Chile Investor Visa

The immigration authority page cited here does set thresholds rather than leaving the matter open, and they divide along two branches of applicant.

The first covers legal representatives and people holding executive or senior management functions in a foreign company who intend to invest in Chile: the minimum is five hundred thousand US dollars or the equivalent in another currency.

Immediately after the figure comes a purpose condition that narrows the scope: the investment counts only if it is destined for the production of goods or services, so sums placed in non-productive assets do not pass through this door.

The second branch is not measured by the applicant’s money but by the ownership structure of the business employing them.

It covers executives, senior managers and specialised technical personnel hired as dependent workers or to provide services to a company established in Chile.

The condition is that the company’s capital or assets are controlled directly or indirectly by a foreign investor holding at least ten per cent of the voting rights attaching to its shares, or an equivalent share of the capital or assets where the company is not a sociedad por acciones.

The file must include a sponsorship letter issued by InvestChile, the country’s foreign investment promotion agency, together with a document setting out the details of the investment, including its purpose and amount, and the nature of the functions to be performed.

The page was last updated on 18 December 2025.

What is granted is a temporary residence permit — Residencia Temporal — under the subcategory for investors and related personnel.

The first thing worth knowing is not the duration but where it is filed: the authority states that applications under this subcategory can be made only from abroad, through the National Migration Service’s digital procedures portal, signing in with ClaveÚnica or with an account the applicant creates for the purpose.

Someone already inside Chile cannot switch into this subcategory on the spot, so the order of travel has to be planned from the outset.

As to how long the permit runs, the page prints no figure at all — no term of validity appears anywhere on it — and that matches how Law 21,325 allocates the power:

Article 156 gives the Service the decision to grant, extend, refuse and revoke permits and to fix their period of validity, so the length is an administrative decision taken file by file rather than a number fixed in advance.

The permit can be extended, and the authority maintains a separate procedure for extending a Residencia Temporal.

Two short clocks apply to the documents rather than to the permit, and both are short enough to spoil a slowly assembled file:

The passport must be valid for at least one year from the date of application where the application is made from abroad, and the criminal record certificate from the country of origin is valid for no more than sixty days from its date of issue.

The law sets no deadline requiring the authority to decide a residence application.

The full text contains no provision on a period within which to decide and none on administrative silence, and sets no thirty-day or ninety-day mark for a decision.

There is therefore no mechanism treating the authority's silence as either consent or refusal, and the applicant has no date to hold onto.

The one deadline the law does impose belongs to the courts rather than the administration, and it runs only on the worst branch.

On a challenge to an expulsion order, the competent Court of Appeal must add the case to its nearest list by extraordinary procedure, with preference for hearing and judgment, and must decide the matter within three days. Lodging the challenge suspends execution of the expulsion order.

On the side of competence, Article 156 gives the Service the power to decide the grant, extension, refusal and revocation of residence and stay permits and to fix their period of validity — so the length of a permit is an administrative decision taken file by file rather than a figure sitting in the statute.

On the branch of prior authorisations or visas issued abroad, the law allows the authority to extend validity up to ten years and requires the number of entries granted to be stated, but the time actually spent in the country may still not exceed the period set under Article 48, counted from the most recent entry.

Chilean law treats temporary residence as a period under assessment rather than a static status, and the four criteria of that assessment are written into the statute itself.

In deciding on the move to permanent residence the authority weighs: first, self-employed or employed activity allowing income to be evidenced for at least half the months of temporary residence in the country.

Second, the number of absences from the country and their duration. Third, the commission of the migration offences listed in Title VII and their gravity.

Fourth, the commission of offences against labour, social security, environmental, health, tax, customs or any other rules of the Chilean legal order, and their gravity.

What deserves attention is how the law handles absence: it sets no hard ceiling in days, but folds the number and length of absences in as one factor to be weighed alongside the other three — so there is no figure to hold onto, and equally no figure to work around.

The period of temporary residence required before applying for permanent residence is two years by default, but the law allows the implementing regulation to set a period below two years and not below one, precisely on the strength of those personal circumstances.

Above all this, Article 70 leaves to a Supreme Decree the naming and the requirements of each temporary-residence subcategory, with a protective clause worth recording:

That decree may not impair rights already acquired by holders of temporary residence when it takes effect, and where new conditions are more favourable, existing holders are entitled to opt into them.

Chile has a distinct temporary residence subcategory called dependant status, and article 74 of Law 21,325 defines it in two groups.

The first group is the spouse or cohabiting partner of the temporary resident.

The second is the children of the temporary resident, of the spouse or of the partner, provided they are under eighteen or are persons with a disability, together with children over eighteen but under twenty-four provided they are studying at an educational institution recognised by the State.

An unmarried partner is recognised on the same footing as a spouse, subject to proving a genuine cohabiting relationship. Three classes of child deserve to be kept apart: under eighteen with no further condition, a child with a disability with no age limit, and eighteen to twenty-four conditional on study.

Dependants in Chile are permitted to undertake paid work, which many other countries forbid.

The financial condition falls on the principal and carries no figure: the holder must evidence economic activity or stable income sufficient to maintain those applying with them, and the immigration service refers only to indicators estimated by the Ministry of Social Development and Family without printing a number.

A spouse must additionally file a notarised sworn declaration undertaking to bear the costs of residence.

Parents and grandparents do not fall within dependant status: they must use the family reunification subcategory, which requires a relationship with a Chilean national or a holder of permanent residence, so a person newly holding temporary residence cannot sponsor a parent.

One internal divergence in the statute is worth recording so that no one joins across it: article 19 does mention parents in its declaration of the right to family reunion, but that is the rights chapter rather than the implementing subcategory.

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 Chile passport and becomes the holder's only once they are issued a Chile passport.

According to the Passport Index of Prosperous Intelligence, on data dated 27 September 2026, the Chile passport reaches 185 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 43 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 Chilean three-year concession is real, but it is not a benefit of this programme.

The second paragraph of article 3 of Decree Law 824 of 1974 on income tax provides that a foreigner who establishes domicile or residence in the country shall, during the first three years counted from entry into Chile, be liable only for the taxes charged on income from Chilean sources.

That period may be extended by the Regional Director in qualifying cases. Upon expiry of the period or of its extensions the general rule in the first paragraph applies.

Under that rule, every person domiciled or resident in Chile pays tax on income of whatever origin, whether the source of receipts is located inside or outside the country.

The concession applies to every foreigner newly establishing domicile or residence, and the decree law does not mention any category of residence permit.

The definition of residence sits in article 8, number 8 of the Tax Code: any person who remains in Chile, continuously or otherwise, for a period or periods totalling more than 183 days within any twelve-month span.

Two things belong in the record.

First, the decree law does not say whether the grant of a residence permit by itself creates domicile or residence for tax purposes, nor does it set criteria for the qualifying cases eligible for extension.

Second, Migration Law 21,325 makes repeated penalties for failure to meet tax or social security obligations a ground for refusing an application, and breaches of tax law a ground for extending the waiting period to as much as 48 months before permanent residence may be sought.

The fee attaches to the permit type rather than to the route, and this route is a Temporary Residence permit. That fee is not a single figure — it varies by the applicant's nationality.

The table sits in Exempt Resolution No. 129194 of 3 July 2020 of the Ministry of the Interior and Public Security, expressed in US dollars, in three columns: Temporary visa, contract-based visa and student visa. For a Vietnamese national all three columns carry the same amount.

The basis is reciprocity: the resolution itself cites article 2 of Supreme Decree No. 296 of 1995, under which these amounts match Chile's Consular Tariff.

The fee at each step is as follows; the temporary step is in US dollars, while for the two later steps the service prints fixed amounts in pesos:

Payment is made in pesos at an administratively fixed rate rather than a market rate: 925.25 pesos to the dollar, published in Official Gazette No. 44,413 of 28 August 2026 and valid only until 30 September 2026.

So USD 135 comes to 124,908.75 pesos, a peso figure that is the product of those two published numbers and holds only inside that window.