Five Years, Half of Them Physically Present, and Three Months in the State
Naturalisation by residence asks for three counted things and one judged one. Five years of continuous residence after lawful admission for permanent residence, immediately before the application. Physical presence inside the United States for at least half of that time. Three months of residence in the State or district where the application is filed. Continuous residence again from the application to the oath. And throughout all of it, good moral character, which the statute states as a condition rather than defining.
At a glance
- Residence required
- Five years after permanent residence
- Physical presence
- At least half of those five years
- Residence in the State
- Three months before filing
- After filing
- Continuous residence until the oath
- Good moral character
- Required throughout, and not defined in this section
Requirements
- Lawful admission for permanent residence
- Five years of continuous residence immediately preceding the application
- Physical presence for at least half of those five years
- Three months of residence in the State or district where the application is filed
- Continuous residence from the application to admission to citizenship
- Good moral character throughout
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
«No person, except as otherwise provided in this subchapter, shall be naturalized unless such applicant, (1) immediately preceding the date of filing his application for naturalization has resided continuously, after being lawfully admitted for permanent residence, within the United States for at least five years and during the five years immediately preceding the date of filing his application has been physically present therein for periods totaling at least half of that time, and who has resided within the State or within the district of the Service in the United States in which the applicant filed the application for at least three months, (2) has resided continuously within the United States from the date of the application up to the time of admission to citizenship, and (3) during all the periods referred to in this subsection has been and still is a person of good moral ch»The residence, presence and State conditions in one sentence. The quotation ends where the stored line ends, mid-phrase, and the condition it is reaching is good moral character.
Read it at the sourceAbout this source
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Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: An edition is a snapshot: the 2024 edition states the law as of a date in 2024 and says nothing about amendments made since. The Code is itself a compilation of acts, and for titles not enacted into positive law the Statutes at Large govern where the two differ. Nothing here carries the regulations, which are in the Code of Federal Regulations, or the annual notices that fill in the numbers these sections leave open.
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Practical notes
Shorter periods exist elsewhere in the same subchapter - for spouses of citizens and for military service - and are not read here.
This section counts years after permanent residence. How long it takes to reach permanent residence is a different question and for most of this corpus it is governed by the per-country ceiling, which has its own record.
- consolidates8 U.S.C. § 1427, requirements of naturalization
GovInfo, U.S. Government Publishing Office · consolidated to 2024
About this source
The Government Publishing Office's authenticated repository. The United States Code is published here edition by edition, one HTML file per section, at an address that names the edition year - and a link service resolves a title and section number to the current edition's file.
Standing: Maintains the text in force
Cannot be cited for: An edition is a snapshot: the 2024 edition states the law as of a date in 2024 and says nothing about amendments made since. The Code is itself a compilation of acts, and for titles not enacted into positive law the Statutes at Large govern where the two differ. Nothing here carries the regulations, which are in the Code of Federal Regulations, or the annual notices that fill in the numbers these sections leave open.
We re-read it every 90 days. More about this source