Bulgaria Investor Visa

The first paragraphs of this cell concern the long-term rung rather than the options table: Article 24(1) item 19 grants a long-term residence permit to a person who has invested at least 600,000 leva, or EUR 306,775.13, per foreigner to acquire real estate in Bulgaria.

Beyond the figure, the Act sets conditions on how the money must be present. On the date of the long-term residence permit application the foreigner or the legal entity concerned must have remitted the full amount, and the payment must have appeared in an account with a licensed Bulgarian credit institution.

Where the property was acquired with borrowed money, the outstanding portion of the loan must not exceed 25 percent.

On the company route the foreigner must own more than 50 percent of the capital of a Bulgarian commercial company and have invested that same amount in the company capital, so that the company thereby obtains title to real estate of that value.

Two legal changes post-date the 2022 translation on which this table rests. First, Bulgaria has used the euro since 1 January 2026.

Article 11(2) of the Act on the Introduction of the Euro, State Gazette No. 70 of 2024, deems every amount stated in leva in existing legal instruments to be an amount in euro, converted at the official rate of 1.95583 leva to the euro.

Converted by the division and rounding rules of Articles 12 and 13, the four permanent residence levels under Article 25(1) items 6, 7, 8 and 16 are:

The options table of this record now carries them in euro.

Second, the act amending the Foreigners Act published in State Gazette No. 52 of 27 June 2025 adds three points.

The funds evidenced to the Invest Bulgaria Agency under Article 25(7)(2) must sit in the foreign national's own payment account; and a first permanent residence application must include a criminal record certificate from the state of nationality or of habitual residence.

The third point sits in Article 25(11): once five years have passed, a person granted permanent residence may terminate or change the investment without affecting the right of permanent residence. The threshold levels were not changed by that amendment.

What is received is not one status but a ladder of three rungs, and the Act names each rung, so counting time correctly depends on knowing which rung is meant.

The lower rung is a long-term residence permit under Article 24(1) items 19 and 20: 600,000 leva, or EUR 306,775.13, for real estate, and 250,000 leva, or EUR 127,822.97, in an economically disadvantaged region.

The payment conditions at the start of the capital threshold cell belong to this rung; the options table does not. The middle rung is permanent residence, reached two ways.

The first, Article 25(1) item 17: a holder of a long-term permit under those two items who has maintained the investment for five years obtains permanent residence.

The second is items 6, 7 and 8 — whose sums are recorded in the tax cell of this table — and the most telling thing about those three is what they do not require: no residence condition at all.

The comparison makes it plain: item 5 of the same provision, the ordinary route for a non-investor, requires five years of lawful continuous residence immediately before the application with no more than 30 months of absence in that period.

The three investment items drop that five-year ladder entirely, and the Act extends the exemption to a spouse: item 2 requires five years of marriage plus five years of residence, but the residence requirement does not apply on marriage to someone granted permanent residence under items 6, 7 or 8.

The top rung is citizenship: a person granted permanent residence under items 6 and 7 may apply for Bulgarian citizenship if they meet Article 12(1) items 1 to 4 and the investment has been maintained for at least five years; their family members may apply only after that person has acquired citizenship.

And a warning the Act sets out itself, in paragraph 10: the preliminary approval for making an investment issued by the Invest Bulgaria Agency does not constitute grounds for issuing a visa and does not constitute grounds for granting a right of residence.

An application for a long-term residence permit is examined within 14 days; in legally and factually complex cases, or where further documents and information must be filed, that period is extended by one month and the foreigner must be notified of the extension.

But processing time is the shortest and least consequential period on this route. What governs the whole journey is three five-year clocks, and they do not count from the same event — confusing them miscounts by years.

The first clock, Article 25(11): investments under items 6, 8 and 16 must be maintained above the statutory minimum for five years from the date the permanent residence permit is granted — the start is the date of the permit, not the date of the investment.

The second clock, Article 25(1) item 17: someone coming through the long-term permit must have maintained the investment for five years in order to reach permanent residence — here the five years sit before permanent residence exists, running in the opposite direction to the first clock.

The third clock is the condition for applying for citizenship: the investment must have been maintained for at least five years.

Alongside the three clocks runs an obligation with no fixed deadline but measured by the word immediately: a person granted permanent residence must declare immediately before the Invest Bulgaria Agency, or before the Ministry of Economy, Investments and Industry, any change in the circumstances of the investment, with evidence of it.

The clock therefore runs continuously rather than merely striking at the five-year marks.

The Act sets three rules about presence, and the investment route is exempt from two of the three — the easiest thing in this record to read backwards.

The first rule, the ordinary one: the permit is withdrawn where the foreigner fails to settle in Bulgaria within one year of the grant and does not reside on the territory.

The second: a long-term or permanent permit is withdrawn where the holder has been away from the territory of the European Union member states for more than twelve consecutive months.

Both of those rules carry an express exception for Article 25(1) items 6, 7, 8, 13 and 16 and for the family members of such persons — so someone entering through the three investment doors bears neither the duty to settle within a year nor the twelve-month absence limit.

The third rule is not waived that way, and it is the only real limit: after a six-year absence from the territory of the Republic of Bulgaria, the entitlement to long-term or permanent residence is withdrawn, save in the cases referred to in Article 25d.

What stands in place of a presence obligation is an obligation to keep the money in place: the investment must remain above the statutory minimum for five years and any change must be declared immediately — the marks and the way they are counted are recorded in the timing cell of this table.

One further count is much stricter and should not be confused with the three rules above, because it serves the accumulation of status rather than its retention: periods of absence do not interrupt the five-year period provided each is shorter than 6 consecutive months and they do not exceed 10 months in total across the five years.

The definition sits in Article 2 of the Foreigners in the Republic of Bulgaria Act, and its first condition is not a paper relationship but cohabitation: in respect of a foreigner, family members are the persons who live together with them in the same household and fall into one of four groups.

The first is spouses. The second is children of the foreigner and of their spouse, adopted children included, aged under 18 and not married.

The third is children of the foreigner alone, adopted included, under 18 and not married, where parental rights are vested in that foreigner and the children are dependent on them.

The fourth is children of the foreigner spouse, adopted included, under 18 and not married, where parental rights are vested in the spouse and the children are dependent on them.

Paragraph 4 opens one narrow further door: unmarried children of the foreigner or of their spouse aged 18 or more still count as family members where serious health problems require personal care for them, or where for such reasons they are objectively incapable of providing for themselves.

Paragraph 5 sets out a prohibition few jurisdictions write down: where the foreigner already has a spouse with whom they live on the territory of the Republic of Bulgaria, family reunification with another spouse shall not be allowed.

Procedurally, once a family reunification application has been accepted and approved, the family members are issued visas under a relaxed procedure, on terms and conditions specified in an act of the Council of Ministers

The status this programme grants, whether a visa or a residence permit, does not replace the holder's passport. The holder still travels on the passport of their own country, so the figure below belongs to the Bulgaria passport and becomes the holder's only once they are issued a Bulgaria passport.

According to the Passport Index of Prosperous Intelligence, on data dated 30 September 2026, the Bulgaria passport reaches 190 destinations without applying for a consular visa in advance. The figure combines three forms of entry and does not count an e-Visa that must be obtained beforehand:

It is therefore a measure of how easily the holder travels, not a count of visa-free countries in the narrow sense.

For comparison, on the same source and the same method of counting, the Vietnamese passport reaches 44 destinations. The two lists of destinations do not nest inside one another, so the difference is an indication rather than a list of places newly opened.

Prosperous Intelligence dates its data and advises checking with the destination’s official authorities before travelling.

The statute governing this category contains no provision on the tax position of a permit holder: where the text does mention tax, the provision lies outside the investment category.

One mention sits among the grounds for refusing entry, applying to a foreigner who breached this country labour or tax law during a previous stay.

Another sits in the trade representative office category, where the foreign company must show it has no overdue tax liabilities for the two years before registering the representative office — and that is a different long-term residence category, not permanent residence by investment.

The word revenue appears only as the name of the authority in administrative contexts: gambling licensing, a basis for assessing undertakings, and recovering the costs of removal.

One provision does allow assessment on audited financial statements and information from the national revenue agency, but its scope must be read carefully: Article 25(4) applies to points 13 and 16 of Article 25(1) and not to the three investment points.

The three investment routes sit at Article 25(1), points 6, 7 and 8.

Point 6, as amended by State Gazette No. 21 of 2021, offers four routes.

The first is acquiring shares or bonds of a Bulgarian trading company traded on a regulated market with a market value of not less than BGN 2,000,000. The second is rights under a concession contract of not less than BGN 1,000,000.

The third is units of a collective investment undertaking of not less than BGN 1,000,000 where the fund net asset value is not less than BGN 5,000,000. The fourth is an alternative investment fund of not less than BGN 1,000,000 where fund assets are not less than BGN 3,000,000.

Point 7, as amended by State Gazette No. 22 of 2022 in force from 18 March 2022: a contribution of not less than BGN 2,000,000 to the capital of a Bulgarian company for a priority investment project certified under the Investment Promotion Act, certified by the Ministry of Economy, Investments and Industry.

Point 8, added by State Gazette No. 36 of 2009: an investment of at least BGN 6,000,000 in the capital of a Bulgarian trading company whose shares are not traded on a regulated market.

On the country tax base, the government investment certification agency publishes national figures rather than any programme-specific regime: a flat rate of 10% for both corporate income tax and personal income tax;

VAT at 20%; withholding tax of 5% on dividends distributed to companies outside the EU and EEA; and labour taxes amounting to 34.8% of labour cost.

One detail about that agency dedicated investor page is worth recording: it offers exactly four downloads — the certificate application, the legal handbook, the Foreigners Act and the Corporate Income Tax Act — with no Personal Income Tax Act among them.

The limit of this cell must be recorded: the statutory tax-residence test for Bulgaria could not be established, because the rule has not been verified on the sites of the national revenue authority or the Ministry of Finance.

This cell therefore does not cite Article 4 of the Personal Income Tax Act and does not state whether a permit holder becomes a tax resident.

Read this cell within its scope: the statute governs entry, exit, residence and employment of foreigners and defines the investment routes and their thresholds; it says nothing about income tax, does not define tax residence, grants no tax concession, and imposes no periodic tax reporting duty on holders under those three points.

The statute likewise does not say that the permit creates tax residence, and does not say that it does not — it is wholly silent on the point

The Act prints no fee amount, and it states plainly who does: Additional Provision 2 provides that fees shall be charged for the issuance of visas, residence permits and other documents under this Act, in such amounts as shall be prescribed in an enactment of the Council of Ministers.

The Act contains no tariff and no state fee; it mentions fees only in the very provision just quoted.

Anyone needing figures must open the Council of Ministers enactment rather than search the Act.

What the Act does contain is an unusual money provision that runs in the applicant's favour, so it deserves recording in full: Article 9h(1) states that a visa application shall be inadmissible in three cases.

Where the applicant has failed to present a valid passport or a substituting valid travel document, where the applicant has refused to provide their biometrics, or where the visa fee is not paid.

Paragraph 2 of the same article is the part that repays reading: in those cases the diplomatic mission or consular post shall immediately return the application, return the visa fee paid, return the supporting documents, and shall destroy the biometrics collected.

In Bulgaria, therefore, an application treated as inadmissible sends the money back — unlike most routes in this table, where the assessment fee is non-refundable regardless of outcome.

Two further cost provisions sit in Article 45 and arise at the other end of the journey: paragraph 4 requires the employer or the receiving organisation to cover the costs of repatriating a third-country national residing illegally in Bulgaria.

Paragraph 5 requires the costs of the return and readmission of a holder of an EU Blue Card issued by another Member State, and of their family members, to be paid by the applicant or their employer.

One note on the text: the file is published by the ministry's own portal, but the footer of every page carries the address of a commercial legal database, so this is a third-party compilation republished by the authority rather than a text the authority itself drafted.