Argentina Citizenship by Investment: The Law Sets No Price

That matters, because almost every guide currently ranking for this topic quotes a figure. The amounts in circulation—500,000 US dollars, one million, a non-refundable donation—do not appear in the decrees. They come from press briefings and from firms selling advisory services. Some of them may turn out to be right. None of them is currently law.

What Decree 366/2025 changed

Decree 366/2025, published in the Boletín Oficial on 29 May 2025, replaced Article 2 of Ley 346, the Argentine citizenship law dating from 1869. The replacement sets out two routes to naturalisation.

The first is residence: a foreign national aged 18 or over who has held continuous legal residence for the two years preceding the application. The decree defines continuous with unusual severity. The text requires that the person hubiere permanecido en el territorio durante todo el plazo … sin haber realizado ninguna salida al exterior—remained in the territory for the whole period without any departure abroad. Read literally, a single trip out of the country restarts the clock.

The second is investment, and the decisive phrase is that it applies cualquiera sea el tiempo de su residencia—whatever the duration of residence. No minimum stay. No physical presence requirement in the decree at all.

The same decree moved naturalisation out of the federal courts and into the Dirección Nacional de Migraciones. That is an administrative change with practical consequences: the decision now sits with an executive agency rather than a judge, which is faster and also more exposed to policy shifts.

Article 2 bis, added by the same decree, states that the Ministry of Economy will determine which investments count as relevant, and may designate specific investment projects. That single sentence is where the missing number lives.

What Decree 524/2025 added

Decree 524/2025, published 31 July 2025, built the machinery. It created the Agencia de Programas de Ciudadanía por Inversión (APCI) and set out the sequence.

Eligibility rests on having made a relevant investment under the criteria the Ministry of Economy sets. APCI assesses whether a given investment qualifies as relevant. Before it reports, it has to gather clearances—from the Ministry of Security, the Unidad de Información Financiera, the criminal record registry and the state intelligence service—and then submit a reasoned report, an informe circunstanciado, recommending approval or rejection to Migraciones. Migraciones then has thirty business days from receipt of that report to decide.

Thirty business days is the number that has travelled furthest in coverage of this programme, and it is real. It is worth being precise about what it measures: it is the deadline for the final decision after APCI has completed its assessment and the security clearances. It is not the length of the process.

The official government announcement of 30 July 2025 is consistent with the decrees and equally silent on amounts. It describes applicants as those who acrediten haber realizado inversiones relevantes en el país and confirms that the definition rests with the Ministry of Economy.

The number that is not there

Three official documents, no threshold. This is not a gap in reporting; it is the actual state of the rules.

Two things follow. If you are budgeting, you cannot budget against a published rule yet. And if a firm quotes you a fixed amount today, ask which instrument it comes from. The answer will be a press statement or an expectation, not a norm.

What still has to happen before anyone can apply

Four things are missing, and they are sequential rather than parallel.

1. The Ministry of Economy has to publish the criteria defining a relevant investment: the amount or amounts, the eligible asset classes or designated projects, and the holding conditions.
2. APCI has to become operationally staffed and reachable, with a published filing route.
3. A procedure has to exist end to end: where the file goes, what evidence is required, how the clearances are requested.
4. The tender process for administering the programme, halted after challenges from bidders, has to be resolved or replaced.

Until the first of those exists, the other three cannot be tested.

What the enacted tax text says—and what it does not settle

Article 194 of Ley 27.802, published on 6 March 2026, adds three paragraphs to Article 116 of the income tax law. The official text says that obtaining Argentine citizenship through a relevant investment does not, by that fact alone, make a foreign individual tax resident under Article 116(a). For Article 116(b), the person continues to be treated as a foreign national; someone who was already a permanent resident when obtaining investment citizenship remains resident under that paragraph.

This is narrower than a general tax exemption. Tax residence and tax exposure can still depend on other facts, statuses and effective dates. The statute does not replace a case-specific analysis of residence, income source, entity structure or reporting obligations.

How this compares with the neighbours

Paraguay and Uruguay already have working routes, which is why interest in Argentine investment citizenship has outrun anything an applicant can currently do about it. We have run all three processes ourselves, and the differences are practical rather than theoretical.

Paraguay issues temporary residency quickly—about six weeks in our case—and requires one personal entry, which powers of attorney reduce but do not remove. The cédula that follows is the document that actually unlocks things; without it a bank account is effectively out of reach. Normal issue time is six to twelve weeks. Ours took five months, and for the second applicant in the same household close to a year, after a scandal at the immigration authority led to restructuring and files sat untouched. That was an outlier and we say so, because most guides quote either the brochure timeline or a horror story, and neither is the expected case.

Uruguay also requires personal entry, and expects you not to be absent for more than roughly six months early on, or the application can lapse. The binding constraint for us has been proof of income, in the order of USD 1,600 a month, which is straightforward on a salary and awkward when income arrives as dividends or distributions. Mercosur nationality matters here: for an Argentine the route is simple, for a German spouse in the same household it is not.

Argentina taught us the departure rule the expensive way. A permanent-residency application filed before the May 2025 changes was terminated near the end because we left the country, which we had not understood would break it. That is worth knowing now that Decree 366/2025 has written a strict continuity requirement into the residence route: the administrative practice came first, the text followed.

Two smaller observations. Argentine paperwork is largely digital, German apostilles are not, and physically shipping documents between countries was the most tedious part of all three processes. On cost, agency fees of around USD 2,000 structured with two trips, and closer to USD 2,500 around a single trip, are what we paid; we have heard higher.

What to watch

The signal that matters is a Ministry of Economy resolution defining relevant investment. It will appear in the Boletín Oficial. Nothing else—no press briefing, no advisory-firm update, no launch estimate—changes what an applicant can actually do.

The second signal is a functioning filing route at APCI. A created agency and a reachable agency are different things. We track both on the implementation-status entry in the regulatory tracker.

Frequently asked questions