Nicaragua

Nicaragua does not give every visitor ninety days. The regulation sorts nationalities into three visa categories and grants a different stay to each: category A, which needs no visa, gets ninety days extendable to a hundred and eighty; categories B and C, which need a consular visa or a consulted one, get thirty days extendable to ninety. The days are regional, not Nicaraguan - they are granted at whichever outer border of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras or Nicaragua you first cross, and the migration directorates of all four may extend them. A visitor must be able to show funds equal to three times the industrial-sector minimum wage if asked, and the tourist card, a vehicle crossing and an air departure each carry a dollar charge set by the tourism law rather than the migration law.

There is no route into Nicaragua on passive income any more. The one that existed - residente rentista, for someone with a stable income generated abroad of at least a thousand two hundred and fifty dollars a month - was created by Ley 694 in 2009 and repealed outright by article 38 of the tourism law of 2 August 2024, which put nothing in its place. The migration law still lists the category among its permanent-residence subcategories and still defines it by reference to Ley 694, so the shell survives in the statute while the law that filled it is gone. What remains for someone living on money from outside Nicaragua is the ordinary immigrant subcategory, which asks for documentation of economic means but names no threshold, and the independent-worker subcategory, which requires a registered business rather than an income.

Nicaragua's retirement residence programme no longer exists. Ley 694 of 2009 gave a pensioner over forty-five with a thousand dollars a month immediate permanent residence, a household-goods franchise worth twenty thousand dollars, a car free of value-added tax every four years and tax-free building materials for a house, in exchange for spending six months a year in the country and banking the pension there. Article 38 of the tourism law of 2 August 2024 repealed that law outright and put nothing in its place. The migration law still names residente pensionado among its permanent-residence subcategories and the regulation still asks for an INTUR committee resolution to prove it, but the instrument those two point at has gone, and the migration directorate's own page for permanent residence no longer lists the subcategory at all.

Work is a property of the residence card rather than a separate permit. The regulation issues the cédula de residencia in one of three conditions - with the right to work, without it, or to study - and the subcategory you apply under decides which one you get. Temporary residence runs from one to three years and is renewable; the directorate's own counter prices it as an annual card. An employment contract has to be certified by the labour ministry before migration will look at it, and the contract's own execution is suspended until the residence is granted, so the job and the permission are deliberately circular. The employer also signs a notarised undertaking to send the worker home when the contract ends. Seasonal work is handled outside residence altogether, by a migrant-worker permit of up to a year.

Nicaragua has an investor route into permanent residence and no published price for it. The law makes the status of inmigrante con capital a matter for the Ministry of Development, Industry and Trade, which issues a certificate of registration of the investment; migration takes that certificate as proof and asks for the company papers, a municipal trading licence and tax registration behind it. No instrument we read names a sum. The one article that looks as though it should - article 35, on what an investor may invest in - sends the reader to article 31 for the requirements, and article 31 is about pensioners. Investment in state and bank paper counts as well as in a business. Two years as a permanent resident is enough for naturalisation on this route, against four on the ordinary one.

A student is a temporary-resident subcategory rather than a visa of its own, and the card issued carries the third of the regulation's three conditions: to study. The documentary burden is light by Nicaraguan standards - a pre-enrolment certificate from the institution showing the course and the period, and a notarised declaration either of where the student's own money comes from or of who is maintaining them. The migration directorate adds a degree, school-leaving certificate or transcript, apostilled. The fee is the halved one, because students are numeral 4 of article 25 and the directorate's reduced line covers that numeral. Nothing in the law or the regulation lets a student work, and article 13 makes carrying on an unauthorised activity a ground for expulsion.

Nicaragua has no residence route by descent, and for most people who would want one it does not need it. A child of a Nicaraguan father or mother is a Nicaraguan national outright, and someone born abroad to a parent who was originally Nicaraguan can claim nationality on application after reaching majority - so the question of residence never arises for the first generation. Beyond that there is nothing. The two closed lists that govern admission - eleven temporary subcategories in article 25 of the law, eight permanent ones in article 30 - contain no category of descent, ancestry or former nationality. The family link that does exist runs the other way: a foreign spouse, parent or minor child of a Nicaraguan can get permanent residence, which reaches a parent but not an adult grandchild.

Marriage or a registered stable union with a Nicaraguan leads straight to permanent residence, but not on the day of the wedding: the regulation and the migration directorate both require the marriage or the union to have lasted at least two years before they will take the application. The residence survives the death of the Nicaraguan spouse and falls with a divorce, from the date of the resolution rather than from the end of the relationship, and it can be cancelled if the foreign spouse stops meeting a maintenance order. Naturalisation follows after two years of continuous residence rather than the ordinary four. The fee is the full one: the halved line on the directorate's price list covers the family of an immigrant or an investor, not the spouse of a Nicaraguan.

Nicaragua is the fourth member of CA-4, and its own law is unusually clear that the arrangement is two things rather than one. Article 14 of the migration law names the treaty of 2005 by its full title - the Convention Creating the Single Central American Visa for the free movement of foreigners - and uses it only to sort third-country nationals into three visa categories. Movement of the four countries' own nationals is handled in a different article, in the generic language of international free-movement instruments, without naming any. Neither gives anyone a right to stay. What does is article 30 of the same law: a foreigner of Central American origin may go directly to permanent residence, subject to reciprocity. That phrase is wider than CA-4 and the law does not define it, which is the hinge the whole topic turns on.

Four years as a permanent resident is the ordinary wait, and the price is your own nationality: the law requires renunciation before the grant, and the Constitution says the same. Four groups halve the wait to two years - Spaniards, Central Americans of origin, the spouse of a Nicaraguan, and foreigners who have established an industry or who have Nicaraguan children - and two of those four are also excused the renunciation. The grant is discretionary in terms, described in the regulation as a sovereign act, and takes legal effect only when published in La Gaceta. The constitutional ground shifted under this in February 2025: the new text dropped the enumeration of who is a national by birth and the guarantee that no national may be deprived of nationality, keeping only the clauses on naturalisation, on traitors to the homeland, and on not losing nationality by acquiring another.

More than a hundred and eighty days in a calendar year makes a natural person tax-resident, and the days need not be continuous. There is a second limb: having your centre of economic interest in the country, which can be rebutted with a tax-residence certificate from elsewhere unless that elsewhere is on the tax-haven list. The test matters less here than in most countries, because Nicaragua taxes territorially - income tax reaches Nicaraguan-source income whether the taxpayer is resident or not, and a resident's foreign income is outside it. Being resident changes the rate rather than the base: a resident pays the progressive scale on work income, where a non-resident pays a flat twenty per cent final withholding. The wording of the day test was substituted in 2014 and now opens with que provengan del exterior, which narrows it to people arriving from abroad.

Residence is not a condition of banking in Nicaragua. The anti-money-laundering rule the superintendency imposes on supervised institutions lists the identity documents a bank must demand, and it has a line for every situation: a resident foreigner uses the residence card, a non-resident foreigner uses a passport carrying a valid entry stamp, and a non-resident foreigner from a CA-4 country may use a passport or a national identity card. A visitor can therefore be identified, which is the first gate. The rule says nothing about minimum balances, proof of address or source-of-funds thresholds beyond requiring the institution to understand the origin of the funds, the purpose of the relationship and who the beneficial owner is - those are each bank's own policy, and the superintendency's rule says in terms that it applies without prejudice to them.

Nicaraguan health law is written around persons rather than citizens. The General Health Law protects the right of every person to enjoy, keep and recover their health, guarantees coverage to the whole population, and nowhere makes nationality or migration status a condition. Free treatment is a narrower promise: it is guaranteed for the vulnerable population, defined as those without the resources to meet their minimum needs for human development, with priority to mothers and children, older people and the disabled. Emergency care is owed by any establishment, public or private, for as long as a grave risk to life or health lasts. The contributory layer is separate: social-security cover through INSS is compulsory for employed resident foreigners and open voluntarily to the self-employed.

A foreign licence is good for as long as it is valid - the traffic law says a person carrying a licence from another country may drive for the period it was issued for, and must get a Nicaraguan one once it expires. There is no ninety-day visitor window and no residence trigger: the test is the expiry date printed on the licence you already hold. A Nicaraguan licence is issued by the traffic police after a theory and a practical test and runs for five years, with an eye test from the Nicaraguan Red Cross on renewal. A provisional permit of ninety days exists for sixty córdobas. A foreign-plated vehicle may circulate for whatever period the customs service allows, and its insurance policy runs thirty days rather than a year, renewable for the length of the stay.

What a person may bring is governed by the Central American customs code and its regulation, both of which Nicaragua published in La Gaceta in July 2008, rather than by a Nicaraguan statute of its own. Baggage comes in free of duty. Goods other than baggage come in free up to five hundred Central American pesos, provided they are not for sale, the traveller has been out of the customs territory at least seventy-two hours, and each member state may limit the concession to once every six months. Household goods are declared by a simplified procedure against a detailed list, with no commercial invoice needed for used items, and a vehicle is never part of them. Nicaragua's own value-added-tax and excise laws exempt household goods in accordance with customs legislation, a limb that survives independently of the retirement law repealed in 2024.