Serbia

The Law on Foreigners sets the length of a visitor's stay and leaves the question of who needs a visa entirely to other instruments. Article 16(3) gives a foreigner who needs neither a visa nor a travel document up to 90 days in any period of 180, counted from the first entry, with the day of arrival and the day of departure both counted as days of stay. Article 16(1) says that an international treaty or a decision of the Government may free the nationals of particular countries from the visa requirement, and article 16(2) lets the Government go further and admit them on a national identity card rather than a passport. Neither list is in the Act, and there is no single decision carrying them either: the Government legislates country by country, and the decision actually titled "on abolishing visas for entry into the Republic of Serbia" has been reduced by a 2024 amendment to a single sentence about Bahrain. A short-stay visa (visa C) covers the same 90 days in 180 and cannot normally be turned into a residence application once the holder is in the country.

The ordinary route runs through article 14 of the Law on Citizenship and has four conditions: permanent settlement granted under the rules on the movement and stay of foreigners, being 18 with legal capacity intact, release from the foreign citizenship or proof that it will follow, and at least three years of continuously registered domicile in Serbia before the application, closed by a written declaration that the applicant regards Serbia as their state. There is no language test, no knowledge-of-country test and no examination of any kind in the Act. Permanent settlement itself requires three years of continuous temporary residence under article 67(2) of the Law on Foreigners, so the ordinary road is three years plus three. The release requirement is softened in three ways by article 14 itself and is simply absent from the shorter routes: a person born in Serbia needs two years of continuous stay instead of three; a spouse of three years' standing with permanent settlement needs no period of their own; an emigrant or an emigrant's descendant needs only the declaration; and a member of the Serbian people without domicile in Serbia has a right to admission with no release and no residence at all.

Article 7 of the Law on Personal Income Tax makes a resident liable on income earned both in Serbia and in another state, and gives two independent tests for residence. The first is having, on the territory of Serbia, either a domicile or the centre of business and life interests - two limbs inside one point, either of which is enough. The second is being present in Serbia, continuously or with interruptions, for 183 or more days in a period of twelve months that begins or ends in the tax year in question. Presence is counted generously against the taxpayer: any part of a day between midnight and midnight counts as a full day, except a part spent in transit. Two relieving rules close the article: a person who was not present at all in a tax year and does not meet the first test is not a resident for that year, and a person who was not resident in the year before arriving is not treated as resident for the part of the year before the first entry, subject to the same condition. Serbia taxes income from self-employment at 10% and other income at 20%, and the flat-rate regime a freelancer is pointed towards is capped at RSD 6,000,000 of turnover and closed to several named activities.

Serbia's compulsory health insurance covers insured persons listed in article 11 of the Law on Health Insurance, and the line that covers foreigners is point 10 of the first paragraph: a foreigner who has entered into an employment relationship, or is engaged for work within the meaning of the rules governing the employment of foreigners in Serbia, is an insured person, unless an international treaty provides otherwise. Two further points in the same list cover foreigners who are not employed in the ordinary sense: those working for Serbian legal persons under special agreements on the exchange of experts or on international technical co-operation, and those schooling or undergoing professional development in Serbia, the latter only until the end of the school or academic year in which they finish and in no case past the age of 26. Insured status may be acquired on one ground only. Health insurance for the period of the planned stay is in any event a general condition of every temporary residence under article 43(1)(4) of the Law on Foreigners, which means a foreigner must hold insurance before the employment that would make it compulsory exists.

Serbia has no residence route for a person living on an income from abroad. The fourteen grounds for temporary residence in article 40(1) of the Law on Foreigners are a closed list and none of them is income, means, retirement or remote work; the nearest is ownership of immovable property in article 40(1)(10), which asks for title and not for money. Article 40(4) then lets the Government create further categories by its own act, and the examples the Act itself offers include "foreign digital nomads". The Government has made such an act - the 2020 regulation amended in 2022 - and it created four categories: startup founder, investor, talent and person of Serbian origin. Digital nomads are not among them. Evidence of an income from abroad appears once in the whole chain, in article 4 of that regulation, and only as one of several documents a person of Serbian origin may produce to extend a permit already granted on that ground. So the statute names the category, the regulation does not create it, and a reader told that Serbia has a digital-nomad permit is being told about a power rather than a route.

Nothing in Serbian law offers residence on the strength of being retired. The fourteen grounds in article 40(1) of the Law on Foreigners run from employment to the status of a victim of trafficking and include no pension, no age and no private means; the Government regulation made under article 40(4) adds four categories - startup founder, investor, talent and person of Serbian origin - and none of them is retirement either. A pension drawn abroad appears exactly once in the whole chain, in article 4 of that regulation, where it is one of the documents a foreigner of Serbian origin may produce when extending a permit already granted on that ground. For everyone else the route to a long stay is the same as for anyone else: a ground under article 40(1), of which ownership of a home one lives in is the one a retired person is most likely to meet.

Until 2024 a foreigner who wanted to work in Serbia needed two things from two bodies: a temporary residence permit from the Ministry of the Interior and a work permit from the National Employment Service. The amendments to the Law on Foreigners and to the Law on the Employment of Foreigners published in Sl. glasnik RS 62/2023 replaced that with a jedinstvena dozvola, a single permit for temporary residence and work, which the Act defines in article 46a and which began to apply on 1 February 2024. The application is made electronically on a single portal, by the foreigner or by the employer on the foreigner's behalf, and the authority has fifteen days from a complete application to decide. Inside those fifteen days it must obtain two assessments, each due within ten days: one from the security service on whether the foreigner is an unacceptable security risk, and one from the employment service on whether the conditions for employment, special cases of employment or self-employment are met. The permit runs for up to three years and is renewable for the same period. The single permit did not abolish the labour market test: the employment service's assessment under article 16 of the Law on the Employment of Foreigners still requires that the employer made no redundancies on the post in the previous 90 days, that it has started a test tržišta rada, and that a draft contract exists.

Investment is not one of the fourteen grounds for temporary residence in article 40(1) of the Law on Foreigners. It reaches the reader through a side door: article 40(4) lets the Government set, by its own act, categories of foreigner to whom temporary residence may be approved independently of those grounds, and the Government did so in a 2020 regulation amended in 2022. Four categories exist, two of which are about money. An "investor" is a foreigner investing in an already registered Serbian company or in its activity, in fixed tangible and intangible assets; at the first application the evidence is a certificate or statement of holding at least EUR 50,000 in an account at a bank registered in Serbia. A "startup" founder is a foreigner who has set up a Serbian company whose innovative activity has been recognised by a registered science and technology park with a public founder. The first permit is six months for the investor and one year for the startup founder, and an extension to one year requires, for the investor, proof of paying at least EUR 5,000 into the company's share capital, and for the startup founder either employment of Serbian nationals, a business income of at least RSD 1,000,000, or confirmation that the company is still innovating.

Study is the third of the fourteen grounds for temporary residence in article 40(1) of the Law on Foreigners, with schooling or learning Serbian as the second and participation in international pupil or student exchange programmes as the fourth. None of them is covered by the single permit: a student gets an ordinary temporary residence permit, decided within thirty days, on the general conditions of article 43. The Law on Higher Education puts the foreign applicant on the same footing as a domestic one in respect of previous education, and adds one condition of its own - knowledge of the language of instruction, tested in a way each institution fixes by its own general act. The sting is at the other end. Article 67(3) of the Law on Foreigners bars a foreigner whose temporary residence rests on study or schooling from applying for permanent settlement at all, and article 67(4) lets a person who later changes ground count only half of the time spent studying towards the three years.

Descent does more work in Serbian law than in most. It appears three times, each time at a different level. At the level of temporary residence, the Government regulation made under article 40(4) of the Law on Foreigners creates a category of "foreigners who are of Serbian origin", defined as a blood or adoptive relationship with an ancestor in the direct line who is a national of Serbia or of a predecessor state of Serbia, or who declares or declared himself a Serb; the first permit runs for a year, and the proof may be a public document or a baptismal certificate issued by an eparchy or parish of the Serbian Orthodox Church. At the level of permanent settlement, article 68 of the Law on Foreigners grants it independently of the usual three-year qualification to a foreigner originating from Serbia and to a foreigner of Serbian origin. And at the level of citizenship, article 23 of the Law on Citizenship gives a member of the Serbian people with no domicile in Serbia a right to be admitted - without release from any other nationality, without residence, and on a written declaration that they regard Serbia as their state.

A foreigner who is a member of the immediate family of a Serbian citizen, of a foreigner with temporary residence or permanent settlement, or of a foreigner granted asylum, may be given temporary residence on the ground of family reunification under article 55 of the Law on Foreigners. The immediate family is defined widely for a country without registered partnership: spouses and extra-marital partners, their children born in or out of marriage, adopted children and stepchildren up to 18 who have not married, and the parents or adopters of such children. Article 55(3) lets the authority treat two further people as immediate family - a dependent relative with no adequate family care in the country of origin, and an adult unmarried child who cannot provide for himself because of his state of health. A spouse of a Serbian citizen is relieved by article 43a of the duty to prove means of subsistence and health insurance, which is the only concession marriage itself makes at the residence stage. It does not shorten the road to permanent settlement, which stays at three years; it shortens the road to citizenship, where three years of marital union plus permanent settlement is enough under article 17 of the Law on Citizenship.

Serbia belongs to no union that confers a right of residence on the nationals of other member states, and nothing in the Law on Foreigners gives one. What exists instead is a one-way grant in domestic law. Article 5 of the Law on the Employment of Foreigners gives nationals of the European Union, of the European Economic Area and of the Swiss Confederation - and their family members down to a defined list - the right of free access to the Serbian labour market: employment, self-employment and unemployment benefit, with no work permit of any kind. Serbia is a member of none of those three. The right survives the end of a job on stated terms, and an employer established in any of them may post a non-EU worker to Serbia without a Serbian permit. Alongside that sits a second power, in article 16(2) of the Law on Foreigners, which lets the Government admit the nationals of a named country on an identity card instead of a passport; the instance we read is a 2020 decision for nationals of Albania, drafted to lapse when a bilateral travel agreement replaces it. Neither "Open Balkan" nor CEFTA appears anywhere in the instruments read for this country.

Article 73n of the Law on Payment Services gives a consumer who is lawfully staying in Serbia and has no payment account the right to have a bank open and run a basic payment account for him, on request. The right is expressed as a duty of the bank, subject only to the anti-money-laundering legislation and the rest of the Act, and the account must be usable for payment transactions in dinars. The services it must carry are listed: everything needed to open, run and close the account, cash deposits, cash withdrawals at counters and at cash machines, and the execution of payment transactions by direct debit, by payment card including payments over the internet, and by credit transfer including standing orders, at terminals, at bank counters and through the bank's internet system. The bank must offer those services to the extent it already offers them on other payment accounts, must apply non-discriminatory conditions, and must open the account or refuse within ten business days of a complete request. A refusal is permitted where the consumer already has a payment account at another bank giving access to the same services, unless he gives a written statement and the other bank's notice that the account will be closed.

Article 178 of the Road Traffic Safety Act lets a foreigner temporarily staying in Serbia drive on a foreign or international driving licence while it is valid, for the duration of the temporary stay, on condition of reciprocity - and requires the driver to carry proof of how long he has been continuously in Serbia and to produce it to an authorised officer on demand. The clock then runs: a foreign licence, and a foreign international licence, ceases to be valid in traffic on Serbian roads twelve months after the day a foreigner was granted continuous temporary residence of more than six months or permanent settlement, after the day a diplomatic identity card was issued, or after the day a Serbian national who lives abroad enters Serbia. The Act contemplates exchange - article 183 speaks of a foreign licence "not issued on the basis of exchange for a Serbian driving licence" and forbids using two licences from two states at once - but it does not set out the conditions for an exchange. Those are left to the Minister of the Interior's rulebook on driving licences, which we could not read.

The relief for a move is in the Regulation on customs privileges rather than in the Customs Act, and it is narrower than a reader expects. Article 4 gives relief from import duties on household goods to foreign nationals who have obtained Serbian citizenship and to foreign nationals who have been granted asylum or permanent settlement in Serbia - and to nobody else. A foreigner arriving on a single permit or on any temporary residence is outside it. Motor vehicles are excluded in terms. To use the relief the beneficiary files a written application with a confirmation from the interior authority of admission to citizenship, or of asylum or permanent settlement, together with a list of the household goods naming their kind and quantity; the customs authority certifies the list and notes the certification in the beneficiary's travel document. Article 5 covers the other direction - Serbian nationals returning from work abroad - with its own thresholds: at least two and at most ten years abroad gives relief up to EUR 20,000 on goods imported within a year of return, and ten years or more gives relief with no ceiling stated.