The Bahamas

An immigration officer may grant leave to land for any period up to eight months, which is the longest visitor ceiling of any country covered here. The number is not a per-entry allowance: section 22(3) caps the total period a person may remain at eight months from the day they last landed, so an extension draws on the same eight months rather than adding to them. What the officer must be satisfied of is a closed list in section 22(1): a ticket or other means of leaving, no gainful occupation, no risk to peace and good government, health, character, no entry on the stop list, and the ability to support yourself and your dependants. Whether a visa is needed first is answered only by the Department of Immigration, on a page carrying two lists that contradict each other - the United Arab Emirates is named in both the waiver list and the table of countries that must obtain a visa. Haiti is a member state of the Caribbean Community and its citizens are in the visa-required table. Since 18 September 2024 an extension of stay carries a non-refundable $200 processing fee.

Section 30(1)(a) of the Immigration Act lets the Director of Immigration grant a permit to remain in The Bahamas for a specified period otherwise than for the purpose of engaging in any gainful occupation. That is the whole of the statutory route, and it is the instrument behind what the Department calls the Permit to Reside, or Annual Permit. The Act names no income threshold, no asset test and no nationality condition; section 30(6) lets the Director require evidence of good character, medical certificates, satisfaction that the applicant can maintain himself and his dependants, a written undertaking not to work, and a bond. The fee is $3,000 a year for a person, $300 for a dependant, plus a $200 processing fee. The divergence is on eligibility: the Act restricts the permit to nobody, and the Department's page lists only two kinds of applicant - a person attending school, college or university, and a dependant of someone lawfully resident. The route every guide calls the Bahamian annual residency for people of independent means does not appear on the Department's own eligibility list, while the fee schedule prices a residence permit for any person.

There is no retirement category in Bahamian immigration law. The Immigration Act's Part VI contains one permit power, section 30, and it distinguishes only between remaining without working and remaining to work; nothing in it turns on age, pension income or retirement. Two provisions come close and neither is general. The International Persons Landholding Act gives a non-Bahamian who owns a home here an entitlement - not a discretion - to an annual home owner resident card covering the holder, spouse and minor children, and that is the route most retirees actually use. The Department's fee schedule separately prices a residence permit at $250 for a person who has held work permits for twenty years and is now retired in The Bahamas, which is a fee for people who worked their way here rather than a route for people arriving to retire. Anyone else retires on an ordinary Permit to Reside under section 30(1)(a), with a written undertaking not to work.

Section 29 makes it an offence for anyone to engage in gainful occupation unless they are a citizen, a permanent resident whose certificate allows it, an accredited diplomat or government servant, the holder of a permit under section 30, or in a class the Minister has exempted by order. The permit is employer-led in practice: the Department requires a Labour Certificate with Notification of Vacancy from the Department of Labour and advertisement of the post in a nationally circulated newspaper on three consecutive days, and says in terms that these exist to test the employment prospects of suitably qualified Bahamians. The fee is not a flat rate but a schedule of occupations in ten scales, from $16,275 at Scale 1 down to $1,000 at the new Scale 10 for a home-care helper, and since 2023 a levy of five per cent is charged on top of the fee in Scales 1, 2 and 3. Work of ninety days or less goes on a short-term permit; from 1 July 2026, a closed list of business activities lasting three days or less needs no permit at all.

The Bahamas has no investment-citizenship programme, and since 2021 it has had a statutory investment-residence one. Section 17A of the Immigration Act, inserted with effect from 1 July 2021, creates an economic permanent residence certificate. As it now stands, after the Immigration (Amendment)(No. 2) Act, 2024 took effect on 1 January 2025, the qualifying investment is one million dollars held for a minimum of ten years, in real estate in The Bahamas or in Zero Coupon Bonds issued by the Central Bank - a deed of gift expressly does not count. The holder must reside here for a cumulative period of no less than ninety days a year and file a declaration every ten years that nothing material has changed. The certificate lasts for life unless revoked, and may be endorsed for a spouse and dependants. Two features are rare: an application is deemed approved three months after a completed application is received, and the certificate itself must carry the real property tax assessment number of the property it rests on.

There is no student visa in Bahamian law. A student holds the ordinary residence permit of section 30(1)(a) - permission to remain otherwise than for the purpose of engaging in gainful occupation - and the only thing that distinguishes it is the fee. The Department's schedule charges $300 a year for a residence permit for a person attending an institution of higher learning in The Bahamas on a full-time basis, or as a trainee, on the certification of the Minister responsible for education, against $3,000 for anyone else. That certification is the only student-specific condition we found in any instrument, and the reduced fee is not a student concession: in the Schedule to the Immigration (Fees) Regulations the student, the dependant, the spouse of a Bahamian citizen and that spouse's child are all charged the same, and that figure is $25 rather than $300. Students are one of only two categories the Department's Permit to Reside page recognises as eligible at all, which makes study the clearest published way into a Bahamian residence permit. A student who wants to work needs a separate permit under section 30(1)(b); nothing in the Act or in the fee schedule creates a right to work part-time while studying.

The Bahamas has no general ancestry route. What it has is section 30A, inserted in 2015, which creates a resident belonger permit for three precisely drawn groups, each of them a person the Constitution leaves with an entitlement to citizenship that cannot be exercised yet or at all: a person born here to non-Bahamian parents who may register under Article 7 and is permanently resident; a person born legitimately outside The Bahamas to a Bahamian mother married to a non-Bahamian father, which is Article 9; and a person born outside The Bahamas to a Bahamian father who is himself a citizen by registration or by descent and married to a non-Bahamian, which Articles 3(2) and 8 exclude from citizenship at birth. The permit entitles the holder to reside and to work for its term, costs $300 a year, and expressly does not prejudice the right to apply for registration as a citizen. There is no route for a grandchild, and none for an adult child of a Bahamian who falls outside those three descriptions.

Marriage to a Bahamian gives a spouse a permit, not a status. Section 30(2) lets the Board grant a resident spouse permit in its absolute discretion to a person married to a citizen, not themselves a citizen or permanent resident, and not living apart under a court decree or deed of separation. Section 30(3), as amended in 2015, protects the permit once it is granted: where there are children of the marriage it stays valid to its expiry date even if the Bahamian spouse dies or the marriage ends, and may be extended while an application for another status is processed; where there are no children it still survives to expiry. Permanent residence is a separate step under section 14 and needs five years of continuous cohabitation, after which the Board may grant a certificate that cannot carry a condition restricting work. Citizenship is a third step and is open to a wife but not to a husband. Entering a marriage to obtain an immigration benefit is an offence under section 32B.

The Bahamas is a member of the Caribbean Community and is outside its Single Market and Economy, and the proof is a three-section Act. The Caribbean Community Act, Chapter 17, is headed An Act to enable The Bahamas to fulfil certain obligations arising under the Treaty of Chaguaramas, and the obligations it fulfils are the juridical personality, immunities and privileges of the Community as an international organisation. It defines the Treaty as the one signed on 4 July 1973 at Chaguaramas, which The Bahamas acceded to in 1983 - not the Revised Treaty of 2001 that created the CSME and the skills certificate. There is no Caribbean Community (Movement of Skilled Nationals) Act in the Bahamian statute book: the published alphabetical list of principal legislation runs straight from Caribbean Community at Chapter 17 to Caribbean Development Bank at Chapter 266. Section 20 of the Immigration Act, which lists the people entitled to land, has no Caribbean category. And a citizen of Haiti, a CARICOM member state, needs a Bahamian visa to arrive at all. The Bahamas is not a party to the full free movement arrangement that opened on 1 October 2025 between Barbados, Belize, Dominica and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.

Naturalisation and registration both run through the Second Schedule to the Bahamas Nationality Act: twelve months of actual residence immediately before the application, plus six years in the preceding nine, good character, sufficient knowledge of English and of the responsibilities of a citizen, and an intention to make The Bahamas a permanent home. Seven years in ten, in substance. Two things are then worth setting out. The first is renunciation: section 5(2) bars registration of a Commonwealth citizen unless he first renounces any other citizenship, and the proviso to section 9 bars naturalisation on the same terms, so Bahamian citizenship is acquired by giving up what you have. Chile, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama ask it too; what this Act does is apply it to both routes at once. The second is sex. Article 10 of the Constitution entitles a woman who marries a Bahamian to register; there is no equivalent for a man. Article 8 passes citizenship at birth through the father and Article 9 gives the child of a Bahamian mother only a registration window between eighteen and twenty-one. Referendums in 2002 and 2016 proposed to change this and neither passed. Separately, the Department publishes a ten-year permanent residence requirement that the Act does not contain.

There is no income tax in The Bahamas and therefore no test for being resident for income tax purposes - no day count, no permanent-home rule, no centre-of-interests test, because there is nothing for such a test to switch on. The proof is a closed list the publisher prints: Title XLV of the Table of Principal Legislation by Title is headed Revenue and contains thirteen chapters - Stamp, Value Added Tax, Spirits and Beer Manufacture, Real Property Tax, Auction, Animal Protection and Control, Passenger Tax, and four marked Repealed. There is no Income Tax chapter, and the alphabetical list runs from Immigration to Industrial Property with nothing between. What exists instead is a set of taxes that attach to things rather than to people: value added tax at a standard rate of ten per cent, business licence tax charged on turnover with no deduction of any kind and expressly reaching the gross amounts receivable as compensation for personal services, real property tax, stamp duty, and compulsory national insurance contributions for everyone employed or self-employed here. Residence does carry legal weight in two places: the National Health Insurance Act defines ordinary residence as six months, and the Automatic Exchange of Financial Account Information Act makes a bank ask where you are resident for tax purposes - a question about somewhere else.

The Financial Transactions Reporting Act, 2018 is the statute a bank applies when you walk in, and it names no documents. Section 7(1)(a) requires a financial institution to identify the identity of a facility holder by means of verifying reliable, independent source documents, data or information, and section 7(3) requires it to take account of its own risk assessment for that customer and relationship. Where the risks identified are low the institution shall conduct simplified due diligence; where there is a suspicion of activity related to an identified risk, enhanced measures are required. Beneficial owners with a controlling interest must be identified, and trusts are opened up by name - settlor, trustees, protector, beneficiaries or class of beneficiaries, and the trust's accountants and tax advisers. Separately, every new individual account carries a Common Reporting Standard self-certification of the holder's residence or residences for tax purposes. What the Act does not do is tell you which papers to bring: that is each institution's own policy, and it is a fact about the institution rather than about Bahamian law.

The National Health Insurance Act, 2025 replaced the 2016 Act and continues the National Health Insurance Plan. Eligibility to enrol turns on three things: being ordinarily resident in The Bahamas, being either a citizen or a lawful resident under the Immigration Act, and being registered with the National Insurance Board with a National Insurance card. Ordinary residence is defined for this Act alone and generously - The Bahamas is home for that person for not less than six months before the application for registration - with absences for occasional or temporary reasons disregarded. A foreign national on a work permit or a residence permit therefore qualifies after six months, which is more open than most schemes in the region. The commencement is the part a reader has to be told about, because it has been done four times: a notice of November 2025 brought most of the Act into force from 24 November 2025, a notice of December 2025 revoked that notice retroactively as from the same day, a second December notice re-appointed the same date for a shorter list of sections, and a third appointed 24 November 2026 for sections 34 to 37 and subsections 28(2) to (5). Section 28(1), the eligibility rule, has been in force throughout.

A person may drive in The Bahamas on a licence issued outside The Bahamas, or on a valid international driving licence issued by a state that recognises them, but only on two conditions: that the driver is a bona fide visitor, and that the driver is at least seventeen - fifteen for an excepted motor vehicle. The Road Traffic Act then defines a bona fide visitor for this purpose as a person who is a visitor to The Bahamas for a period not exceeding three months and who is not employed in The Bahamas. Both halves bite. An immigration officer may grant leave to land for up to eight months, so a visitor can be lawfully present and no longer entitled to drive on a foreign licence after month three. And anyone working here, on a work permit or otherwise, is outside the exemption from the day they start, however short their stay. Driving without a licence or outside the exemption carries a fine of not less than two hundred and not more than eight hundred dollars. A visitor's own car may be registered on a temporary private motor vehicle licence, which the Controller may issue only to a bona fide visitor whose vehicle is registered abroad and was brought in by them.

Part IX of the Customs Management Act is headed Goods for Personal Use and is two sections long. Section 140(1) exempts goods from duties and taxes where they are in the personal baggage of a passenger or crew member arriving from outside the customs territory, are of a non-commercial nature within the limits of the duty-free allowance, and show no material indication of being part of commercial traffic. Section 140(2) goes further and exempts goods that are the bona fide belongings of such a passenger, without reference to the allowance. Both are subject to any regulations, and neither states a figure: the duty-free allowance is referred to and not defined in the Act. The Act's own definition of personal effects is narrow - all new or used articles which a traveller may reasonably require for personal use during the journey, excluding anything imported for commercial purposes - which is a definition about travelling rather than about moving house. The Tariff Act, 2023, where the allowance and the rates of duty live, has now been downloaded and still cannot be read: its font drops whole letters, taking the tariff codes and the rates with them, so no figure is published here.