather than a page, so the register's own copy could not be read and every Lithuanian reading here is the Seimas Chancellery's. **A consolidation that is in force is not the only one published.** e-seimas serves future consolidations alongside the current one - on 10 October 2026 the Aliens Act had editions dated 2026-11-01 and 2027-01-01 already on the site, the income tax law had one for 2027-01-01 - so reading the newest edition rather than the one whose window contains today gives next year's law. **The extraction inserts spaces inside the publisher's numbering**: a paragraph marked '1.' arrives as '1 .', and article 44-1 arrives as '44 1'. Quotations here are taken from the stored text and carry those spaces; they are an artefact of our reading, not of the publisher. **Amendment annotations are interleaved with the text**, so a quotation that crosses a paragraph boundary picks up lines of the form 'Straipsnio dalies pakeitimai: Nr. XIII-2348, 2019-07-16, paskelbta TAR 2019-07-29'. It cannot be cited for anything the Collection does not carry: the amount of subsistence funds a residence permit requires, which article 27 of the Aliens Act leaves to an order of the Minister of Social Security and Labour; the annual immigration quota, which article 57-1 leaves to the same minister; the average monthly gross wage every salary threshold is measured against, which the State Data Agency publishes; the maximum basic-account fee, which the Bank of Lithuania recalculates every three years; the list of target territories behind article 4(4) of the income tax law; or anything about how the Migration Department actually decides, which is published, where it is published at all, on migracija.lrv.lt.
We re-read it every 45 days. More about this source
«neatvyksta į Lietuvos Respubliką ir ketina dirbti nuotoliniu būdu pagal darbo sutartį, sudarytą su įmone, vykdančia veiklą Lietuvos Respublikoje;»Our translation - not official
he does not come to the Republic of Lithuania and intends to work remotely under an employment contract concluded with an undertaking operating in the Republic of Lithuania;
The only mention of remote work in the Act, and it describes somebody who stays away.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The Seimas Chancellery's legal acts information system at e-seimas.lrs.lt, and in practice the only reachable public face of the Lithuanian statute book. Every instrument has a document identifier - TAIS.<number> for anything registered before 2014, a 32-character hex identifier after it - and lives at /portal/legalAct/lt/TAD/<id>. That page is a JavaScript shell: it carries the metadata, the article tree and the list of consolidated versions by date, and no statutory text at all. The text is in an iframe at /rs/actualedition/<id>/<editionId>/, where <editionId> names one consolidated version; /portal/legalAct/lt/TAD/<id>/asr always resolves to the version in force today and is where the current edition identifier is found. Those identifiers are stable - the same one comes back on repeated requests - but they change when a new consolidation is published, so a stored URL is a URL to one point-in-time text and not to 'the current law'. Each consolidation prints its own validity window on its first line: 'Suvestinė redakcija nuo 2026-07-01 iki 2026-10-31'. The same address also serves the text as PDF and as ODT under /format/ISO_PDF/ and /format/OO3_ODT/. The HTML is Word-generated and extracts cleanly by direct fetch; the Aliens Act came out at 567,031 characters with all 146 of its articles present.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: **The consolidations are a statutory product of the register and are not themselves the official publication of the act.** Article 19(3) of the Teisėkūros pagrindų įstatymas says that registration and publication of a legal act in the Register of Legal Acts information system is deemed the official publication of the act - of the act, not of a consolidation of it. Article 2(5) defines a consolidated version as a text prepared on the basis of the official text of the original act and the official texts of the acts amending it, which makes it derivative by definition, and article 6(6) makes the Seimas Chancellery, as the Register's data manager, responsible for preparing and publishing it properly and gives it 5 or 10 working days to do so. So these are consolidations prepared under a statutory duty by the body legally accountable for them and published in the official register - stronger than the informative consolidations of Slovakia or Romania - but nothing in the statute calls a consolidated version authentic, and the legal force is in the act as registered. **This is also not the Register itself.** The Teisės aktų registras has its own public interface at www.e-tar.lt, which from this infrastructure answers every request with a Cloudflare interstitial rather than a page, so the register's own copy could not be read and every Lithuanian reading here is the Seimas Chancellery's. **A consolidation that is in force is not the only one published.** e-seimas serves future consolidations alongside the current one - on 10 October 2026 the Aliens Act had editions dated 2026-11-01 and 2027-01-01 already on the site, the income tax law had one for 2027-01-01 - so reading the newest edition rather than the one whose window contains today gives next year's law. **The extraction inserts spaces inside the publisher's numbering**: a paragraph marked '1.' arrives as '1 .', and article 44-1 arrives as '44 1'. Quotations here are taken from the stored text and carry those spaces; they are an artefact of our reading, not of the publisher. **Amendment annotations are interleaved with the text**, so a quotation that crosses a paragraph boundary picks up lines of the form 'Straipsnio dalies pakeitimai: Nr. XIII-2348, 2019-07-16, paskelbta TAR 2019-07-29'. It cannot be cited for anything the Collection does not carry: the amount of subsistence funds a residence permit requires, which article 27 of the Aliens Act leaves to an order of the Minister of Social Security and Labour; the annual immigration quota, which article 57-1 leaves to the same minister; the average monthly gross wage every salary threshold is measured against, which the State Data Agency publishes; the maximum basic-account fee, which the Bank of Lithuania recalculates every three years; the list of target territories behind article 4(4) of the income tax law; or anything about how the Migration Department actually decides, which is published, where it is published at all, on migracija.lrv.lt.
We re-read it every 45 days. More about this source
«yra sportininkas, dalyvaujantis aukšto meistriškumo sporte, arba aukšto meistriškumo sporto treneris, kaip jie apibrėžiami Lietuvos Respublikos sporto įstatyme, atvykstantys į Lietuvos Respubliką užsiimti aukšto meistriškumo sporto veikla;»Our translation - not official
he is a sportsperson taking part in high-performance sport, or a high-performance sport coach, as defined in the Law on Sport of the Republic of Lithuania, coming to the Republic of Lithuania to engage in high-performance sport activity;
The lawful-activity grounds are named occupations, not a category of means.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The Seimas Chancellery's legal acts information system at e-seimas.lrs.lt, and in practice the only reachable public face of the Lithuanian statute book. Every instrument has a document identifier - TAIS.<number> for anything registered before 2014, a 32-character hex identifier after it - and lives at /portal/legalAct/lt/TAD/<id>. That page is a JavaScript shell: it carries the metadata, the article tree and the list of consolidated versions by date, and no statutory text at all. The text is in an iframe at /rs/actualedition/<id>/<editionId>/, where <editionId> names one consolidated version; /portal/legalAct/lt/TAD/<id>/asr always resolves to the version in force today and is where the current edition identifier is found. Those identifiers are stable - the same one comes back on repeated requests - but they change when a new consolidation is published, so a stored URL is a URL to one point-in-time text and not to 'the current law'. Each consolidation prints its own validity window on its first line: 'Suvestinė redakcija nuo 2026-07-01 iki 2026-10-31'. The same address also serves the text as PDF and as ODT under /format/ISO_PDF/ and /format/OO3_ODT/. The HTML is Word-generated and extracts cleanly by direct fetch; the Aliens Act came out at 567,031 characters with all 146 of its articles present.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: **The consolidations are a statutory product of the register and are not themselves the official publication of the act.** Article 19(3) of the Teisėkūros pagrindų įstatymas says that registration and publication of a legal act in the Register of Legal Acts information system is deemed the official publication of the act - of the act, not of a consolidation of it. Article 2(5) defines a consolidated version as a text prepared on the basis of the official text of the original act and the official texts of the acts amending it, which makes it derivative by definition, and article 6(6) makes the Seimas Chancellery, as the Register's data manager, responsible for preparing and publishing it properly and gives it 5 or 10 working days to do so. So these are consolidations prepared under a statutory duty by the body legally accountable for them and published in the official register - stronger than the informative consolidations of Slovakia or Romania - but nothing in the statute calls a consolidated version authentic, and the legal force is in the act as registered. **This is also not the Register itself.** The Teisės aktų registras has its own public interface at www.e-tar.lt, which from this infrastructure answers every request with a Cloudflare interstitial rather than a page, so the register's own copy could not be read and every Lithuanian reading here is the Seimas Chancellery's. **A consolidation that is in force is not the only one published.** e-seimas serves future consolidations alongside the current one - on 10 October 2026 the Aliens Act had editions dated 2026-11-01 and 2027-01-01 already on the site, the income tax law had one for 2027-01-01 - so reading the newest edition rather than the one whose window contains today gives next year's law. **The extraction inserts spaces inside the publisher's numbering**: a paragraph marked '1.' arrives as '1 .', and article 44-1 arrives as '44 1'. Quotations here are taken from the stored text and carry those spaces; they are an artefact of our reading, not of the publisher. **Amendment annotations are interleaved with the text**, so a quotation that crosses a paragraph boundary picks up lines of the form 'Straipsnio dalies pakeitimai: Nr. XIII-2348, 2019-07-16, paskelbta TAR 2019-07-29'. It cannot be cited for anything the Collection does not carry: the amount of subsistence funds a residence permit requires, which article 27 of the Aliens Act leaves to an order of the Minister of Social Security and Labour; the annual immigration quota, which article 57-1 leaves to the same minister; the average monthly gross wage every salary threshold is measured against, which the State Data Agency publishes; the maximum basic-account fee, which the Bank of Lithuania recalculates every three years; the list of target territories behind article 4(4) of the income tax law; or anything about how the Migration Department actually decides, which is published, where it is published at all, on migracija.lrv.lt.
We re-read it every 45 days. More about this source
«yra žurnalistas, akredituotas Lietuvos Respublikos užsienio reikalų ministerijos ir atvykstantis į Lietuvos Respubliką užsiimti veikla pagal Lietuvos Respublikos visuomenės informavimo įstatymą;»Our translation - not official
he is a journalist accredited by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Lithuania and coming to the Republic of Lithuania to engage in activity under the Law on the Provision of Information to the Public of the Republic of Lithuania;
About this source
The Seimas Chancellery's legal acts information system at e-seimas.lrs.lt, and in practice the only reachable public face of the Lithuanian statute book. Every instrument has a document identifier - TAIS.<number> for anything registered before 2014, a 32-character hex identifier after it - and lives at /portal/legalAct/lt/TAD/<id>. That page is a JavaScript shell: it carries the metadata, the article tree and the list of consolidated versions by date, and no statutory text at all. The text is in an iframe at /rs/actualedition/<id>/<editionId>/, where <editionId> names one consolidated version; /portal/legalAct/lt/TAD/<id>/asr always resolves to the version in force today and is where the current edition identifier is found. Those identifiers are stable - the same one comes back on repeated requests - but they change when a new consolidation is published, so a stored URL is a URL to one point-in-time text and not to 'the current law'. Each consolidation prints its own validity window on its first line: 'Suvestinė redakcija nuo 2026-07-01 iki 2026-10-31'. The same address also serves the text as PDF and as ODT under /format/ISO_PDF/ and /format/OO3_ODT/. The HTML is Word-generated and extracts cleanly by direct fetch; the Aliens Act came out at 567,031 characters with all 146 of its articles present.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: **The consolidations are a statutory product of the register and are not themselves the official publication of the act.** Article 19(3) of the Teisėkūros pagrindų įstatymas says that registration and publication of a legal act in the Register of Legal Acts information system is deemed the official publication of the act - of the act, not of a consolidation of it. Article 2(5) defines a consolidated version as a text prepared on the basis of the official text of the original act and the official texts of the acts amending it, which makes it derivative by definition, and article 6(6) makes the Seimas Chancellery, as the Register's data manager, responsible for preparing and publishing it properly and gives it 5 or 10 working days to do so. So these are consolidations prepared under a statutory duty by the body legally accountable for them and published in the official register - stronger than the informative consolidations of Slovakia or Romania - but nothing in the statute calls a consolidated version authentic, and the legal force is in the act as registered. **This is also not the Register itself.** The Teisės aktų registras has its own public interface at www.e-tar.lt, which from this infrastructure answers every request with a Cloudflare interstitial rather than a page, so the register's own copy could not be read and every Lithuanian reading here is the Seimas Chancellery's. **A consolidation that is in force is not the only one published.** e-seimas serves future consolidations alongside the current one - on 10 October 2026 the Aliens Act had editions dated 2026-11-01 and 2027-01-01 already on the site, the income tax law had one for 2027-01-01 - so reading the newest edition rather than the one whose window contains today gives next year's law. **The extraction inserts spaces inside the publisher's numbering**: a paragraph marked '1.' arrives as '1 .', and article 44-1 arrives as '44 1'. Quotations here are taken from the stored text and carry those spaces; they are an artefact of our reading, not of the publisher. **Amendment annotations are interleaved with the text**, so a quotation that crosses a paragraph boundary picks up lines of the form 'Straipsnio dalies pakeitimai: Nr. XIII-2348, 2019-07-16, paskelbta TAR 2019-07-29'. It cannot be cited for anything the Collection does not carry: the amount of subsistence funds a residence permit requires, which article 27 of the Aliens Act leaves to an order of the Minister of Social Security and Labour; the annual immigration quota, which article 57-1 leaves to the same minister; the average monthly gross wage every salary threshold is measured against, which the State Data Agency publishes; the maximum basic-account fee, which the Bank of Lithuania recalculates every three years; the list of target territories behind article 4(4) of the income tax law; or anything about how the Migration Department actually decides, which is published, where it is published at all, on migracija.lrv.lt.
We re-read it every 45 days. More about this source
«Leidimas laikinai gyventi gali būti išduodamas ir keičiamas Australijos, Japonijos, Jungtinės Didžiosios Britanijos ir Šiaurės Airijos Karalystės, Jungtinių Amerikos Valstijų, Kanados, Naujosios Zelandijos, Pietų Korėjos piliečiui, kuris Lietuvos Respublikoje: 1 ) dirba pagal darbo sutartį arba pateikiamas darbdavio įsipareigojimas jį įdarbinti pagal darbo sutartį; 2 ) yra įmonės, kuri vykdo steigimo dokumentuose nurodytą veiklą Lietuvos Respublikoje, dalyvis ar vadovas ir jo atvykimo tikslas yra darbas toje įmonėje; 3 ) užsiima kita teisėta veikla ar pateikia dokumentus, patvirtinančius, kad ketina užsiimti kita teisėta veikla, įskaitant savarankiškos veiklos vykdymą.»Our translation - not official
A temporary residence permit may be issued and changed for a national of Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the United States of America, Canada, New Zealand or South Korea who in the Republic of Lithuania: 1) works under an employment contract or an employer's undertaking to employ him under an employment contract is submitted; 2) is a participant in or the head of an undertaking carrying on in the Republic of Lithuania the activity stated in its incorporation documents and his purpose in coming is work in that undertaking; 3) engages in other lawful activity or submits documents confirming that he intends to engage in other lawful activity, including the pursuit of self-employment.
The only ground in the Act that reaches self-employment in the abstract, and it is open to seven nationalities.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The Seimas Chancellery's legal acts information system at e-seimas.lrs.lt, and in practice the only reachable public face of the Lithuanian statute book. Every instrument has a document identifier - TAIS.<number> for anything registered before 2014, a 32-character hex identifier after it - and lives at /portal/legalAct/lt/TAD/<id>. That page is a JavaScript shell: it carries the metadata, the article tree and the list of consolidated versions by date, and no statutory text at all. The text is in an iframe at /rs/actualedition/<id>/<editionId>/, where <editionId> names one consolidated version; /portal/legalAct/lt/TAD/<id>/asr always resolves to the version in force today and is where the current edition identifier is found. Those identifiers are stable - the same one comes back on repeated requests - but they change when a new consolidation is published, so a stored URL is a URL to one point-in-time text and not to 'the current law'. Each consolidation prints its own validity window on its first line: 'Suvestinė redakcija nuo 2026-07-01 iki 2026-10-31'. The same address also serves the text as PDF and as ODT under /format/ISO_PDF/ and /format/OO3_ODT/. The HTML is Word-generated and extracts cleanly by direct fetch; the Aliens Act came out at 567,031 characters with all 146 of its articles present.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: **The consolidations are a statutory product of the register and are not themselves the official publication of the act.** Article 19(3) of the Teisėkūros pagrindų įstatymas says that registration and publication of a legal act in the Register of Legal Acts information system is deemed the official publication of the act - of the act, not of a consolidation of it. Article 2(5) defines a consolidated version as a text prepared on the basis of the official text of the original act and the official texts of the acts amending it, which makes it derivative by definition, and article 6(6) makes the Seimas Chancellery, as the Register's data manager, responsible for preparing and publishing it properly and gives it 5 or 10 working days to do so. So these are consolidations prepared under a statutory duty by the body legally accountable for them and published in the official register - stronger than the informative consolidations of Slovakia or Romania - but nothing in the statute calls a consolidated version authentic, and the legal force is in the act as registered. **This is also not the Register itself.** The Teisės aktų registras has its own public interface at www.e-tar.lt, which from this infrastructure answers every request with a Cloudflare interstitial rather than a page, so the register's own copy could not be read and every Lithuanian reading here is the Seimas Chancellery's. **A consolidation that is in force is not the only one published.** e-seimas serves future consolidations alongside the current one - on 10 October 2026 the Aliens Act had editions dated 2026-11-01 and 2027-01-01 already on the site, the income tax law had one for 2027-01-01 - so reading the newest edition rather than the one whose window contains today gives next year's law. **The extraction inserts spaces inside the publisher's numbering**: a paragraph marked '1.' arrives as '1 .', and article 44-1 arrives as '44 1'. Quotations here are taken from the stored text and carry those spaces; they are an artefact of our reading, not of the publisher. **Amendment annotations are interleaved with the text**, so a quotation that crosses a paragraph boundary picks up lines of the form 'Straipsnio dalies pakeitimai: Nr. XIII-2348, 2019-07-16, paskelbta TAR 2019-07-29'. It cannot be cited for anything the Collection does not carry: the amount of subsistence funds a residence permit requires, which article 27 of the Aliens Act leaves to an order of the Minister of Social Security and Labour; the annual immigration quota, which article 57-1 leaves to the same minister; the average monthly gross wage every salary threshold is measured against, which the State Data Agency publishes; the maximum basic-account fee, which the Bank of Lithuania recalculates every three years; the list of target territories behind article 4(4) of the income tax law; or anything about how the Migration Department actually decides, which is published, where it is published at all, on migracija.lrv.lt.
We re-read it every 45 days. More about this source
Practical notes
This is a negative claim and it is bounded by what was read. The whole of the Act's chapter III, section three - articles 40 to 52, the grounds for a temporary residence permit - was read in the e-seimas consolidation in force from 1 July 2026, together with articles 26, 27, 53, 57-1 and 58. The Act's own list of articles was checked and all 146 are present in the stored reading.
The Act is not the whole of Lithuanian residence law. The amount of means a permit holder must show is set by the Minister of Social Security and Labour under article 27 and was not read; that order fixes a sum, not a route, and nothing in the Act turns the sum into a ground of its own.
- consolidatesLietuvos Respublikos įstatymas dėl užsieniečių teisinės padėties, suvestinė redakcija nuo 2026-07-01
Lietuvos Respublikos Seimo kanceliarija, Teisės aktų informacinė sistema (e-seimas) · consolidated to 2026-07-01
About this source
The Seimas Chancellery's legal acts information system at e-seimas.lrs.lt, and in practice the only reachable public face of the Lithuanian statute book. Every instrument has a document identifier - TAIS.<number> for anything registered before 2014, a 32-character hex identifier after it - and lives at /portal/legalAct/lt/TAD/<id>. That page is a JavaScript shell: it carries the metadata, the article tree and the list of consolidated versions by date, and no statutory text at all. The text is in an iframe at /rs/actualedition/<id>/<editionId>/, where <editionId> names one consolidated version; /portal/legalAct/lt/TAD/<id>/asr always resolves to the version in force today and is where the current edition identifier is found. Those identifiers are stable - the same one comes back on repeated requests - but they change when a new consolidation is published, so a stored URL is a URL to one point-in-time text and not to 'the current law'. Each consolidation prints its own validity window on its first line: 'Suvestinė redakcija nuo 2026-07-01 iki 2026-10-31'. The same address also serves the text as PDF and as ODT under /format/ISO_PDF/ and /format/OO3_ODT/. The HTML is Word-generated and extracts cleanly by direct fetch; the Aliens Act came out at 567,031 characters with all 146 of its articles present.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: **The consolidations are a statutory product of the register and are not themselves the official publication of the act.** Article 19(3) of the Teisėkūros pagrindų įstatymas says that registration and publication of a legal act in the Register of Legal Acts information system is deemed the official publication of the act - of the act, not of a consolidation of it. Article 2(5) defines a consolidated version as a text prepared on the basis of the official text of the original act and the official texts of the acts amending it, which makes it derivative by definition, and article 6(6) makes the Seimas Chancellery, as the Register's data manager, responsible for preparing and publishing it properly and gives it 5 or 10 working days to do so. So these are consolidations prepared under a statutory duty by the body legally accountable for them and published in the official register - stronger than the informative consolidations of Slovakia or Romania - but nothing in the statute calls a consolidated version authentic, and the legal force is in the act as registered. **This is also not the Register itself.** The Teisės aktų registras has its own public interface at www.e-tar.lt, which from this infrastructure answers every request with a Cloudflare interstitial rather than a page, so the register's own copy could not be read and every Lithuanian reading here is the Seimas Chancellery's. **A consolidation that is in force is not the only one published.** e-seimas serves future consolidations alongside the current one - on 10 October 2026 the Aliens Act had editions dated 2026-11-01 and 2027-01-01 already on the site, the income tax law had one for 2027-01-01 - so reading the newest edition rather than the one whose window contains today gives next year's law. **The extraction inserts spaces inside the publisher's numbering**: a paragraph marked '1.' arrives as '1 .', and article 44-1 arrives as '44 1'. Quotations here are taken from the stored text and carry those spaces; they are an artefact of our reading, not of the publisher. **Amendment annotations are interleaved with the text**, so a quotation that crosses a paragraph boundary picks up lines of the form 'Straipsnio dalies pakeitimai: Nr. XIII-2348, 2019-07-16, paskelbta TAR 2019-07-29'. It cannot be cited for anything the Collection does not carry: the amount of subsistence funds a residence permit requires, which article 27 of the Aliens Act leaves to an order of the Minister of Social Security and Labour; the annual immigration quota, which article 57-1 leaves to the same minister; the average monthly gross wage every salary threshold is measured against, which the State Data Agency publishes; the maximum basic-account fee, which the Bank of Lithuania recalculates every three years; the list of target territories behind article 4(4) of the income tax law; or anything about how the Migration Department actually decides, which is published, where it is published at all, on migracija.lrv.lt.
We re-read it every 45 days. More about this source