No Retirement Permit Anywhere in the Act, and the Route Pensioners Actually Use Is the Flat They Bought
Answer
The general rule applies to you
No exception is recorded for citizens of Hungary on this topic. That is the answer, not a gap - everything below is the rule you get, unchanged.
195 exceptions recorded across 74 countries · none match Hungary to Montenegro · Residency as a retiree
Article 38(1) of the Zakon o strancima is the Act's own closed list of the purposes for which temporary residence may be approved, and retirement is not one of them. There is no pension-income category, no retiree visa and no age-based route; the thirteen grounds run from family reunification through schooling, exchange programmes, specialisation, scientific research, medical treatment, humanitarian reasons, property ownership, religious service, European voluntary work, statelessness and work to a residual ground for other cases provided by law or an international agreement, and the chapter that follows gives each of them its own article. A retired person who wants to live in Montenegro arrives on one of the other grounds, and in practice that means article 56, the permit for using and disposing of a right to immovable property owned in Montenegro - which since 17 January 2026 requires a municipal property-transfer-tax assessment with a taxable base of at least 150,000 euros - or family reunification under article 44. What the law does say about pensioners is on the other side of the move. Article 6(15) of the Zakon o zdravstvenom osiguranju makes nationals of Montenegro and foreigners with permanent residence who draw a pension or another benefit exclusively from a foreign insurance institution compulsorily insured persons, unless an international agreement provides otherwise; and article 9 lets anyone with domicile or permanent-residence status who is not insured on any other ground acquire insured status by paying the contribution. Both turn on permanent residence, which article 86 of the Zakon o strancima puts five years away.
At a glance
- Residence permit for retirees
- None among the thirteen grounds in article 38(1) of the Zakon o strancima
The list is closed and each ground has its own article in the chapter that follows, articles 44 to 60a. None is age-based or pension-based.
- Pension drawn from abroad
- Compulsorily insured in the Montenegrin health system, but only with permanent residence
Article 6(15) of the Zakon o zdravstvenom osiguranju (Sluzbeni list CG 6/16), which names nationals of Montenegro and foreigners with permanent residence receiving a pension or other benefit exclusively from a foreign insurance institution, unless an international agreement provides otherwise.
- Time to permanent residence
- Five years of continuous lawful residence on an approved temporary residence
Article 86(1) of the Zakon o strancima.
Requirements
- One of the thirteen grounds in article 38(1) of the Zakon o strancima, since retirement is not among them
- In practice, ownership of immovable property assessed at not less than 150,000 euros, or a close family member in Montenegro
- The general conditions of article 43, including health insurance, which the Ministry's rulebook has required to be travel health insurance or insurance under an international agreement since 12 February 2025
- Five years of continuous lawful temporary residence before permanent residence, and with it the health-insurance provisions that name pensioners
Country-level policy
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.
What applies to you
Nothing changes for a citizen of Hungary
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
«6) liječenja; 7) humanitarnih razloga; 8) korišćenja i raspolaganja pravom na nepokretnosti koju posjeduje u Crnoj Gori; 9) obavljanja vjerske službe; 10) obavljanja volonterskog rada u okviru Evropske volonterske službe; 11) boravka lica bez državljanstva; 12) rada; i»Our translation - not official
6) medical treatment; 7) humanitarian reasons; 8) using and disposing of a right to immovable property which he owns in Montenegro; 9) performing religious service; 10) performing voluntary work within the European Voluntary Service; 11) the stay of a stateless person; 12) work; and
The middle of the closed list of grounds. Nothing in it is retirement, pension income or age.
Read it at the sourceAbout 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
«15) državljani Crne Gore i stranci sa stalnim boravkom, koji primaju penziju ili drugu naknadu isključivo od inostranog nosioca osiguranja, ako međunarodnim ugovorom nije drukčije određeno;»Our translation - not official
15) nationals of Montenegro and foreigners with permanent residence who receive a pension or another benefit exclusively from a foreign insurance institution, unless an international agreement provides otherwise;
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
«Lica koja nemaju svojstvo osiguranika ni po jednom osnovu iz člana 6 ovog zakona, a imaju prebivališe, odnosno status lica sa stalnim boravkom u Crnoj Gori i nemaju svojstvo osiguranog lica u drugoj državi, mogu steći svojstvo osiguranika pod uslovom da su uplatili doprinos, u skladu sa posebnim zakonom.»Our translation - not official
Persons who do not have the status of an insured person on any ground under article 6 of this Act, but have domicile or the status of a person with permanent residence in Montenegro and do not have the status of an insured person in another state, may acquire the status of an insured person provided they have paid the contribution, in accordance with a special law.
The publisher prints 'prebivalise' for 'prebivaliste' in this sentence. It is left as published.
Read it at the sourceAbout 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
The claim that Montenegro has no retirement route is bounded by two things we read in full: article 38(1) of the Zakon o strancima, which is the Act's own list of grounds, and articles 44 to 60a, where every ground gets its own permit article. The amending Acts of 2019, 2022, 2024, January 2026 and March 2026 were read in full as well and none of them adds one.
Nothing published by the Ministry of the Interior or by a consulate was read for this record.
- issuesZakon o strancima, Sluzbeni list Crne Gore broj 12/2018
Sluzbeni list Crne Gore
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
- issuesZakon o zdravstvenom osiguranju, Sluzbeni list Crne Gore broj 6/2016
Sluzbeni list Crne Gore
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