Mexico Investor Visa

The figures exist, and the unit of account is days of UMA, the Unit of Measurement and Update, under the Lineamientos Generales published in the Official Gazette on 25 July 2025. Item g of the requirements, headed investor, lists three ways to prove the case. The text joins the first to the second with the Spanish conjunction y, meaning and, and introduces the third with o, meaning or; Article 107(VI) of the Regulation to the Migration Law, which the Guidelines implement, lists the forms of investment as alternatives, so read with the Regulation the applicant needs only one.

The first: a deed or policy of a Mexican legal person executed before a notary, or a document duly certified by that entity governing body, recording that the foreign national participates in its share capital.

It must show that the investment actually disbursed for that participation exceeds 45,850 days of UMA.

Provable by a contract for the purchase of shares or partnership interests, a contract transferring assets or rights to the Mexican entity, or a document issued by that entity evidencing the amount contributed to share capital.

The second: a document proving ownership of movable goods or fixed assets held by a foreign legal person, used for economic or business purposes, again with a value exceeding 45,850 days of UMA.

The third is not measured in money at all, and it is the branch most often missed: documentation proving that economic or business activities are being carried on in Mexican territory.

Contracts, service orders, invoices, receipts, business plans, licences or permits, or a certificate from the Mexican Social Security Institute showing that the foreign legal person employs at least three workers.

On the unit of account, the 2025 Lineamientos replaced the earlier text's twenty thousand days of the minimum wage in the Distrito Federal with a threshold in days of UMA, and the current consular guidance sheet quotes the same figure of 45,850 days of UMA.

Anyone converting to currency must state which year's UMA value they used.

One further threshold is routinely confused with this route: item f immediately above, real estate, requires a notarised public deed showing the foreign national owns real property worth more than 91,710 days of UMA — double the investor level, and a separate item rather than a fourth way of satisfying item g.

What is granted is temporary resident status under Article 52(VII) of the Migration Law, in the consolidated text last amended in the Official Gazette on 15 January 2026. That status allows a stay in Mexico of no more than four years, with entry and exit as many times as the holder wishes.

The route to it has two stages: a single-entry visa valid for 180 days, issued by a consular office of Mexico's Ministry of Foreign Affairs under the joint guidelines of the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, then exchanged for a Temporary Resident Card at the National Migration Institute within 30 days of entry. The first card is valid for one year from entry, under Article 32 of the Lineamientos para trámites y procedimientos migratorios as amended in the Official Gazette on 30 December 2019. The card can be renewed: Article 156 of the Regulation to the Migration Law allows a temporary resident card to be valid for one, two, three or four years, and lets the holder apply for renewal within the thirty days before it expires, until four years have been completed from the grant of resident status.

For Vietnamese nationals the visa stage is compulsory. Viet Nam is on the list of countries whose nationals need a visa to enter Mexico, and under Article 53 of the Migration Law a person admitted as a visitor may not change to another status, except humanitarian visitors and those with a family tie to a Mexican national or to a foreign national lawfully resident in Mexico. Applicants living in Viet Nam file at the Consular Section of the Embassy of Mexico in Hanoi, booking through the Mi Consulado system; the Honorary Consulate of Mexico in Ho Chi Minh City does not accept visa applications.

The status does not carry a right to work by itself: the law allows a permit for paid work, but that permit is subject to a job offer.

A temporary resident has the right to preservation of family unity, and so may enter with, or later request the admission of, unmarried minor children of their own or of their spouse, a spouse, a cohabiting partner, and their father or mother. These family members reside for exactly as long as the principal's permit runs. That right does not turn relatives into a sub-item of the investor's application: under the General Guidelines for the Issuance of Visas published in the Official Gazette on 25 July 2025, each relative applies for a temporary residence visa of their own on the family unity ground, but that application is tied to the investor's, since the whole family attends the consular interview and relatives' visas are issued only once the investor's visa has been granted, as the dependants cell sets out.

The last milestone is permanent residence: Article 54(V) grants permanent resident status once the foreign national has held a temporary residence permit for four years. The investor route offers no direct path to permanent residence at the consular stage: Procedure 7 of the 2025 Guidelines, the permanent residence visa, has only three grounds, namely retirees or pensioners, family unity and a points system, and for the points system the instrument defers the requirements to an agreement that will be published in the Official Gazette.

The authority publishes a hard deadline, which is rare: the maximum period for resolving the procedure is ten working days.

The body of the instrument states where that clock starts: during the consular interview the authority analyses the information and documents supplied by the applicant and, in appropriate cases, after payment of any fees due, will issue the visa within the following ten working days counted from the day the consular interview was held.

Three accompanying details determine what that figure is actually worth. First, issuance of the visa is subject to the result of the consular interview — the ten days govern the issuing step, not the outcome.

Second, the migration authority may obtain whatever further means of proof it considers appropriate in order to decide better, and where there is doubt about the legitimacy of the data or documents, that verification sits outside the ten-day window.

Third, and this is the marker this table most often omits: the visa is not the destination. For this procedure, the visa issued has a maximum validity of one hundred and eighty days and permits a single entry.

The procedure block states its own scope: it applies to foreign nationals seeking to enter Mexico in the condition of stay of temporary resident in order to remain more than 180 days and not more than 4 years.

The visa is therefore a one-way document for getting into the country, while the residence status itself must be completed inside Mexico — and anyone planning a timeline around ten working days alone is planning without a whole leg of the journey.

The General Guidelines issued by Mexico's Ministry of the Interior and Ministry of Foreign Affairs set this route's residence obligations at three points, and the heaviest is the thirty-day one.

Procedure 5, the temporary residence visa, applies to foreign nationals seeking to enter Mexico in order to stay longer than 180 days and no more than four years.

The visa itself is only the entry document: maximum validity 180 days, one entry only, and usable solely within the validity period running from the date of issue.

After entering, the foreign national must apply for the residence card within thirty calendar days of entering the territory — that card, not the visa, is what evidences lawful residence and permits the stay to continue.

The third point is a continuing duty to notify: any change of marital status, of nationality, of the place of residence or place of work must be reported to the immigration authority within ninety days of the change.

The instrument further requires residents who intend to carry out unpaid or philanthropic activity tied to a regulated profession to obtain separate authorisation from the competent body.

One thing this instrument does not impose: there is no minimum number of days of physical presence in Mexico per year of temporary residence — the duties it writes down are duties to exchange documents and to report, not duties to be present.

The investor requirements define no dependants at all, and that absence carries weight because this same instrument defines dependants in detail — just somewhere else.

Item g, headed Investor, speaks only of share capital, fixed assets and business activity; not one line addresses a spouse, children or parents.

What the instrument does provide is a separate ground headed family unity, standing alongside rather than beneath the investment route, and the text returns to that ground in many places, so this is a structure rather than a stray sentence.

The practical consequence deserves stating plainly because it changes how a file is assembled: family members do not ride along on the investor application as a sub-item; they file their own applications on the family unity ground, which carries its own documents and its own conditions.

A separate application is not an independent one. The family unity ground in Procedure 5 requires the relative to produce the principal's valid temporary residence visa and requires proof of means to support each family member: an average monthly balance equivalent to 220 days of UMA over the last twelve months, or net monthly income from employment or a pension above the equivalent of 220 days of UMA over the last six months. Article 112 of the Regulation to the Migration Law requires every family member to attend the consular interview and allows relatives' visas to be issued only once the principal applicant has obtained a residence visa. Under Article 113 of the Regulation and under the Guidelines, a family unity application is filed at a consular office only where the principal resident is outside Mexico and present with the relative when it is filed; otherwise it is filed with the National Migration Institute.

For minors the instrument adds a procedural layer markedly stricter than the rest, and that layer applies across every visa class: the application form must be signed by both parents, or by whoever exercises parental authority or guardianship, in the presence of the consular officer or employee.

Where a parent does not attend the consular office in person, a notarised authorisation from the other parent must be filed.

Where parental authority rests with one parent alone by court judgment, a certified copy of that judgment must be produced, and where the document was issued in a third country it must be legalised or apostilled, with a translation where it is not in Spanish.

Children travelling alone or with an adult who is not a parent must carry a document executed before a notary or a competent authority recording the authorisation of both parents or of the guardians for a Mexican visa to be applied for and issued.

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

According to the Passport Index of Prosperous Intelligence, on data dated 30 September 2026, the Mexico passport reaches 166 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 programme carries no tax regime of its own, and the silence here is the silence of a text checked in full, not of a source that could not be verified.

The General Guidelines for the issue of visas, the instrument that sets every threshold and document requirement for this category, do not mention fiscal, tributario, contribuyente or Registro Federal.

The word impuesto is used only in the phrase período de restricción impuesto por la autoridad migratoria, a bar imposed by the immigration authority, and not in the sense of tax.

The instrument does not avoid money altogether: it imposes a real financial obligation, namely payment of the visa issue fee under the Federal Law on Fees, but no tax obligation.

A taxpayer-registration duty does exist within the Mexican immigration framework but is not attached to the investor route:

The Regulation to the Migration Law requires the certificate of registration in the Federal Taxpayer Register and the most recent tax return from the employer, and requires a taxpayer number from a foreigner undertaking paid activity that does not involve a job offer.

No Mexican immigration instrument says whether a residence permit does or does not create tax residence.

The test of tax residence sits in tax law, not immigration law. Article 9 of the Federal Tax Code treats an individual who has established a home in Mexico as resident; a person who also has a home in another country is resident in Mexico where their centre of vital interests is there, for instance where more than 50% of their total income in the calendar year has a Mexican source or where their main centre of professional activity is in Mexico. Article 1 of the Income Tax Law taxes residents on all their income, wherever its source. The list of double taxation agreements published by Viet Nam's tax authority contains no agreement with Mexico.

The authority prints no fee figure in this instrument, but it names exactly where the figure lives, and how it names it repays more attention than the number itself.

The charge payable is the one provided for in Article 22 of the federal duties law for the issuance of the visa.

The schedule therefore sits in a separate fiscal statute, amended by Congress on the budget cycle, rather than in the visa guidance — so a fee copied from a consulate information sheet is the fee of the year that sheet was drafted, not the fee in force.

In the consolidated Federal Law on Fees, last amended in the Official Gazette on 7 November 2025, Article 22(III)(d) sets MXN 990.79 for receiving, examining and issuing an ordinary visa in a foreign passport. The temporary resident card issued inside Mexico carries a separate fee under Article 8 of the same law: MXN 11,140.74 for a card of up to one year, rising with its length to MXN 25,057.82 for a four-year card, at the amounts amended in the Official Gazette on 7 November 2025; a renewal pays the same fee.

Three accompanying provisions determine what an applicant actually pays.

First, on currency: consular offices collect the duties in the currency authorised by the Ministry of Finance and Public Credit, so the amount payable may differ from post to post. In Hanoi, the Consular Section of the Embassy of Mexico accepts US dollars in cash only, and neither cards nor local currency; the Embassy's 2026 fee table sets the visa fee at USD 56, and the payment is not refunded whatever the outcome of the application.

Second, on waivers: the instrument contemplates cases where an agreement or a unilateral declaration of free visas exists, in which the duty is not collected; in a parallel procedure in the same instrument the corresponding clause adds unless Mexico decides to grant special treatment.

Third, on sequence, and this is what bears directly on the risk of losing money: the visa is issued only after the fees due have been paid, while issuance itself is subject to the result of the consular interview — put side by side, those two clauses mean the money goes before the outcome.

Beyond the state schedule sits one further mandatory cost with no published price: under the Guidelines, every foreign public document to be presented to the National Migration Institute, other than a passport or identity and travel document, must be apostilled by the issuing state's authority if that state is a party to the 1961 Apostille Convention, or legalised by the competent Mexican consular office, and a document in another language must come with a Spanish translation.

For Vietnamese documents, the Apostille Convention has applied to Viet Nam since 11 September 2026; Mexico is a party and is not among the three states that objected to Viet Nam's accession, Czechia, Austria and Germany, so the Convention applies between the two countries. The temporary residence visa page of the Embassy of Mexico in Hanoi, last updated on 14 February 2025, still states that Vietnamese documents must be translated into Spanish by a certified translation office and legalised by Viet Nam's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.