At a glance

Armenia’s investment-based permanent residence takes effect on 1 November 2026 and runs for five years, and as of 10 September 2026 the Government has not published the amount a foreigner must invest to qualify. The ground exists in the statute. The number that makes it usable has not been published.

The residence ground that does carry published figures is entrepreneurship: AMD 2,000,000 (about USD 5,500 at the CBA official rate of 363.58 on 10 September 2026) contributed to the charter capital of an Armenian company, or AMD 1,000,000 (about USD 2,750 at the same rate) for a private entrepreneur. Those two figures are frequently reported as though they were the investment threshold. They belong to a different ground with different consequences, and the difference decides whether an applicant receives one year of status or five.

Several immigration sites quote USD 150,000, and some quote USD 50,000, as Armenia’s investment residence threshold. Both figures trace back to a 2022 draft that was never brought into force.

What takes effect on 1 November 2026

Law HO-11-N rewrites large parts of the Law on Foreigners (HO-47-N) with effect from 1 November 2026. For anyone considering Armenia as an investment destination, five changes matter.

Four new residence grounds appear: education, entrepreneurship, investment and exceptional services. The ten-year special passport is abolished for new applicants, and existing holders keep their rights until the printed expiry date of the document they already hold. Every application moves onto one electronic platform. Residence cards become biometric, which means attendance in Armenia to give fingerprints and collect the card. An annual Government quota replaces the labour market test, and exhaustion of that quota becomes an express ground for refusing an application.

Until 31 October 2026 the existing regime continues to run. Filing early under the new rules is impossible, and there is no window in November or December 2026 in which the new process operates at the old lower fees. Applications submitted before 1 November 2026 are processed under the old rules even where the decision comes later. Employment-based applications through the workpermit.am system are the one route not gated by the appointment system.

Investment permanent residence under Article 29.6

Article 29.6 creates a direct five-year permanent residence status for a foreigner who makes a significant investment in Armenia. Its practical value lies in what it removes. Family-based and business-based permanent residence both require three years of temporary residence within the preceding five years. The investment ground carries no such prerequisite, so a qualifying investor reaches five-year permanent status without first spending three years on annual permits. Exceptional-services status and ethnic Armenian status share that exemption.

The statute delegates everything quantitative to the Government: the minimum amounts, the currency they are expressed in, which forms of investment qualify, the documentation, and the application route. That Government decision had not been published as of 10 September 2026, and the firm’s monitoring of pending implementing acts records it as outstanding alongside the quota decision. Nothing in the statutory text supplies a figure, so any specific threshold currently circulating for Article 29.6 has no published source.

Three consequences follow from the statute even without the decree. Investment permanent residence is revoked where the holder ceases to satisfy the conditions the Government prescribes, which makes the unpublished decree the source of the exit risk as well as the entry test. Investors are exempt from the obligation to notify the authorities of absences from Armenia exceeding 183 days, an obligation whose breach is itself a revocation ground for other status holders. And the investment ground sits inside the general annual quota framework, so a published quota can constrain it; no 2026 numerical quota for this ground has been published.

Anyone planning around Article 29.6 should treat 1 November 2026 as the earliest date on which the ground can be invoked, and the publication of the Government decision as the date on which it becomes usable. Those may well be the same day. They are not guaranteed to be.

The entrepreneurship route, which has published numbers

Article 29.4 governs residence based on entrepreneurial activity, and its thresholds sit in the statute itself, with no decree pending.

USD equivalents use the CBA official rate of 363.58 on 10 September 2026 and move with the rate.

Passive shareholding qualifies under this ground, so a foreign shareholder does not need a management role in the company. What the ground gives, however, is ordinarily temporary status. Permanent residence built on entrepreneurial activity still requires the three years of prior temporary residence, so incorporating a company with AMD 2,000,000 of capital in November 2026 produces a residence permit and a three-year clock, and no immediate five-year card. Setting the company up correctly at the outset is what makes that clock run cleanly; our business registration and Armenian tax pages cover the mechanics.

What the AMD 2,000,000 figure actually covers

AMD 2,000,000 is the entrepreneurship threshold. It says nothing about the investment ground, which the legislature placed in a separate article with its own conditions and delegated to a separate decree. The two grounds differ on the point that costs the most time: the entrepreneurship route to permanent status runs through three years of temporary residence, and the investment route does not.

Treating AMD 2,000,000 as an investment-residence price therefore understates what Article 29.6 is likely to require and overstates what AMD 2,000,000 buys. The published expectation among Armenian practitioners is that the investment figure will land materially above the entrepreneurship threshold, which is consistent with the drafting, though the decree remains the only thing that can settle it.

A third ground, Article 29.7, covers exceptional services to Armenia. It is granted by decision of the Prime Minister on the opinions of the National Security Service and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, it also bypasses the three-year prerequisite, and it is the only category that retains direct agricultural land ownership rights. It carries no threshold, because it turns on discretion.

Armenia has no citizenship by investment

Armenian law contains no route by which a defined payment or charitable donation produces residence or citizenship as a matter of entitlement. There is no price schedule in the Law on Citizenship and no donation category in the Law on Foreigners.

A citizenship-by-investment initiative did circulate in 2022, published on the e-draft portal as project 4835, with categories such as USD 150,000 in real estate, in foundation capital, in shares, in bonds or in a fund. The enabling amendment to the Law on Citizenship was adopted on 7 July 2022 by law HO-284-N. The implementing decision that would have given those categories legal effect was never adopted, the draft attracted 14 supporting comments against 284 opposing, and it remains under revision. The USD 150,000 figure that still appears on comparison sites is a figure from that abandoned draft. In August 2026 the Minister of Internal Affairs stated publicly that Armenia operates no golden-passport scheme.

The actual routes to Armenian citizenship by naturalisation are three. The ordinary route requires three years of residence together with examinations in the Armenian language and the Constitution. A facilitated route exists for spouses and close family of Armenian citizens. A further route exists for applicants with a former Armenian parent. None of them is priced.

The Law on Citizenship also permits discretionary naturalisation for persons who have rendered exceptional service to Armenia or made a significant contribution to it. The wording is permissive, so a decision may be granted and cannot be demanded, and no sum of money converts the discretion into a right.

Commercial agencies nevertheless market packages under the labels “Armenia citizenship by investment” and “Armenia residency by donation”. What is being sold in those packages is a private service built on the ordinary statutory grounds, most often company formation and the entrepreneurship residence ground. A reader comparing offers should ask which statutory ground the package runs on and what the Government fee on that ground is. Both answers are fixed by law and can be checked against the figures on this page.

Government fees from 1 November 2026

USD equivalents use the CBA official rate of 363.58 on 10 September 2026. These levels arrive in a single step no later than 1 November 2026. Reports of a two-month window from 1 November to 31 December 2026 during which the new process runs at the old lower fees describe an arrangement that does not exist in the enacted text, and reports that the fees change on 1 January 2027 describe a date that never operates as a residence fee date.

The work entry visa deserves a caveat of its own: the statute delays it until the new electronic entry visa system is operational, so it does not activate automatically on 1 November 2026. Changing from tourist status to work status inside Armenia is prohibited. Our work permits page tracks that route separately.

Fee exemptions

Applicants under 18 are exempt from both residence and visa fees, and that exemption is unchanged. Family members of Armenian citizens are currently exempt from both; from 1 January 2027 the residence fee exemption is removed and the visa fee exemption survives. Foreign students and teachers lose their exemption on the same date. Recipients of exceptional-services permanent residence are exempt from the application duty, an exemption that commences on 1 January 2027 and covers consideration of the application rather than the AMD 5,950 card charge. The Government retains power to fund the duty in whole or in part for defined groups.

Two figures are deliberately absent from the table. The card replacement and restoration charge is not carried into the new schedule and its position is unconfirmed. No post-reform total is stated for United States citizens, because the interaction between the United States reciprocity rates and the new fee structure is unresolved.

Keeping the status once it is granted

The reform attaches continuing conditions to business and investment status, and the enforcement runs through databases.

The 180-day tax check

Where status rests on entrepreneurial activity, the State Revenue Committee database must show tax assessed from that business within 180 days of the grant. If it shows none, the status is to be treated as lapsed. This is the provision that ends residence built on dormant companies. Two points within it are unresolved in the published material: no minimum sum is specified, and the treatment of a nil or zero assessment is unconfirmed. The 180-day check applies to the entrepreneurship ground; the investment ground has its own conditions, still pending.

The capital floor

Entrepreneurship status is cancelled if the company’s capital falls below AMD 1,000,000 (about USD 2,750 at the CBA rate of 363.58 on 10 September 2026), or if the value of the shares or securities held falls below AMD 1,000,000. Withdrawn charter capital has two escapes: immediate equivalent reinvestment into another Armenian commercial organisation, or a one-month window to reinvest. Whether that one-month window reaches a fall in the market value of securities where nothing has been withdrawn is not addressed in the statutory text.

Revocation and refusal

Investment permanent residence is revoked where the holder ceases to satisfy the conditions prescribed by the Government, which places the exit risk inside the same unpublished decree that sets the entry test. Beyond that, applications may be refused for exhaustion of the annual quota, for false documents or a mismatch between the declared purpose and the actual one, and for three years following deportation or deprivation of status. A criminal conviction for a medium-gravity, grave or especially grave offence is a refusal ground, subject to a carve-out that matters in practice: it does not apply to a person whose spouse, parent or child is legally residing in Armenia.

What is still unpublished

Four items were outstanding as of 10 September 2026, and each has to be adopted before the reform can operate as drafted.

• The Government decision setting the Article 29.6 investment amounts and qualifying investment types.
• The Government decision setting the annual quota numbers, the sectors they apply to and the methodology behind them.
• The card replacement and restoration charge under the new fee schedule.
• The post-reform fee position for United States citizens, where reciprocity rates meet the new structure.

Foreign ownership of Armenian property is a separate question from residence and is unaffected by these gaps. Foreigners may own apartments and commercial property in their own name; agricultural land requires an Armenian legal entity or a lease, and the only status category retaining direct agricultural ownership is exceptional-services permanent residence. Ownership by itself creates no residence entitlement. Where a property is turned into income-generating activity, the owner registers as a taxpayer, and rental income is taxed at 10 percent up to AMD 60,000,000 a year. Our real estate and banking pages set out the transaction and account-opening steps, and the residence permits and residence by investment pages carry the current application procedure.

Frequently asked questions

Reviewed 10 September 2026 against the enacted text of HO-11-N and the Armenian state duty legislation. This page is general information about Armenian law and does not constitute investment advice.