Argentina Citizenship by Investment Cost 2026

Key takeaways

The announced price is USD 350,000 to the National Treasury, and it is not refundable. The Economy Ministry's statement of 2 October 2026 describes "un aporte directo y no reembolsable al Tesoro Nacional por USD 350.000". The alternative is a public bond of USD 800,000 created specifically for the programme. There is no asset at the end of the first route and no published interest on the second.

Family members are priced separately, and a household of four was put at USD 500,000. Spouses and unmarried children aged 18 to 25 with no children of their own contribute USD 100,000 each; children under 18 contribute USD 25,000. The ministry's own worked example reaches USD 500,000 for the family group.

No amount appears in any decree. Decreto 366/2025 added the investment route to citizenship law and left the definition of a "relevant investment" to the Economy Ministry; Decreto 524/2025 built the procedure and names no figure at all. The announced amounts are terms, not a published schedule, and we found no resolution in the Boletín Oficial fixing them.

A federal court has already declared the citizenship chapter invalid. In case CNE 9345/2025 the Juzgado Federal N° 1 de Paraná found the whole of Title III of Decreto 366/2025 constitutionally invalid for want of necessity and urgency. The effect was limited to that applicant, but Title III is the chapter the investment route lives in.

The European access this passport is bought for is the exposed part. Argentine nationals travel to the Schengen area visa-free under Annex II of Regulation (EU) 2018/1806. Since the reform Parliament approved on 7 October 2025, an investor citizenship scheme raising security concerns is a standalone ground for suspending that exemption — and one Annex II country's waiver is already suspended over exactly this.

On this page

Every figure below is attached to the document that states it, because on this programme the distance between an announcement and a published rule is the whole story. The Economy Ministry's statement of 2 October 2026 is the source for the amounts; Decreto 366/2025 and Decreto 524/2025 for the mechanism; the naturalisation page and the migration fee table for the ordinary route; the Paraná ruling for the litigation. This site's renderer does not emit heading anchors, so the list below is a map rather than jump links.

• What Argentina citizenship by investment costs in 2026
• What is law, what is an announcement, and what is neither
• A federal court has already struck down the citizenship chapter
• The two-year route Argentina already had, and what it charges
• The European access this passport is bought for is the part at risk
• How the Argentina citizenship by investment cost compares with programmes open today
• What to ask before you wire anything

What Argentina citizenship by investment costs in 2026

Two announced routes for the principal applicant, a per-person scale for the family, and one source for all of it: the statement the Ministry of Economy published when Luis Caputo presented the Programa de Ciudadanía por Inversión in Paris on 2 October 2026. It says the programme "estará operativo para recibir solicitudes en el transcurso del cuarto trimestre de 2026".

The table is the announcement as published. The third column is what gets lost when these figures are repeated, because the two routes are not the same kind of transaction.

That USD 500,000 example resolves to a principal applicant, a spouse and two children under 18: 350,000 plus 100,000 plus two lots of 25,000. It is the ministry's own arithmetic, and it tells you the family amounts are additive rather than a household discount, which is how most Caribbean funds work.

The bond route is the one to read carefully. The official statement gives a single number, USD 800,000, and the phrase "creado específicamente para este Programa" — no maturity, no coupon, no redemption terms. Press reporting of the Paris presentation describes a seven-year, zero-coupon instrument, which is not in the ministry's published text and should be treated as unconfirmed until a prospectus exists. That gap is not academic: on a zero-coupon seven-year hold the real cost is the yield you forgo, which against Argentine sovereign risk can exceed the USD 350,000 the other route simply takes.

Neither column includes professional fees, legalisation, sworn translation or due diligence charges, because Argentina has published none of them. Our guide to citizenship by investment due diligence fees shows what those run elsewhere, and they are not small.

What is law, what is an announcement, and what is neither

This is where every competing page we read stops, and it decides whether the price above is real. Argentina built the route in two instruments, both decrees rather than acts of Congress, and neither contains a number.

Decreto 366/2025, signed on 28 May 2025 and published the following day, rewrote article 2 of citizenship law 346. It kept the ordinary route — eighteen years of age and residence "en forma continua y legal durante los DOS (2) años anteriores a la solicitud" — and added a second path for foreigners who prove to the Dirección Nacional de Migraciones, "cualquiera sea el tiempo de su residencia", that they have made a relevant investment in the country. Then it added article 2 bis: the Ministry of Economy "establecerá qué inversiones serán consideradas relevantes". The decree does not say what a relevant investment is. It says who decides.

Decreto 524/2025, published on 31 July 2025, built the machine. Applications go to the Agencia de Programas de Ciudadanía por Inversión, created inside the Ministry of Economy by the same decree. The agency tests whether the investment is relevant "de acuerdo con lo que establezca el MINISTERIO DE ECONOMÍA", asks the intelligence, financial-intelligence, criminal-record and identity bodies whether a grant would create a risk, then reports to Migraciones, which has thirty working days to grant or refuse. Also no amounts, and no fees.

So the honest description of the Argentina citizenship by investment cost today is this: the legal hook, the procedure and the agency all exist, and the price is a ministerial statement where the enabling article requires a ministerial decision. Those can be the same thing, but only once it is published. Until then nobody — the advisers already taking enquiries included — can say whether USD 350,000 is the figure, a floor, or the price of one of the "proyectos específicos de inversión" article 2 bis also lets the ministry designate.

That is not a reason to dismiss the programme. It is a reason to ask for the resolution number rather than the press release.

A federal court has already struck down the citizenship chapter

In the course of an ordinary citizenship application — case CNE 9345/2025, Mondragón Herrera, Leonel Felipe, on a petition for a carta de ciudadanía — the Juzgado Federal N° 1 de Paraná declared the "invalidez integral del Título III" of Decreto 366/2025. The reasoning was constitutional rather than substantive: an emergency decree requires necessity and urgency, Congress was sitting, and administrative or political convenience does not meet that bar.

Two things about that ruling matter for anyone pricing this route, and they pull in opposite directions. The first is scope: the court limited its effect to the case before it, so the decree remains in force generally and the agency it created continues to exist. The second is subject matter. Title III is not a side chapter — it moved the grant of citizenship from federal judges to the Dirección Nacional de Migraciones, required the two years of residence to be unbroken by any departure, and added the relevant-investment ground in the first place. A programme resting on a decree chapter already found constitutionally invalid once carries a risk no statutory Caribbean programme carries.

The practical reading is about sequencing rather than probability. Nobody can say how the appellate courts will treat Title III; what you can say is that an investor paying before the schedule is published and before the litigation resolves takes both risks at once, with a non-refundable contribution as the stake.

The two-year route Argentina already had, and what it charges

Argentina's naturalisation requirement was already among the shortest in the world, so the investment route is not competing with a ten-year wait. The government's service page states the conditions: eighteen or over, and resident in Argentina legally and continuously for the two years before the application, defined strictly — "durante los dos (2) años anteriores a la solicitud, sin haber realizado ninguna salida al exterior", without any trip abroad. You must be inside the country to apply, and the application goes through the RaDEX system rather than a court.

The paperwork is a DNI, proof of lawful livelihood, a criminal record certificate from the Registro Nacional de Reincidencia and a written statement of your wish to become a citizen. Foreign documents need an apostille and a sworn translation under article 6 of law 20.305. The page publishes no fee and no processing time.

The residence permit underneath it does have published fees, and they are unusually modest. The migration fee table under Decreto 584/2024 is denominated in UMSM units — Unidad de Medida de Servicios Migratorios — which the Dirección Nacional de Migraciones states at ARS 1,000.

At the published UMSM value, an extra-Mercosur residence application is ARS 100,000 in state fees. The real cost of that route is not money but the clause about departures: two years in Argentina without leaving is a genuine relocation, which is exactly what the USD 350,000 contribution is sold to avoid. That trade — a third of a million dollars against two years of physical presence — is the comparison that matters here, and no brochure frames it that way.

One caution on reading the two routes together. The strict no-departures definition and the transfer of citizenship decisions to Migraciones both come from the same Title III the Paraná court struck down. If that chapter falls, the ordinary route does not disappear; the pre-2025 version of article 2 and the judicial procedure return.

The European access this passport is bought for is the part at risk

Buyers of Argentine citizenship are not buying the right to live in Buenos Aires, which residence already gives them. They are buying mobility, and the valuable part of it is Europe: Argentina sits in Annex II of Regulation (EU) 2018/1806, whose article 4 exempts listed nationals from a short-stay visa for up to ninety days in any one hundred and eighty.

That exemption became conditional in a new way in 2025. The European Parliament approved a reform of the EU's visa suspension mechanism on 7 October 2025, by 518 votes to 96 with 24 abstentions, and its own press release lists the new grounds: hybrid threats, a lack of alignment with EU visa policy, violations of international law, failure to comply with international court decisions, and "investor citizenship schemes (or 'golden passports') raising security concerns". The Council adopted it in November 2025 and it entered into force twenty days after publication, as Regulation (EU) 2025/2441.

This is not hypothetical. The European Commission's visa policy page records Vanuatu's visa waiver agreement as currently suspended under the mechanism, and that suspension was about its citizenship programme. Our page on the Vanuatu passport ranking traces what it did to the document's value: the mobility a buyer paid for was withdrawn after the money was spent, and not refunded.

Argentina's position is different in degree, not in kind. It is a G20 member with deep European ties, and nobody expects the Commission to move against it the way it moved against a Pacific micro-state. But the ground now exists, it describes the programme Argentina has announced, and an applicant buying a passport for Schengen access should price that risk rather than assume it away.

How the Argentina citizenship by investment cost compares with programmes open today

Against programmes that are accepting applications, USD 350,000 is at the expensive end of the market, and it buys a passport with wider visa-free access than any Caribbean document and a legal foundation that is considerably less settled.

Two differences do not show up in a column of numbers. The first is maturity: every other programme there has a unit you can write to, a fee schedule you can read and applicants who have been through it, while Argentina has an agency, a procedure and a press release. The second is mobility — an Argentine passport is a materially stronger travel document than a Caribbean one, which is the honest case for the premium and also why the European suspension ground is the risk to watch.

If price is what you are optimising, the comparison to run is not Argentina against the Caribbean but Argentina against its own residence route. At the lower end, cheapest citizenship by investment ranks the market on money you never get back, and citizenship by investment countries lists what is open in 2026.

What to ask before you wire anything

Five questions, in this order. The first disposes of most of the marketing currently in circulation.

Which published instrument fixes the USD 350,000? If the answer is the October 2026 announcement rather than a numbered resolution in the Boletín Oficial, the price is not yet a rule. What are the bond's terms? A maturity, a coupon and a redemption schedule, in writing; without them the USD 800,000 route cannot be compared with anything. Who holds the money before approval? The contribution is non-refundable on its face, so the sequencing of payment against the Migraciones decision is the most important commercial term in the file. What happens if Title III is struck down generally? Nobody can answer that with certainty, which is itself the answer. What is the full source-of-funds file? Decreto 524/2025 routes every application past the intelligence service, the financial intelligence unit and the security ministry, so expect the deepest review in the market, not the lightest.

Our guide to citizenship by investment source of funds sets out what that file normally contains, and citizenship by investment processing time explains why published decision windows — Argentina's is thirty working days after the agency reports — describe the government's part, not the clock an applicant experiences.

Nothing here is advice to apply or to wait, and no figure is a quote. Argentina has published a procedure and announced a price. Those are two different kinds of document, and until the second looks like the first, the safe assumption is that the number can change.

Related guides on Domicila

• Cheapest citizenship by investment — the low end of the market, ranked on money you never get back.
• Citizenship by investment countries — every programme still open in 2026, and what each one issues.
• Egypt citizenship by investment cost — the other large-economy programme at USD 250,000, and a government schedule that contradicts itself.
• Caribbean citizenship by investment comparison — the donation routes Argentina's announced price sits well above.
• Citizenship by investment due diligence fees — what the vetting costs elsewhere, since Argentina publishes nothing on it.
• Vanuatu passport ranking — what happened the last time the European Union acted against an investor citizenship scheme.