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The Bahamas Department of Immigration

Applies the rule

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.

The body that applies the rule and decides applications. It publishes what it requires, which is authoritative about its own practice but is not the text of the law.

www.immigration.gov.bs

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.

Re-check every

60 days

Publication rhythm

Pages are edited without notice and without a visible date. Fee and requirement changes have followed the 1 July commencement of the annual fee Regulations, sometimes by months.

Re-check triggers

Immigration (Fees)(Amendment) Regulations, made with effect from 1 July in most recent years · an Immigration (Amendment) Act coming into force · any change to the visa waiver list or the visa-required table · a sector policy published under section 32A of the Immigration Act, in the Gazette, in two newspapers or on a government website · the Director's annual publication of licensed immigration consultants, due before the end of January under section 49A(6)

Facts resting on this publisher · 11