The Spouse of a Citizen Waits Two Years for the Permit and Four for the Next One; the Spouse of a Permit Holder Waits Two Years to Apply At All
Answer
The general rule applies to you
No exception is recorded for citizens of Italy 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 Italy to Lithuania · Residency through marriage
Family reunification under article 43 of the Įstatymas dėl užsieniečių teisinės padėties does not depend on how long the marriage has lasted, and the Act sets no minimum. What it sets is a wait on the other side. Where the sponsor is a Lithuanian citizen or holds a permanent residence permit, the spouse's temporary permit is issued for two years and changed for four. Where the sponsor holds only a temporary residence permit, article 43(6) requires that the sponsor has lived in Lithuania for the last two years, holds a permit valid for at least another year, and has reasonable prospects of acquiring the right of permanent residence - a condition that falls away for a sponsor on the descent, Blue Card, intra-corporate, startup, researcher, business or seven-nationality grounds, and for a refugee. A registered partnership is treated the same as a marriage throughout. The application is tested for genuineness under article 43(4): the Migration Department must assess, in the manner the Minister of the Interior lays down, whether there is serious ground to believe the marriage or the partnership is one of convenience.
At a glance
- Minimum length of marriage
- None stated in article 43 of the Įstatymas dėl užsieniečių teisinės padėties, which names no period at all
The waiting period in the Act is imposed on the sponsor's residence, not on the marriage.
- Permit where the sponsor is a citizen or permanent resident
- 2 years, then changed for 4
Article 43(5) of the Įstatymas dėl užsieniečių teisinės padėties.
- Wait where the sponsor holds a temporary permit
- 2 years of the sponsor's residence, and at least 1 year left on their permit
Article 43(6) of the Įstatymas dėl užsieniečių teisinės padėties, which also requires reasonable prospects of permanent residence.
- Registered partnership
- Treated as a marriage throughout article 43
Article 43(1)(5), which names the spouse and the registered partner in the same breath.
- Marriage of convenience
- Assessed in every case under article 43(4)
The procedure is set by the Minister of the Interior and was not read.
Requirements
- A spouse or registered partner who is a Lithuanian citizen or holds a residence permit
- Where the sponsor holds only a temporary permit: two years of residence behind them and a year of permit ahead
- A marriage or partnership that survives the assessment under article 43(4)
- The general conditions of article 26, including the 7 square metres
Country-level policy
Most countries that restrict dual citizenship do it by statute, and a statute can be amended by an ordinary majority. Lithuania does it in article 12 of its Constitution: except in separate cases provided by law, nobody may be at once a citizen of the Republic of Lithuania and of another state. Article 3(4) of the Pilietybės įstatymas restates it, and article 26(1) gives it teeth from the other direction - a Lithuanian citizen who acquires another citizenship loses Lithuanian citizenship on the day he acquires it, with a duty under article 26(2) to report the acquisition within two months and liability under article 26(3) for failing to. The separate cases the Constitution allows are the eleven points of article 7, and they are historical rather than practical: citizenship of both acquired at birth, deportation from occupied Lithuania before 11 March 1990, emigration before the same date, descent from either of those two, automatic acquisition of a spouse's citizenship by the fact of marriage, adoption in either direction, a grant by way of exception, refugee status, exceptional service to the state, and a person born Lithuanian who acquired another citizenship before turning eighteen other than by birth. Nothing in that list reaches somebody who naturalises abroad by living there, and nothing reaches somebody who comes to Lithuania and naturalises here: article 18(1)(6) requires him to renounce. The restoration and descent routes carry the same price - article 9(2) and article 10(2) both ask the applicant not to be a citizen of another state, with the single exception of applicants whose claim runs through the deported or the pre-1990 emigrants.
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 Italy
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
«Lietuvos Respublikoje gyvena užsieniečio sutuoktinis arba asmuo, su kuriuo sudaryta registruotos partnerystės sutartis ir kuris yra Lietuvos Respublikos pilietis arba užsienietis, turintis leidimą gyventi;»Our translation - not official
the alien's spouse, or the person with whom a registered partnership agreement has been concluded, who is a national of the Republic of Lithuania or an alien holding a residence permit, lives in 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
«Užsieniečiui, kuris šeimos susijungimo tikslu atvyksta pas užsienietį, turintį leidimą nuolat gyventi, arba pas Lietuvos Respublikos pilietį, leidimas laikinai gyventi išduodamas 2 metams, o keičiamas 4 metams.»Our translation - not official
An alien who comes for the purpose of family reunification to an alien holding a permanent residence permit, or to a national of the Republic of Lithuania, shall be issued a temporary residence permit for 2 years, and it shall be changed for 4 years.
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
«turi būti pragyvenęs Lietuvos Respublikoje pastaruosius 2 metus, turėti ne mažiau kaip vienerius metus galiojantį leidimą laikinai gyventi ir turėti pagrįstas perspektyvas įgyti teisę nuolat gyventi Lietuvos Respublikoje, reglamentuojamas pagal šio Įstatymo 28 straipsnio 5 dalyje nustatytą tvarką. Šis reikalavimas netaikomas, kai šeimos nariai atvyksta pas užsienietį:»Our translation - not official
must have lived in the Republic of Lithuania for the last 2 years, hold a temporary residence permit valid for at least one year, and have reasonable prospects of acquiring the right of permanent residence in the Republic of Lithuania, regulated under the procedure laid down in article 28(5) of this Act. This requirement does not apply where the family members come to an alien:
The sentence continues into a list of six exemptions, which includes the descent grounds and the seven-nationality ground.
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
«vidaus reikalų ministro nustatyta tvarka turi būti įvertinama, ar nėra rimto pagrindo manyti, kad sudaryta fiktyvi santuoka arba fiktyvi registruota partnerystė, o jeigu nepilnametis užsienietis buvo įvaikintas, – ar nėra rimto pagrindo manyti, kad įvaikinimas fiktyvus.»Our translation - not official
Where a temporary residence permit is issued to an alien under point 5 of paragraph 1 of this article, it must be assessed, in the manner laid down by the Minister of the Interior, whether there is serious ground to believe that a marriage of convenience or a registered partnership of convenience has been concluded, and, where a minor alien has been adopted, whether there is serious ground to believe that the adoption is one of convenience.
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
«turi pakankamai lėšų ir (ar) gauna reguliarių pajamų, kurių pakanka pragyventi Lietuvos Respublikoje; 4 ) pateikia rašytinį pasižadėjimą, kad deklaruos savo gyvenamąją vietą gyvenamojoje patalpoje, kurios gyvenamasis plotas, tenkantis kiekvienam pilnamečiam asmeniui, deklaravusiam joje gyvenamąją vietą, bus ne mažesnis kaip 7 kvadratiniai metrai;»Our translation - not official
has sufficient funds and (or) receives regular income sufficient to live on in the Republic of Lithuania; 4) submits a written undertaking that he will declare his place of residence in residential premises in which the living area falling to each adult who has declared his place of residence there will be no less than 7 square metres;
Article 43(3) allows the sponsor to satisfy these for the family member.
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
Citizenship by marriage is a separate and much longer road: article 19(1) of the Pilietybės įstatymas asks for seven years of lawful permanent residence together with the spouse. See the citizenship record.
The procedure for assessing a marriage of convenience is set by the Minister of the Interior and was not read, so nothing is recorded here about what the Migration Department actually looks at.
- 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.
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