Landing in The Bahamas: Eight Months, Counted From the Day You Arrived
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.
At a glance
- Maximum period an officer may grant
- Eight months
Section 22(2)(b) sets the ceiling in words, not figures.
- How the ceiling is counted
- Eight months from the day the person last landed, in total
Section 22(3). An extension does not restart the count.
- Extension of stay fee
- $200.00, non-refundable
Stated by the Department of Immigration as effective 18 September 2024. We did not find it in the Immigration (Fees) Regulations, whose consolidated text we could not read.
- Visa lists
- Two lists published by the Department of Immigration, and they overlap
The United Arab Emirates appears in the waiver list and in the visa-required table on the same page.
- Business visits of three days or less
- No work visa required, for a closed list of activities
Section 33A, inserted by the Immigration (Amendment) Act, 2026 with effect from 1 July 2026.
Requirements
- Leave to land from an immigration officer, at an authorised port
- A ticket or other means of travelling onward to a country you can enter
- No gainful occupation unless a permit under section 30 says otherwise
- Capacity to support yourself and your dependants for the stay
- A passport valid at least six months, and a completed immigration card, both asked for by the Department rather than by the Act
- A visa in advance if your country is in the Department's visa-required table
In detail
Eight months is a budget, not an allowance
Section 22(2)(b) lets an immigration officer grant leave to remain for any period not exceeding eight months, which is longer than the six months Barbados allows a visitor and sits between that and the twelve months Jamaica allows a Commonwealth citizen. Section 22(3) then does something the other two do not: it says that where the Director varies the period for good cause, the total time the person may remain must not exceed eight months from the date they last landed. The eight months therefore attaches to the visit, not to each decision within it. A traveller given three months at the border and later extended twice has eight months in all, counted from the day they arrived, and the only way to begin again is to leave and land afresh.
The conditions are a closed list, and the discretion sits inside it
Section 22(1) sets out twelve things an officer must be satisfied of, lettered (a) to (l). Several are objective - a ticket out, no contagious disease, no entry on the stop list, no conviction of a kind the Board deems undesirable. Two are not: paragraph (j) covers a person whose presence would in the Board's opinion be undesirable and not conducive to the public good, and paragraph (i) covers anyone in a class the Minister declares prohibited by Order. The Department says as much on its own page, that admittance is not automatic even where the listed requirements are met. Two of the requirements the Department publishes - a passport valid for at least six months and a completed disembarkation card - are not in section 22 at all; the passport requirement is a departmental condition and the card comes from section 36.
The visa answer is published once, and it disagrees with itself
There is no visa schedule in the Immigration Act or in the Immigration (General) Regulations as we read them. The only list is on the Department of Immigration's own page, which gives a long waiver list and then a table of countries whose citizens must obtain a visa before travelling. The United Arab Emirates is in both. The waiver is also qualified in a way worth reading twice: it covers visits of three months, or eight months, as each individual agreement may dictate, and the page does not say which countries fall in which group. Haiti, a member state of the Caribbean Community, is in the visa-required table.
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
«a person shall not land in The Bahamas from any place
outside The Bahamas»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 with the two conditions: save with the leave of an Immigration Officer, and at an authorised port.
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
«such period not exceeding eight months as the Immigration
Officer may, subject to any directions of the Board, determine.»Known to be out of date. The pages this provision is printed on are marked [Original Service 2001] in the publisher's own footer, so they have not been reprinted since the original service of the 2000 Revised Edition; the publisher's claim that the database is in force at 31 December 2016 is what the cut-off records.
The page this section is printed on is marked [Original Service 2001] in the Act's own list of authorised pages, where neighbouring pages are at LRO 1/2017. Paragraph (a) is the different case of a person who already holds a permit under section 30, where the period is the one in the permit.
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
«the total period during which such person is permitted to
remain in The Bahamas does not exceed eight months from
the date when he last landed in The Bahamas.»Known to be out of date. The pages this provision is printed on are marked [Original Service 2001] in the publisher's own footer, so they have not been reprinted since the original service of the 2000 Revised Edition; the publisher's claim that the database is in force at 31 December 2016 is what the cut-off records.
This is what makes eight months a budget rather than a renewable allowance: the Director may vary the period granted, but not past eight months from the last landing.
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 capable of supporting himself and his
dependants during such time as he may be
permitted to remain in The Bahamas»Known to be out of date. The pages this provision is printed on are marked [Original Service 2001] in the publisher's own footer, so they have not been reprinted since the original service of the 2000 Revised Edition; the publisher's claim that the database is in force at 31 December 2016 is what the cut-off records.
One of twelve conditions, (a) to (l), every one of which the officer must be satisfied of before leave to land may be granted.
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
«a person shall be entitled to land or embark in The
Bahamas and shall be permitted by any Immigration
Officer so to land or embark, if he satisfies the Immigration
Officer that he comes within any of the following
categories»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 categories that follow are citizens, permanent residents, accredited diplomats, persons in the service of the Government, persons the Board authorises an officer to treat as entitled, and the wife and children of the last two. No category is a national of another Caribbean Community state.
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 is required to obtain a work visa or short-term»The sentence continues: work visa if that person enters The Bahamas for the purpose of engaging in any activity listed in subsection (2) for a period not exceeding three days and the activity is the only activity in which that person is so engaged. Cited to the resulting section of the Immigration Act, naming the Act that inserted it.
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
«attending a conference or seminar as a participant,»The list continues with trade shows and summits, non-executive directorships, and business meetings attended in one of fourteen named capacities. Organisers of a conference or trade show are expressly outside it.
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 eight-month ceiling and the three-month limit on driving on a foreign licence do not line up. The Road Traffic Act lets a visitor drive on a licence issued outside The Bahamas only while a bona fide visitor, which it defines as a visit of not more than three months by a person not employed here. A visitor lawfully present in month four is lawfully present and not lawfully driving.
The Department's page is the only published answer to the visa question, and it contains an internal contradiction, so a traveller from the United Arab Emirates cannot settle the point from it. Ask the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which the same page names as the body that issues Bahamian visas.
This record rests on sections 19, 20, 21, 22 and 23 of the Immigration Act Chapter 191 as published in the 2000 Revised Edition, on section 33A as inserted by the Immigration (Amendment) Act, 2026, and on the Department of Immigration's Before Your Arrival and Extension of Stay pages. We did not read the Immigration (Fees) Regulations in consolidated form: the publisher served a bot-challenge page in place of the document.
- 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. Six Acts have amended this Chapter since the cut-off and none is folded into it: the Immigration (Amendment) Acts of 2020, 2021, 2023, 2025 and 2026 and the Immigration (Amendment)(No. 2) Act, 2024. All six were read separately.
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
- administersBefore Your Arrival
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
- administersExtend Your Visit
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
- consolidatesImmigration (Amendment) Act, 2026 (No. 31 of 2026)
Laws of The Bahamas On-line (Law Reform and Revision Commission)
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