Panama

Ninety days is the whole of it. Panama's migration decree-law fixes the tourist period at no more than ninety days and the regulation repeats the figure for both the stamped visa and the tourist card issued to nationals who need no visa, so the number a reader plans around is the number in the instrument rather than an officer's allowance. There is no cumulative annual ceiling of the Peruvian or Colombian kind. The one extension the law offers is not an extension of the holiday: it buys up to sixty extra days, and only to finish assembling a residency application, against a fee and a deposit you forfeit if the application is not filed in time.

Panama has no residence permit that tests a monthly income from abroad. Its answer to the person who says 'I can support myself' is a capital test: B/.300,000 placed in a three-year fixed deposit at a Panamanian bank, or held as unencumbered Panamanian real estate, or split between the two. The permit is granted provisionally for two years before permanence can be asked for. The nearest thing to an income test anywhere in the migration rules is the remote-worker visa created in 2021, which asks for B/.36,000 a year from a foreign source - but that is a short-stay visa in the non-resident category, not residence, and it is capped at eighteen months.

Panama has two retirement routes and they are not variants of each other. The pensionado takes a lifetime pension of at least B/.1,000 a month from a foreign government, an international body or a private company, and it is the one route that escapes the two-year provisional stage: the permit is granted indefinitely and needs no renewal. The rentista retirado is a different animal - it asks for B/.850 a month of interest from a fixed deposit held at the Banco Nacional de Panamá or the Caja de Ahorros for at least five years, and the regulation as amended in 2009 calls it a temporary residence permit. Both carry the statutory discounts of Ley 6 de 1987, and both carry a prohibition on working.

Two permissions, two ministries, and you need both. The Servicio Nacional de Migración grants the residence; the Ministerio de Trabajo y Desarrollo Laboral grants the work permit, and the migration file will not move without a copy of it. What constrains the whole thing is a quota written into the labour law and carried into the migration regulation: a company may fill 10% of its ordinary payroll with foreigners and 15% of its specialist payroll, and the two migration subcategories ordinary employees actually use are named after those percentages. The salary floor in both is B/.850 a month. Labour permits are issued for one year at a time up to a total of six years.

Panama prices investor residence by what you invest in rather than by a single headline figure. Reforestation is the cheapest door and the one that was rewritten most recently: B/.80,000 buys a temporary permit, B/.100,000 a permanent one through the usual two-year provisional stage, and B/.350,000 permanent residence automatically - but since 2021 the investment has to be held five years or the residence is cancelled. A company investment takes B/.160,000 of paid-up registered shares and, unusually, five full-time Panamanian employees per applicant on the payroll. Capital parked in a bank deposit or in property is a different topic: that is the B/.300,000 own-means route.

A study permit in Panama is a temporary residence for full-time study at an institution recognised by the Ministerio de Educación, and it is one of only two categories a foreigner may apply for from outside the country, at a Panamanian consulate, rather than through a lawyer in Panama. It is also one of the narrowest: the regulation requires every subject on the term's syllabus to be enrolled, in daytime hours unless the programme itself runs at night, and it bans work outright except for the placements and internships the course itself requires. Students are exempt from the repatriation deposit the decree-law otherwise charges.

Panama has no residence category for the descendant of a Panamanian. The demographic chapter of the migration regulation contains exactly three routes - marriage to a Panamanian, dependants of a resident or national, and a foreigner adopted by a Panamanian - and the dependant route reaches the parents of a Panamanian but not an adult child or a grandchild. What Panamanian ancestry does give, where it exists in the right form, is nationality itself rather than residence: a child born abroad to a Panamanian-born parent is Panamanian by birth once they establish domicile in the country, and no visa is involved.

Marrying a Panamanian does not give you the right to live in Panama. The regulation says so in terms, and it is one of the bluntest sentences in Panamanian migration law: the marriage confers no right of residence by itself, and the Servicio Nacional de Migración may refuse entry or residence on grounds of health, morality, public security, the national economy or social need. What the marriage does is open a provisional two-year permit, conditional on genuinely living together, backed by a marriage interview and the possibility of a home visit. Permanence is a second application after those two years. The decree-law also makes marrying solely to obtain residence an express ground for cancellation.

Nothing in Panamanian migration law grants residence because of membership of a regional bloc. Panama is an associated state of Mercosur and a member of the Central American Integration System, and neither fact appears anywhere in the decree-law, its regulation or the migration service's catalogue of permits. What Panama has instead are two routes that turn on nationality without turning on a bloc: a list of named countries, revised by decree, whose nationals may apply for permanent residence on economic or professional grounds, and a 1966 treaty of friendship with Italy under which Italian nationals get an indefinite permanent residence of their own. Both are recorded separately because they depend on where you are from.

Five consecutive years of residence, counted not from arrival but from the resolution that granted permanent residence - which means the two provisional years most routes impose do not count. Three years instead of five if you have a Panamanian spouse or Panamanian children. The decision belongs to the President rather than to an agency, the refusal cannot be appealed, and the Constitution requires express renunciation of your existing nationality. A Spanish or Latin American national can do it on whatever terms their own country gives Panamanians, which for nine countries the migration service publishes as a shorter list of years.

Two tests, either of which is enough: more than 183 days in the country in a tax year or in the one immediately before, or a permanent home established in Panama. The second looks like the easier one and the revenue authority has made it the harder one - the Dirección General de Ingresos reads 'vivienda permanente' as your centre of vital interests, economic or family, and says in terms that merely having a home available, owned or rented, does not make you a tax resident without a personal link to it. The certificate that proves residence is not automatic: the applicant carries the burden of proof, each application is judged on its own, and the DGI can revoke a certificate it has already issued.

Panama's social security is tied to work, not to residence. Every worker in the country, national or foreign, employed or self-employed, must join the Caja de Seguro Social - and the organic law goes further than most: it forbids the labour and migration authorities from blocking a foreign worker's affiliation and contributions on the ground that the worker is breaching migration or labour rules. Someone who is not working joins voluntarily, on terms the Caja sets. A retiree on the pensionado route has no social-security entitlement from the visa at all; what they get instead is a statutory 15% off private hospital bills and 20% off medical consultations under the 1987 retirement benefits law.

Panama's banking regulator rewrote its anti-money-laundering rulebook in January 2026, and the new agreement repeals the 2015 one every guide still cites. For a foreigner the identity document is the passport, and what the bank must keep is narrow and specific: the pages with your photograph, signature and particulars, and the page carrying the entry stamp into Panama. That stamp requirement is the quiet barrier - it does not apply where the bank recruited you abroad, through a group affiliate or through an international-licence bank, but it does apply to someone walking into a branch. A national identity document from your own country is acceptable only in defined cases, and the document has to be current when the account is opened.

Ninety days on your own licence as a tourist, and then nothing - the traffic regulation says in terms that a tourist may not obtain a Panamanian licence or permit, and may not get one by virtue of an extension either. Only Panamanians and foreigners with authorised residence can hold a Panamanian licence, and the regulation sets out the route as a first application with a training course and sight and hearing tests, not as an exchange of a foreign licence. Public-passenger-transport licences are closed to foreigners outright: the regulation requires Panamanian nationality for them. A licence runs four years, or two for a driver over seventy.

Panama's household-goods concession is not a general one for new residents: it belongs to the retirement categories. Ley 9 de 1987 gives the pensioner and the retired annuitant total tariff exemption on household and personal articles, once, up to B/.10,000, and total tariff exemption on one motor vehicle every two years. The goods cannot be sold for three years without paying the duty that was waived. And the agency that issues the exemption certificate publishes a condition the statute does not contain: its own requirement sheet says applicants will pay import duties and are relieved only of the 5% excise and the 7% transfer tax. The statute says 'franquicia arancelaria total'. The two do not say the same thing.