Free Movement, With Lithuania's Own Clock: Three Months in Any Half-Year, Not Three Months
Answer
The general rule applies to you
No exception is recorded for citizens of Colombia 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 Colombia to Lithuania · Residency under a regional treaty
Chapter V of the Įstatymas dėl užsieniečių teisinės padėties carries the free movement right for nationals of EU member states and, through article 1(2-1), of EFTA states. The substance is Directive 2004/38: a worker or self-employed person, a person with sufficient resources and health insurance, a student on the same terms, or a family member of any of them. The threshold at which a certificate becomes necessary is written in a way the Directive is not: article 99(1) requires a certificate of the right of temporary residence from a national who has come to live in Lithuania for longer than three months in any half-year, which counts the time differently from the Directive's plain three months of residence. Permanent residence comes after five years, and article 104(1) adds two shortcuts that have nothing to do with time: an EU national who has the right to restore Lithuanian citizenship, or who is a person of Lithuanian descent, or who came to live here as the family member of a Lithuanian citizen, acquires the right of permanent residence outright. An absence of more than six months in a year may be a ground for refusing it, with excuses listed in article 104(5).
At a glance
- When a certificate is needed
- A stay longer than 3 months in any half-year
Article 99(1) of the Įstatymas dėl užsieniečių teisinės padėties. The measure is per half-year, which is not how Directive 2004/38 states it.
- Grounds of residence
- Worker or self-employed, sufficient resources with insurance, study, or family member
Article 101(1) of the Įstatymas dėl užsieniečių teisinės padėties, which also preserves worker status through illness, parental leave and registered unemployment.
- Permanent residence
- 5 years, or immediately with Lithuanian descent or the right to restore citizenship
Article 104(1) of the Įstatymas dėl užsieniečių teisinės padėties.
- Certificate of permanent residence
- Valid 10 years
Article 104(3) of the Įstatymas dėl užsieniečių teisinės padėties.
- Absence that may cost the permanent right
- More than 6 months in a year
Article 104(5) of the Įstatymas dėl užsieniečių teisinės padėties, which excepts pregnancy, childbirth, serious illness, studies, vocational training and postings.
- Time to decide on a certificate
- 1 month
Article 99-1 of the Įstatymas dėl užsieniečių teisinės padėties.
Requirements
- Nationality of an EU member state, or of an EFTA state through article 1(2-1)
- Work, self-employment, sufficient resources and insurance, or study
- A certificate of the right of temporary residence for a stay longer than three months in any half-year
- Five years for permanent residence, or none at all with Lithuanian descent
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.
What applies to you
Nothing changes for a citizen of Colombia
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
«Europos Sąjungos valstybės narės piliečiui, atvykusiam gyventi į Lietuvos Respubliką ilgiau negu 3 mėnesius per pusę metų ir atitinkančiam bent vieną iš šio Įstatymo 101 straipsnio 1 dalyje numatytų pagrindų, jo teisei laikinai gyventi Lietuvos Respublikoje patvirtinti išduodamas teisės laikinai gyventi Lietuvos Respublikoje pažymėjimas.»Our translation - not official
A national of a member state of the European Union who has come to live in the Republic of Lithuania for longer than 3 months in any half-year and who meets at least one of the grounds laid down in article 101(1) of this Act shall be issued a certificate of the right of temporary residence in the Republic of Lithuania, to confirm his right of temporary residence in the Republic of Lithuania.
The threshold, counted per half-year.
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
«turi sau ir savo šeimos nariams, jeigu jie atvyksta kartu su juo arba pas jį, pakankamai išteklių pragyventi Lietuvos Respublikoje ir turi galiojantį sveikatos draudimą patvirtinantį dokumentą;»Our translation - not official
has, for himself and for his family members if they come with him or to him, sufficient resources to live on in the Republic of Lithuania and holds a valid document confirming health insurance;
The self-sufficiency ground, which is the free-movement answer to the income question the Act answers for nobody else.
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
«Europos Sąjungos valstybės narės pilietis, kuris teisėtai gyveno Lietuvos Respublikoje pastaruosius 5 metus arba kuris turi teisę atkurti Lietuvos Respublikos pilietybę Lietuvos Respublikos pilietybės įstatymo nustatyta tvarka, arba kuris yra lietuvių kilmės asmuo, arba atvyko gyventi į Lietuvos Respubliką kartu su Lietuvos Respublikos piliečiu kaip jo šeimos narys, įgyja teisę nuolat gyventi Lietuvos Respublikoje.»Our translation - not official
A national of a member state of the European Union who has lawfully lived in the Republic of Lithuania for the last 5 years, or who 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, or who is a person of Lithuanian descent, or who came to live in the Republic of Lithuania together with a national of the Republic of Lithuania as his family member, acquires the right of permanent residence in the Republic of Lithuania.
Descent cuts five years to nothing here as well.
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
Lithuania is in no regional residence treaty outside the European Union and the EEA. Nothing of the Mercosur or CARICOM kind was read, because there is nothing of that kind to read.
The procedure for issuing, changing and revoking the certificate is set by the Minister of the Interior under article 99(3) and was not read.
- 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