Country-wide policy
A Temporary Residence Permit Dies After Thirty Days Out of the Country Unless You Tell the Police First
Montenegro attaches a presence rule to every temporary residence permit and it is stricter than almost anything a reader will have met. Article 65(1)(3) of the Zakon o strancima says the permit ceases to be valid if, during the temporary residence, the foreigner stays outside Montenegro for more than 30 days. Article 65(2) softens it on one condition only: a foreigner who is outside Montenegro for up to 90 days for justified reasons does not lose the permit if he notifies the police of the departure and of its reasons beforehand. Beyond 90 days there is no relief at all, except for holders of a permit on the residual ground in article 38 point 13, who are exempt from the rule entirely by article 65(4). This is a continuous-absence rule rather than a quota of presence, so it bites on one long trip and not on many short ones - and it sits oddly beside article 86(3), which allows absences of up to ten months in total, or one of up to six months, across the five years that lead to permanent residence. A person who takes the six-month absence article 86 permits would lose the permit that is accumulating the five years under article 65.
Topics it changes
- Residency on passive income
- Residency through investment
- Residency through work
- Residency as a student
- Residency through marriage
- Residency as a retiree
What it requires
- No absence of more than 30 consecutive days from Montenegro while holding a temporary residence permit
- Advance notice to the police of the departure and its reasons, to stretch that to 90 days for justified reasons
- No reliance on the ten-month and six-month allowances in article 86, which govern the count towards permanent residence and not the validity of the permit
At a glance
- Longest absence before the permit lapses
- 30 days, or 90 days with advance notice to the police of the departure and its reasons
Article 65(1)(3) and 65(2) of the Zakon o strancima.
- Who is exempt
- Holders of a permit on the residual ground in article 38 point 13
Article 65(4) of the Zakon o strancima, which disapplies both the 30-day and the 90-day limits for them.
- Absence allowed towards permanent residence
- Up to ten months in total, or one absence of up to six months, across the five years
Article 86(3) of the Zakon o strancima. It governs the count of continuous residence, not the validity of the permit, and the two provisions do not line up.
What the law says
«Dozvola za privremeni boravak prestaje da važi: 1) istekom roka važenja; 2) prestankom razloga na osnovu kojih je dozvola izdata; 3) ako za vrijeme trajanja privremenog boravka stranac boravi van Crne Gore duže od 30 dana; 4) ako se naknadno utvrdi da postoje razlozi iz člana 8 ovog zakona; 5) ako je strancu izrečena mjera bezbjednosti protjerivanje stranca iz zemlje, zaštitna mjera protjerivanja stranca sa teritorije Crne Gore ili je donijeto rješenje iz člana 110 ovog zakona; 6) ako stranac boravak u Crnoj Gori ne koristi u svrhu zbog kojeg je odobren; 7) u slučaju kad je stranac dozvolu za privremeni boravak dobio radi spajanja porodice, a naknadno se utvrdi da je brak zaključen iz koristi; 8) kad stranac ostvari pravo na stalni boravak.»Our translation - not official
A temporary residence permit ceases to be valid: 1) on the expiry of its period of validity; 2) on the ceasing of the reasons on the basis of which the permit was issued; 3) if during the temporary residence the foreigner stays outside Montenegro for more than 30 days; 4) if it is subsequently established that the reasons in article 8 of this Act exist; 5) if a security measure of expulsion from the country, a protective measure of expulsion from the territory of Montenegro has been imposed on the foreigner or a decision under article 110 of this Act has been taken; 6) if the foreigner does not use the stay in Montenegro for the purpose for which it was approved; 7) in the case where the foreigner obtained the temporary residence permit for family reunification and it is subsequently established that the marriage was contracted for benefit; 8) where the foreigner acquires the right to permanent residence.
About this source
The official gazette of Montenegro, published by the public institution JU Sluzbeni list Crne Gore, which also runs the country's legal information system (PIS). Everything the Montenegrin state enacts appears here and only here as an authentic text: Acts of the Skupstina with the President's promulgating decree printed above them, Government decrees and decisions, ministerial rulebooks, Constitutional Court decisions, and separate series for municipal regulations, international treaties and the predecessor Sluzbeni list Republike Crne Gore up to 2006. Each instrument has a record page at https://www.sluzbenilist.me/propisi/<id> which is server-rendered and carries, in plain text, the date of publication, the gazette issue, the registry number, the issuing body, the date of entry into force and often the date of first application, the EU negotiating chapter it belongs to, and the status Vazeci or Nevazeci - in force or no longer in force. The same page cross-links the instruments this one amends, the instruments that amend it, the constitutional provisions it was made under and the subordinate acts made under it, which is the cheapest way in existence to assemble a Montenegrin amendment chain. The text itself is a PDF at https://www.sluzbenilist.me/propisi/<id>/download, one file per instrument rather than one per issue. Issues are indexed by year at https://www.sluzbenilist.me/registri?type=0&year=<year> with type 0 for Sluzbeni list Crne Gore and type 3 for the pre-2006 Republican series, and each issue page lists every instrument in it with a link. Article 13 of the Constitution puts the Cyrillic and Latin scripts on an equal footing and the gazette uses both: some Acts of 2010 and 2011 and some Government decisions are printed wholly in Cyrillic, and a /cyr/ mirror of the site exists. Amending Acts are published as free-standing instruments in the classic civil-law form - 'in article N, paragraph M is replaced and reads' - and are never consolidated into the parent Act here, so the current text of a provision has to be assembled from the base Act and every amendment that touched it.
Standing: Issues the instrument
Cannot be cited for: It publishes instruments and it does not consolidate them. There is no consolidated text of any Act on this site: the regis.sluzbenilist.me legal information system that would give one is an Angular application that returns a 6 KB shell to any fetcher, and its own feature table reads as a subscription product, so it is not reachable by any tool this project has. Assembling the law in force therefore means reading the base Act plus every amending Act, and the site's own cross-reference list cannot be relied on to be complete - the record for the Zakon o crnogorskom drzavljanstvu lists four of its seven amending Acts, the record for the Zakon o porezu na dohodak fizickih lica lists ten of at least sixteen, and the record for the citizenship-by-investment decision lists none at all because the record is classified 'Neklasifikovan'. The site search is client-side only: the search box on /propisi is an Alpine.js model and a searchTerm query parameter is ignored by the server, which returns a generic list, so an instrument is found through the issue index, through a cross-link on a related record, or through an external search engine. Some record identifiers are UUIDs rather than numbers and those do not answer at /download. Two of its own PDFs are defective and must not be quoted from: the Zakon o bezbjednosti saobracaja na putevima (33/2012) extracts with a broken character map - Cyrillic a, e and o standing inside Latin words, C-circumflex for C-caron, t-cedilla for z-caron - through the body of the Act while the penalty articles come out clean, and downloading the file directly or passing it through the extraction service makes no difference. It must not be cited for anything the state has not enacted: it carries no guidance, no fee a ministry charges in practice, no processing time, no country list maintained outside a decree, and nothing at all about how an authority applies the text it prints. The status field is a useful signal and not a legal conclusion: the citizenship-by-investment decision is still marked Vazeci although its own article 18 stopped applying on 31 December 2022.
We re-read it every 45 days. More about this source
«Izuzetno od stava 1 tačka 3 ovog člana, strancu koji do 90 dana iz opravdanih razloga boravi van Crne Gore, neće prestati da važi dozvola za privremeni boravak ako o odlasku i razlozima odlaska iz Crne Gore prethodno obavijesti policiju.»Our translation - not official
By way of exception to paragraph 1 point 3 of this article, a foreigner who stays outside Montenegro for up to 90 days for justified reasons will not have his temporary residence permit cease to be valid, if he notifies the police of the departure and of the reasons for the departure from Montenegro beforehand.
About this source
The official gazette of Montenegro, published by the public institution JU Sluzbeni list Crne Gore, which also runs the country's legal information system (PIS). Everything the Montenegrin state enacts appears here and only here as an authentic text: Acts of the Skupstina with the President's promulgating decree printed above them, Government decrees and decisions, ministerial rulebooks, Constitutional Court decisions, and separate series for municipal regulations, international treaties and the predecessor Sluzbeni list Republike Crne Gore up to 2006. Each instrument has a record page at https://www.sluzbenilist.me/propisi/<id> which is server-rendered and carries, in plain text, the date of publication, the gazette issue, the registry number, the issuing body, the date of entry into force and often the date of first application, the EU negotiating chapter it belongs to, and the status Vazeci or Nevazeci - in force or no longer in force. The same page cross-links the instruments this one amends, the instruments that amend it, the constitutional provisions it was made under and the subordinate acts made under it, which is the cheapest way in existence to assemble a Montenegrin amendment chain. The text itself is a PDF at https://www.sluzbenilist.me/propisi/<id>/download, one file per instrument rather than one per issue. Issues are indexed by year at https://www.sluzbenilist.me/registri?type=0&year=<year> with type 0 for Sluzbeni list Crne Gore and type 3 for the pre-2006 Republican series, and each issue page lists every instrument in it with a link. Article 13 of the Constitution puts the Cyrillic and Latin scripts on an equal footing and the gazette uses both: some Acts of 2010 and 2011 and some Government decisions are printed wholly in Cyrillic, and a /cyr/ mirror of the site exists. Amending Acts are published as free-standing instruments in the classic civil-law form - 'in article N, paragraph M is replaced and reads' - and are never consolidated into the parent Act here, so the current text of a provision has to be assembled from the base Act and every amendment that touched it.
Standing: Issues the instrument
Cannot be cited for: It publishes instruments and it does not consolidate them. There is no consolidated text of any Act on this site: the regis.sluzbenilist.me legal information system that would give one is an Angular application that returns a 6 KB shell to any fetcher, and its own feature table reads as a subscription product, so it is not reachable by any tool this project has. Assembling the law in force therefore means reading the base Act plus every amending Act, and the site's own cross-reference list cannot be relied on to be complete - the record for the Zakon o crnogorskom drzavljanstvu lists four of its seven amending Acts, the record for the Zakon o porezu na dohodak fizickih lica lists ten of at least sixteen, and the record for the citizenship-by-investment decision lists none at all because the record is classified 'Neklasifikovan'. The site search is client-side only: the search box on /propisi is an Alpine.js model and a searchTerm query parameter is ignored by the server, which returns a generic list, so an instrument is found through the issue index, through a cross-link on a related record, or through an external search engine. Some record identifiers are UUIDs rather than numbers and those do not answer at /download. Two of its own PDFs are defective and must not be quoted from: the Zakon o bezbjednosti saobracaja na putevima (33/2012) extracts with a broken character map - Cyrillic a, e and o standing inside Latin words, C-circumflex for C-caron, t-cedilla for z-caron - through the body of the Act while the penalty articles come out clean, and downloading the file directly or passing it through the extraction service makes no difference. It must not be cited for anything the state has not enacted: it carries no guidance, no fee a ministry charges in practice, no processing time, no country list maintained outside a decree, and nothing at all about how an authority applies the text it prints. The status field is a useful signal and not a legal conclusion: the citizenship-by-investment decision is still marked Vazeci although its own article 18 stopped applying on 31 December 2022.
We re-read it every 45 days. More about this source
«Dozvola za privremeni boravak ne prestaje da važi strancu kome je odobren boravak iz člana 38 tačka 13 ovog zakona, iako je boravio van Crne Gore duže od 30, odnosno 90 dana.»Our translation - not official
A temporary residence permit does not cease to be valid for a foreigner who has been granted a stay under article 38 point 13 of this Act, even though he has stayed outside Montenegro for more than 30, or 90, days.
About this source
The official gazette of Montenegro, published by the public institution JU Sluzbeni list Crne Gore, which also runs the country's legal information system (PIS). Everything the Montenegrin state enacts appears here and only here as an authentic text: Acts of the Skupstina with the President's promulgating decree printed above them, Government decrees and decisions, ministerial rulebooks, Constitutional Court decisions, and separate series for municipal regulations, international treaties and the predecessor Sluzbeni list Republike Crne Gore up to 2006. Each instrument has a record page at https://www.sluzbenilist.me/propisi/<id> which is server-rendered and carries, in plain text, the date of publication, the gazette issue, the registry number, the issuing body, the date of entry into force and often the date of first application, the EU negotiating chapter it belongs to, and the status Vazeci or Nevazeci - in force or no longer in force. The same page cross-links the instruments this one amends, the instruments that amend it, the constitutional provisions it was made under and the subordinate acts made under it, which is the cheapest way in existence to assemble a Montenegrin amendment chain. The text itself is a PDF at https://www.sluzbenilist.me/propisi/<id>/download, one file per instrument rather than one per issue. Issues are indexed by year at https://www.sluzbenilist.me/registri?type=0&year=<year> with type 0 for Sluzbeni list Crne Gore and type 3 for the pre-2006 Republican series, and each issue page lists every instrument in it with a link. Article 13 of the Constitution puts the Cyrillic and Latin scripts on an equal footing and the gazette uses both: some Acts of 2010 and 2011 and some Government decisions are printed wholly in Cyrillic, and a /cyr/ mirror of the site exists. Amending Acts are published as free-standing instruments in the classic civil-law form - 'in article N, paragraph M is replaced and reads' - and are never consolidated into the parent Act here, so the current text of a provision has to be assembled from the base Act and every amendment that touched it.
Standing: Issues the instrument
Cannot be cited for: It publishes instruments and it does not consolidate them. There is no consolidated text of any Act on this site: the regis.sluzbenilist.me legal information system that would give one is an Angular application that returns a 6 KB shell to any fetcher, and its own feature table reads as a subscription product, so it is not reachable by any tool this project has. Assembling the law in force therefore means reading the base Act plus every amending Act, and the site's own cross-reference list cannot be relied on to be complete - the record for the Zakon o crnogorskom drzavljanstvu lists four of its seven amending Acts, the record for the Zakon o porezu na dohodak fizickih lica lists ten of at least sixteen, and the record for the citizenship-by-investment decision lists none at all because the record is classified 'Neklasifikovan'. The site search is client-side only: the search box on /propisi is an Alpine.js model and a searchTerm query parameter is ignored by the server, which returns a generic list, so an instrument is found through the issue index, through a cross-link on a related record, or through an external search engine. Some record identifiers are UUIDs rather than numbers and those do not answer at /download. Two of its own PDFs are defective and must not be quoted from: the Zakon o bezbjednosti saobracaja na putevima (33/2012) extracts with a broken character map - Cyrillic a, e and o standing inside Latin words, C-circumflex for C-caron, t-cedilla for z-caron - through the body of the Act while the penalty articles come out clean, and downloading the file directly or passing it through the extraction service makes no difference. It must not be cited for anything the state has not enacted: it carries no guidance, no fee a ministry charges in practice, no processing time, no country list maintained outside a decree, and nothing at all about how an authority applies the text it prints. The status field is a useful signal and not a legal conclusion: the citizenship-by-investment decision is still marked Vazeci although its own article 18 stopped applying on 31 December 2022.
We re-read it every 45 days. More about this source
Practical notes
Article 65 has not been amended by any of the five amending Acts we read, so this is the rule as it has stood since 3 March 2018.
Nothing published by the police or the Ministry about how the notification is made was read, and the Act does not prescribe a form for it.