Marrying a Bahamian: a Permit at Once, Permanent Residence After Five Years
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.
At a glance
- Resident spouse permit
- Granted in the Board's absolute discretion, from the date of grant
- Permit fee
- $300 a year, or $1,500 for five years
From the Department's published fee scale for a permit granted under section 30(2) and (3).
- Cohabitation needed for permanent residence
- Not less than five years, continuous
Section 14(d), as amended by Act 3 of 2015. Stated in words in the Act.
- Work rights on that certificate
- Unconditional; the certificate may not restrict gainful employment
Section 14, closing words.
- Citizenship by marriage
- Open to a wife of a Bahamian man only
Article 10 of the Constitution confers the entitlement on a woman who marries a citizen. There is no corresponding provision for a husband.
- Fraudulent marriage
- An offence; deportation for a non-citizen, up to ten thousand dollars or five years for a citizen or permanent resident
Section 32B, inserted by Act 3 of 2015. The Act states the figure in words.
Requirements
- A subsisting marriage to a Bahamian citizen, and no decree or deed of separation
- Not already being a citizen or a permanent resident
- For permanent residence under section 14: five years of continuous cohabitation
- An application in the prescribed form, with the Department's $200 processing fee
In detail
Three steps, and they are not automatic
A foreign spouse starts on a resident spouse permit under section 30(2), granted in the Board's absolute discretion and for a period the permit specifies. After five years of continuous cohabitation the spouse may apply for permanent residence under section 14; the Board's discretion is again absolute, but if it grants the certificate it may not attach a condition restricting work. Citizenship is governed by Article 10 of the Constitution and by the Bahamas Nationality Act, and the constitutional entitlement is confined to a woman married to a citizen. A husband of a Bahamian woman has no entitlement and must go the ordinary registration or naturalisation route, which needs seven years of residence in ten and renunciation of his existing citizenship.
What the 2015 amendment fixed
Before 2015 a resident spouse permit fell with the marriage. Section 30(3) as amended now says that where there are children of the marriage the permit remains valid to its expiration date notwithstanding the death of the Bahamian spouse, a decree of divorce, or a deed of separation, and may where applicable be extended while an application for another status is processed; where there are no children it still survives to expiry, though without the extension. Section 14A, inserted at the same time, lets a person who is divorced or living apart apply for permanent residence provided the five years of cohabitation were completed during the marriage. The consolidated Chapter prints a stray closing quotation mark at the end of section 30(3)(b), left over from the amending Act's own text.
Country-level policy
Every citation on these pages goes to laws.bahamas.gov.bs, and the question of what that site is has a statutory answer. The Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023, in force since 1 May 2023, repealed and replaced the 1975 Act of the same name. Under it the Law Reform and Revision Commissioner maintains an electronic database of the existing revised edition with amendments incorporated, and that database, made available electronically through the medium of a national information structure, shall be deemed to be an official version of the law. The Attorney-General, not the Minister, now authorises pages into the edition by Law Revision Order and appoints the day a revised edition comes into operation; and under section 28 the Government Printer may, at the Commissioner's request and with the Attorney-General's approval, print a reprint of any Act with its amendments incorporated, which is deemed an authentic copy as at the date of printing. The practical consequences are three. The chapters are the 2000 Revised Edition as the publisher says it stood at 31 December 2016, so every amendment since sits in a separate Act. Pages inside one chapter can carry different Law Revision Orders, and some are still at the original service of 2001. And the site itself says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street - a disclaimer flatly narrower than the statute that deems the database official.
Every immigration fee in The Bahamas is set by the Schedule to the Immigration (Fees) Regulations, made under section 45 of the Immigration Act, and that Schedule is amended by statutory instrument almost every year with effect from 1 July. The Department of Immigration publishes the whole Schedule as a web page called the Immigration Fee Scale, and that page is the only easily readable version - but it is a copy, and copies drift. The consolidated Schedule itself has now been read, and it shows the drift runs both ways: the page carries items and figures that no instrument we hold puts there, and it omits others that the instruments we hold do. At 6 October 2026 it is right about some 2026 changes and wrong about others. Scale 1 shows $16,275, which is the figure the 2026 Regulations substituted. Item 5D, the economic permanent residence certificate without the right to work, still shows $20,000, which the same Regulations raised to $25,000 with effect from 1 July 2026. Item 5B still shows $50, which the same Regulations raised to $500. The 2026 Regulations also added a Trusted Traveller's Programme fee of $200 and a late-payment charge of $300 for every ninety days an approved fee goes unpaid, neither of which appears on the page.
Exceptions by origin
No exceptions recorded
Nothing we have read treats any nationality differently for this topic. The rule above applies to everyone.
What the law says
«the Board may, in its absolute discretion, grant a permit to»Known to be out of date. The chapters on this site are the 2000 Revised Edition as the publisher states it stood at 31 December 2016; Acts amending them since are published separately and are not folded in. The page the quotation sits on carries its own Law Revision Order, printed in the Act's own list of authorised pages.
The sentence continues: that person (in this Act referred to as a “resident spouse”), permitting that resident spouse to remain in The Bahamas for the purpose of residing or engaging in gainful occupation. The three conditions precede it: married to a citizen, not a citizen or permanent resident, and not living apart under a decree or deed of separation.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
«has lived continuously with the other party to the
marriage for a period of not less than five years,»Known to be out of date. The chapters on this site are the 2000 Revised Edition as the publisher states it stood at 31 December 2016; Acts amending them since are published separately and are not folded in. The page the quotation sits on carries its own Law Revision Order, printed in the Act's own list of authorised pages.
Inserted by Act 3 of 2015. The section closes: the Board may, in its absolute discretion, grant a certificate under section 13 to the applicant and where a certificate is granted it shall not contain any condition restricting the right of the holder to engage in gainful employment.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
«is married to, or is the surviving spouse of, a»Known to be out of date. The chapters on this site are the 2000 Revised Edition as the publisher states it stood at 31 December 2016; Acts amending them since are published separately and are not folded in. The page the quotation sits on carries its own Law Revision Order, printed in the Act's own list of authorised pages.
The paragraph continues: citizen of The Bahamas and, in case of a surviving spouse, the marriage was subsisting at the time of death of the other party. Section 14A, also inserted in 2015, extends the same route to a divorced spouse or one living apart, provided the five years of cohabitation were completed during the marriage.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
«No person shall wilfully enter into a
marriage with the intention of»Known to be out of date. The chapters on this site are the 2000 Revised Edition as the publisher states it stood at 31 December 2016; Acts amending them since are published separately and are not folded in. The page the quotation sits on carries its own Law Revision Order, printed in the Act's own list of authorised pages.
The two purposes that follow are evading or avoiding a provision of the Act or regulations, and obtaining a permit or other benefit under Part VI.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
«Any woman who, after 9th July 1973, marries a
person who is or becomes a citizen of The Bahamas shall
be entitled, provided she is still so married»The entitlement is to registration as a citizen on application and on taking the oath of allegiance, subject to exceptions prescribed in the interests of national security or public policy. Chapter II contains no equivalent for a man who marries a Bahamian woman.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
Practical notes
The Department's fee scale prices a permit under section 30(2) and (3) at $300 a year or $1,500 for five years, and separately prices a general worker permit at $300 for a person previously married to a Bahamian citizen with children of the marriage.
The gendered citizenship rule is constitutional, not statutory, so it cannot be changed by Parliament alone. Referendums in 2002 and 2016 proposed to change it and neither passed; the publisher's own footnote records that the 1973 Constitution has not been amended to date.
This record rests on sections 13, 14, 14A, 30, 31 and 32B of the Immigration Act Chapter 191, on Article 10 of the Constitution, and on the Department of Immigration's Resident Spouse Permit, Permanent Residence and Immigration Fee Scale pages.
- consolidatesImmigration Act, Chapter 191 of the Statute Law of The Bahamas
Laws of The Bahamas On-line (Law Reform and Revision Commission) · consolidated to 2016-12-31
Known to be out of date. The chapters on this site are the 2000 Revised Edition as the publisher states it stood at 31 December 2016; Acts amending them since are published separately and are not folded in. The page the quotation sits on carries its own Law Revision Order, printed in the Act's own list of authorised pages.
About this source
The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
- consolidatesThe Constitution of the Commonwealth of The Bahamas
Laws of The Bahamas On-line (Law Reform and Revision Commission) · consolidated to 2016-12-31
About this source
The statute book of The Bahamas, managed by the Law Reform and Revision Commission and official by statute rather than by courtesy: section 12(2) of the Law Reform and Revision Act, 2023 provides that a database the Commissioner maintains and makes available electronically through the medium of a national information structure shall be deemed to be an official version of the law, and section 18(2)(c) says the same of an electronic revised edition. It carries the 2000 Revised Edition of the Statute Law and Subsidiary Legislation as in force at 31 December 2016, every principal and amending Act and statutory instrument made since, Acts not yet in force, Bills tabled since October 2023, and the Official Gazettes since January 2021. The Supplementary Volume holds the Table of Principal Legislation by Title and the Alphabetical List of Principal Legislation, which are the only published closed lists of what the statute book contains. It supports a point-in-time query, so what was in force on a given date can be asked rather than guessed. Pages authorised by the 2017 Law Revision Order, 2023 were prepared by The Regional Law Revision Center, Inc., in Anguilla.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: It consolidates and does not issue, and its chapters stop at 31 December 2016: every amendment since sits in a separate Act and is not folded in. The Immigration Act Chapter 191 has been amended six times since the cut-off, including the Act that created the economic permanent residence certificate and the Act that put a figure of one million dollars in it, and none of that is visible in the Chapter. The cut-off is also per page rather than per Act - every page bears the Law Revision Order that authorised it, and one chapter routinely mixes LRO 1/2017, LRO 1/2010 and pages still at the original service of 2001. The Immigration Act has six such bands; the section setting the eight-month visitor ceiling is on an Original Service page. The Bahamas Nationality Act and the Caribbean Community Act are at the original service throughout, which is why the oath of allegiance there still names Queen Elizabeth the Second. It must not be cited for whether an Act is in force: it serves Chapter 3, the Law Reform and Revision Act 1975, with nothing on its face to say that section 33 of the 2023 Act repealed it, though its own in-force index no longer lists it. Its own About page says the authoritative texts are in the Official Gazettes, which can be bought on Bay Street, which is a narrower claim than the statute makes for the site. And it must never be relied on for reachability: a content delivery network in front of it answers part of its traffic with a 192-character bot-challenge page headed "Checking the site connection security", which no failure marker catches and which is stored carrying the real document's HTTP validators, so the pipeline then reports the source unmoved and never re-reads it. On 6 October 2026 that happened to the consolidated Immigration (Fees) Regulations, the Exchange Control Regulations Act and the Domestic Minimum Top-Up Tax Act, 2024. A direct or PDF fetch answers 403 to the user agent the fetcher sends and 200 to any other, so a re-read needs a different user agent as well as a flag that bypasses the validator check. And one of its files cannot be read at all: the Tariff Act, 2023 is an 83 MB PDF whose font maps no glyph for w, h, g, j, k, q, z or most capitals, so it extracts into 658,900 characters of text with the letters missing and a tariff schedule with no codes and no rates in it. That is the Act carrying every rate of customs duty and the baggage exemption the Customs Management Act refers to and does not define.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source
- administersImmigration Fee Scale
The Bahamas Department of Immigration
About this source
The department that administers the Immigration Act Chapter 191 and decides every permit and certificate under it. It publishes a page per status - permit to reside, resident spouse, resident belonger, permanent residence, home owner resident permit, short-term and annual work permits, re-entry permit, extension of stay - each setting out the documents it asks for, and it publishes the whole Schedule to the Immigration (Fees) Regulations as a readable web page called the Immigration Fee Scale. It is also the only publisher of the Bahamian visa position: a waiver list and a visa-required table, which exist nowhere in the Act or the Regulations.
Standing: Applies the rule
Cannot be cited for: It states practice, and its practice is not always the Act. It publishes a ten-year permanent residence requirement for citizenship that the Bahamas Nationality Act does not contain; nine permanent residence eligibility categories that sections 13 to 17A do not contain; a Labour Certificate and three consecutive days of newspaper advertising that no instrument requires; and an eligibility list for the Permit to Reside that recognises only students and dependants, where its own fee schedule prices a residence permit for any person. Its fee page is a copy of a Schedule that is amended by statutory instrument almost every year, and it drifts: at 6 October 2026 it carried the 2026 Scale 1 figure but still showed $20,000 for Schedule item 5D, raised to $25,000 from 1 July 2026, and $50 for item 5B, raised to $500. It prices a BH-1B Visa at $3,000 and a BH-4S Visa at $750, neither of which appears in any instrument or on any page it publishes. Its Before Your Arrival page contradicts itself: the United Arab Emirates is named both among the countries whose citizens are waived and in the table of countries that must obtain a visa first. It must never be cited for what the law requires - only for what the Department asks for and what it charges - and where it and an instrument disagree, the instrument governs.
We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source
- administersPermanent Residence
The Bahamas Department of Immigration
About this source
The department that administers the Immigration Act Chapter 191 and decides every permit and certificate under it. It publishes a page per status - permit to reside, resident spouse, resident belonger, permanent residence, home owner resident permit, short-term and annual work permits, re-entry permit, extension of stay - each setting out the documents it asks for, and it publishes the whole Schedule to the Immigration (Fees) Regulations as a readable web page called the Immigration Fee Scale. It is also the only publisher of the Bahamian visa position: a waiver list and a visa-required table, which exist nowhere in the Act or the Regulations.
Standing: Applies the rule
Cannot be cited for: It states practice, and its practice is not always the Act. It publishes a ten-year permanent residence requirement for citizenship that the Bahamas Nationality Act does not contain; nine permanent residence eligibility categories that sections 13 to 17A do not contain; a Labour Certificate and three consecutive days of newspaper advertising that no instrument requires; and an eligibility list for the Permit to Reside that recognises only students and dependants, where its own fee schedule prices a residence permit for any person. Its fee page is a copy of a Schedule that is amended by statutory instrument almost every year, and it drifts: at 6 October 2026 it carried the 2026 Scale 1 figure but still showed $20,000 for Schedule item 5D, raised to $25,000 from 1 July 2026, and $50 for item 5B, raised to $500. It prices a BH-1B Visa at $3,000 and a BH-4S Visa at $750, neither of which appears in any instrument or on any page it publishes. Its Before Your Arrival page contradicts itself: the United Arab Emirates is named both among the countries whose citizens are waived and in the table of countries that must obtain a visa first. It must never be cited for what the law requires - only for what the Department asks for and what it charges - and where it and an instrument disagree, the instrument governs.
We re-read it every 60 days. More about this source