Malta Golden Visa Cost 2026: Two Fee Rewrites

Key takeaways

The non-refundable floor is EUR 99,000 before any property. A EUR 60,000 administration fee, a EUR 37,000 contribution and a EUR 2,000 donation to a Maltese voluntary organisation are all gone for good the moment they are paid, whether you buy or rent, and whether or not you ever spend a night in Malta.

The property bar is EUR 375,000 to buy or EUR 14,000 a year to rent, anywhere in Malta or Gozo. The cheaper southern and Gozitan thresholds are not reduced, they are deleted: the schedule of southern localities was removed from the regulations outright, so a page still offering EUR 300,000 in Gozo is quoting a rule that no longer exists.

The fee schedule was replaced twice in seven months, and the two rewrites pulled in opposite directions. Against the schedule in force at the end of 2024, a single applicant buying property now pays EUR 29,000 more in fixed charges, while one renting pays EUR 1,000 less. Which set of figures a published comparison quotes tells you which month it was written in.

A spouse and minor children now carry no administration fee at all, and nor does an adult child with a certified disability. The EUR 7,500 per head applies to two categories only: an unmarried child under 29 who is principally dependent on you, and a parent or grandparent who is principally dependent on you and not in full-time employment.

This is residence, and the obligations do not end at year five. Malta's route to an actual passport by investment was closed by the Court of Justice of the European Union in April 2025, and the residence regulations require you to keep a residential property in Malta or Gozo after the five-year qualifying period ends, with the Agency monitoring compliance annually for the first five years.

On this page

This guide starts with what the programme charges in 2026, then shows what the two rewrites changed and why the published comparisons missed them, who among your family is charged and who is free, how the buy-versus-rent decision moved, when each payment is actually due, and three worked totals. The renderer on this site does not emit heading anchors, so the list below is a map rather than a set of jump links.

• Malta golden visa cost in 2026: the EUR 99,000 that never comes back
• Two fee rewrites in a year, and why most cost pages missed both
• Who pays the EUR 7,500, and who is free
• Buy or rent: what the unified contribution did to the decision
• When each payment falls due, and what you owe after approval
• What a Malta golden visa really costs: three worked totals
• Related guides on Domicila

Malta golden visa cost in 2026: the EUR 99,000 that never comes back

Malta does not issue anything called a golden visa. What the search term means is the Malta Permanent Residence Programme, run by Residency Malta Agency under Subsidiary Legislation 217.26 of the Immigration Act, which grants a certificate entitling the holder and approved dependants to reside in Malta indefinitely. Applications can only be filed through an agent licensed by the Agency, so there is no self-application route and no way to avoid a professional layer on top of the state's own charges.

Three of the state's charges are fixed, non-refundable and owed by every successful applicant regardless of route. They come to EUR 99,000 for a single applicant, and that is before the property requirement, which is separate and additional.

The property requirement is the part people budget for and the fees are the part they underestimate. A qualifying owned property means residential property in Malta or Gozo bought for not less than EUR 375,000, and a qualifying rented property means a residential lease of not less than EUR 14,000 a year. Either has to be held for five years from the day the certificate issues. The regulations also let the Agency accept a cheaper property improved by the applicant's own works, provided an independent architect's valuation report puts the finished value at EUR 375,000 or more.

There is a wealth test underneath all of it that has nothing to do with what you spend. At submission the main applicant must evidence assets of at least EUR 500,000, of which at least EUR 150,000 must be financial assets, or alternatively assets of at least EUR 650,000 of which at least EUR 75,000 must be financial. The second option was added in 2024 for applicants whose wealth is concentrated in illiquid holdings. The capital has to stay in place for five years, and applicants must be third-country nationals, not from a country the Agency lists as sanctioned, and not already benefiting under one of Malta's other residence or tax schemes. If you are still comparing programmes rather than committing, our golden visa countries guide covers what remains open in Europe.

Two fee rewrites in a year, and why most cost pages missed both

Search this topic today and you will be told the contribution is EUR 28,000 if you buy and EUR 58,000 if you rent, or perhaps EUR 30,000 and EUR 60,000, that the administration fee is EUR 40,000 or EUR 50,000, and that property starts at EUR 350,000 in Malta or EUR 300,000 in Gozo and the south. Those are not errors so much as fossils. Three different fee schedules were in force between 2024 and now, and a page quoting any of the first two is quoting a repealed one.

Legal Notice 310 of 2024 came into force on 1 January 2025 and rewrote both the definitions and the money. The purchase threshold became a single EUR 375,000 for property anywhere in Malta or Gozo, the rental threshold a single EUR 14,000 a year, and the Second Schedule listing the southern localities that carried the discount was repealed outright. The same notice put an age ceiling on adult children, who must be under 29 and unmarried when the main applicant submits, added the alternative EUR 650,000 asset test, and raised the administration fee to EUR 50,000 while charging EUR 5,000 for every dependant. Legal Notice 146 of 2025 then replaced that First Schedule in turn.

Add the columns up for a single applicant and the direction of travel is not what a headline about a cheaper contribution suggests. Fixed charges on the lease route went EUR 100,000, then EUR 112,000, then EUR 99,000. On the purchase route they went EUR 70,000, then EUR 82,000, then EUR 99,000. Net across both rewrites, a renter is EUR 1,000 better off than at the end of 2024 and a buyer is EUR 29,000 worse off, and a buyer in Gozo is also facing a property floor EUR 75,000 higher than the one that applied to them.

One detail decides whether the new schedule applies to you, and it is more aggressive than a normal commencement rule. The amending notice provides that the new administration fees and contributions apply also to applications submitted after 1 January 2025 that had not been concluded when it came into force, and that the older contributions no longer apply to them. An application filed in spring 2025 and still in process was therefore repriced mid-flight. If you are budgeting from a quote issued before July 2025, ask your agent in writing which schedule your file is being assessed under.

Who pays the EUR 7,500, and who is free

The family arithmetic changed more than the headline did, and for most households it changed favourably. The schedule that ran through the first half of 2025 charged EUR 5,000 for every dependant, spouse and small children included, and exempted only an adult child with a certified disability. The current one charges EUR 7,500 a head but exempts three of the five categories of dependant outright, which is the part most summaries compress into the phrase "excluding the spouse" and thereby get wrong.

The regulations define five categories of dependant, and the exemption covers three of them. What matters is which letter your relative falls under.

Two of those rows have teeth. Category (c) closes at 29, so an unmarried 29-year-old who depends on you entirely cannot be included at any price, and the age is tested on the date the main applicant submits rather than the date of approval. Category (d) now requires that the parent or grandparent is not in full-time employment, a condition added in July 2025 that did not exist before: a working parent who is nonetheless financially supported no longer qualifies as a dependant.

Relatives can also be added after the certificate issues, and the fee follows the same categories, payable on submission of that later application rather than after approval. How programmes price families is the single largest source of divergence between two headline figures that look identical, which is why we keep a separate citizenship by investment family cost comparison.

Buy or rent: what the unified contribution did to the decision

Until July 2025 the schedule pushed applicants toward buying: renting cost EUR 30,000 more in contribution, which was most of a deposit. That pressure is gone. The contribution is EUR 37,000 either way, so the choice is now a clean comparison between EUR 70,000 of rent paid over five years and EUR 375,000 of capital parked in a Maltese apartment for the same period.

Read the last row rather than the second-to-last. The lease route commits less than half as much money but every euro of it is spent; the purchase route commits EUR 474,000 of which EUR 375,000 buys an asset you still own in year six. Whether that asset is worth what you paid is a property question we are not going to answer for you, and the Agency's approval says nothing about it.

Three costs sit outside both columns. A purchase attracts Malta's duty on documents and transfers, assessed by the notary on the higher of price or market value, and we have left it out rather than quote a rate we could not confirm against the tax administration's own published schedule, which blocks automated access. Agent fees are not published by anyone: the regulations require every applicant to use an agent, and oblige that agent to hold professional indemnity cover of at least EUR 500,000 and pay the Agency EUR 5,000 a year for the licence, which is a floor under what they can charge you. Health insurance for the whole family is required for as long as the certificate lasts, and is bought on the open market, as our golden visa health insurance requirements guide explains.

For what it is worth against the alternatives, EUR 169,000 of committed spend on the lease route is competitive with nothing else in the EU on a cash-out basis, because everywhere else the qualifying money is an investment you nominally keep. Our golden visa cost comparison sets the surviving European programmes against each other on exactly that distinction, and cheapest golden visa explains why the lowest advertised threshold is so rarely the lowest real bar.

When each payment falls due, and what you owe after approval

The schedule is staged rather than payable up front, and the stages are tied to the Letter of Approval in Principle rather than to calendar dates. The first EUR 15,000 is at risk within a month of filing, well before the Agency has said anything about your file.

Miss the first deadline and the Agency may refuse the application immediately. One genuinely useful change arrived with the 2025 amendments: an applicant may now request a temporary residence permit valid for one year on submission, for themselves and their dependants, renewable in further one-year periods while the main application is assessed. Before that, waiting meant waiting outside.

Approval is not the end of the obligations, and this is where the programme differs from how it is sold. The Agency monitors adherence to every condition annually for the first five years, and at its discretion after that. Throughout, the beneficiary must hold the qualifying property, hold the capital that satisfied the asset test for five years, keep health insurance covering all risks normally covered for Maltese nationals for every person on the certificate, and have stable resources sufficient to support the household without recourse to Malta's social assistance system. An approved dependant without health insurance is removed from the certificate.

The obligation that outlives the five years is easy to miss in the regulations and absent from most summaries: after the qualifying property requirement expires, the beneficiary must still hold a residential property in Malta or Gozo, owned or leased, for as long as the certificate stands. There is no threshold on that later property, but there is no exit from the requirement either. The certificate itself does not expire; the residence card issued under it is renewed periodically, with biometrics recaptured.

What a Malta golden visa really costs: three worked totals

Here is the same programme totalled for three households, using only charges established above. Each line is the state's own schedule plus the property requirement, and none of them includes agent fees, due diligence billed by the agent, duty on a purchase, insurance premiums or the cost of actually living in Malta.

The middle row is the one that surprises people. A spouse and two minor children add nothing at all to the state's charges, so a family of four buying property pays exactly what a single applicant buying property pays. Add one dependent grandparent to the third row and the bill moves by EUR 7,500, which is less than most programmes charge for a second adult.

Set against Europe's other open routes, Malta is expensive in fees and cheap in committed capital. Greece wants EUR 250,000 to EUR 800,000 in property depending on the zone, Portugal EUR 500,000 into funds, Cyprus EUR 300,000 plus VAT, and all three of those sums remain, at least nominally, yours. Malta asks EUR 99,000 that is simply gone and then lets you satisfy the property test with a lease. Which is better depends entirely on whether you would rather sink EUR 169,000 or immobilise EUR 474,000.

One thing the money does not buy is a Maltese passport. The separate route that sold citizenship directly was held contrary to EU law by the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice in Case C-181/23 on 29 April 2025 and is closed; our Malta citizenship cost guide covers what the judgment did and did not end. This certificate is residence. It permits you to settle in Malta, and because Malta is in the Schengen area the residence card supports short stays elsewhere in the zone on the usual terms, subject to the rules our Schengen visa insurance requirement guide sets out. It is not a work permit: employment in Malta is applied for separately under the ordinary rules, and any route to naturalisation is the ordinary one, measured in years of actual residence.

Related guides on Domicila

If you are pricing Malta against the alternatives, these are the comparisons that do the most work:

• Golden visa cost comparison — Portugal, Greece, the UAE and Malta on published 2026 fee tables
• Malta citizenship cost — the route the Court of Justice closed, and what survived it
• Cyprus golden visa cost — the closest comparable permanent permit, and its VAT problem
• Greece golden visa cost — the 2024 threshold zones, and what they did to the entry price
• Cheapest golden visa — why the lowest advertised threshold is rarely the lowest real bar
• Golden visa health insurance requirements — the cover these permits oblige you to hold, indefinitely