Vanuatu grants citizenship to investors under four separate schemes run by the Citizenship Office and Commission, and the Commission’s own published fee table starts at USD 130,000 for a single applicant plus a USD 5,000 Financial Intelligence Unit due diligence fee. The Capital Investment Immigration Plan is priced separately at USD 260,000. Before any of that matters, one fact decides whether this passport suits your purpose: the European Union moved Vanuatu out of its visa-exempt list and into the list of countries whose nationals need a visa, and that is still where Vanuatu sits today.
This page sets out what the Vanuatu Citizenship Office publishes about its own programs, and what the European Union’s own regulation says about Vanuatu passports. Every figure below was taken from the issuing authority on 23 August 2026. The fee table and the application steps were read again on 30 September 2026, and again on 16 October 2026 together with the Citizenship Act, the agents’ register, the Financial Intelligence Unit’s notice and the European Union’s acts. Where an authority publishes nothing, we say so rather than filling the gap.
A Vanuatu application is lodged through a designated agent; Serka Law Firm is not one and works beside it as the investor’s independent counsel, reading the source of funds the way the Financial Intelligence Unit will. The other programs are set against Vanuatu on our citizenship by investment country comparison.
The current EU visa position, from the EU’s own regulation
Regulation (EU) 2018/1806 is the instrument that lists which third countries’ nationals need a visa for short stays in the Schengen area and which do not. In its consolidated version of 30 December 2025, Vanuatu appears in Annex I, Part 1, the list of countries whose nationals must hold a visa. Vanuatu does not appear in Annex II at all.
Two steps produced that. Council Decision (EU) 2022/2198 suspended the short-stay visa waiver agreement between the European Union and the Republic of Vanuatu “in whole as regards nationals of Vanuatu, as from 4 February 2023”. Regulation (EU) 2025/11 of 19 December 2024, published in the Official Journal on 14 January 2025, then inserted Vanuatu into Annex I, Part 1, moving it permanently onto the visa-required list. The reasons the EU institutions recorded concern Vanuatu’s investor citizenship schemes: the volume of passports issued, the rejection rate, the absence of a physical presence or residence requirement, and the level of information exchange with applicants’ countries of origin.
We have not found any later EU act restoring the exemption, and Vanuatu’s own Citizenship Office publishes nothing on the subject. If a buyer’s reason for holding a second passport is European travel, that is the fact to weigh first.
What the programs are
The Citizenship Act [Cap 112] came into force in 1980. The Office’s own page lists amending acts and orders of 2013, 2014 and 2018, and Regulation (EU) 2025/11 records two later changes Vanuatu reported to the European Commission: legislation amended in 2021 so that a dual citizen cannot register a change of name in Vanuatu, and a March 2023 amendment to the Citizenship Act that replaced the bodies screening the applications. The Citizenship Office lists eight categories of citizenship, four of which are investment routes:
- Capital Investment Immigration Plan (CIIP), applied for on Form D. The government contracted Vanuatu Registry Services, based in Hong Kong, as the main agent for this plan.
- Honorary Citizenship under the Vanuatu Development Support Program (DSP), as the Office’s list names it. The Citizenship (Development Support Program) Regulations Order No. 33 of 2019, made by the Prime Minister on 24 April 2019, establish the program for the purpose of section 13E of the Citizenship Act and set its prices and procedure.
- Vanuatu Contribution Program (VCP).
- Real Estate Option Program (REO), which began on 23 July 2021 and requires the purchase of property inside a Vanuatu Government Approved Project. Naika Holdings Limited is the exclusive master agent worldwide. Four approved projects are named: Pacific Springs at Rentabao on Efate, Narpow Point Coral Bay and the FPF Rainbow City Project, both at Narpow Point on Efate, and Milai on Espiritu Santo.
Vanuatu recognizes dual citizenship: Article 13(1) of its Constitution, as amended in 2013, and Part 3A of the Citizenship Act, inserted by the Citizenship (Amendment) Act No. 39 of 2013.
The published cost
The Citizenship Office publishes one fee table covering the application fee and the citizenship certificate fee. The table names no program and carves out Form D separately; its four family figures are the ones Order No. 33 of 2019 sets for the Development Support Program.
| Category | Government mandated fee |
|---|---|
| FIU due diligence fee | USD 5,000 |
| Single applicant | USD 130,000 |
| Married couple | USD 150,000 |
| Married couple and one child | USD 165,000 |
| Married couple and two children | USD 180,000 |
| Additional applicant | USD 10,000 |
The application fee, for everything except Form D, is 5,000 Vatu per application, payable when the application is lodged, and it applies to every applicant regardless of age. The citizenship fee is paid only after the Commission has approved the application.
Order No. 33 of 2019, which the Office still links, reads those figures differently. Regulation 4 makes USD 130,000 for a single person, USD 150,000 for a couple, USD 165,000 for a couple and a child and USD 180,000 for a couple and two children the minimum prices at which agents may market the program, and regulation 7 prescribes lower fees payable to the government account: USD 80,000, USD 100,000, USD 115,000 and USD 130,000, USD 10,000 for each further child or resident dependant, a USD 2,000 due diligence fee per applicant, and VT 5,000 and VT 10,000 for the application and the certificate. The same Order has a quarter of the prescribed fee paid before the Commission considers the file, kept by the State if the Commission refuses it, and the rest before the certificate, which the Commission must issue within 90 days of approval; it bars an applicant with a criminal conviction, and lets the Commission accept one from a restricted country only if he has not lived there for the last five years and shows permanent residency abroad. Which figure a given file pays is read from the agent’s contract and the Office’s receipt.
Form D, the Capital Investment Immigration Plan, is priced on its own terms. The application fee is USD 250 per application. The citizenship fee is USD 260,000, and that figure covers the applicant, a spouse and one child under 18. Each further child under 18 costs USD 19,250. A dependant aged 18 to 21 may be included at USD 44,250 per person. The Commission’s press release of 2 December 2024 adds that the plan carries a mandatory USD 50,000 investment component, that the Commission monitors compliance with it, and that non-compliance can lead to revocation of the citizenship.
The Office does not publish a minimum holding period for property bought under the Real Estate Option, and it does not publish a residence requirement for any of the investment routes. What it does publish is the purchase requirement itself: the property must sit inside an approved project.
The step nobody markets: the oath, in Vanuatu
The Citizenship Office publishes its application process as ten steps. Steps nine and ten are the ones that catch investors out.
Step nine is the oath. The Office states that it can only be completed in a Vanuatu court, and that applicants who live in a foreign country must travel to Vanuatu to complete it. Step ten is payment of the citizenship fee, which is what releases the printing of the citizenship certificate. The Office applies a deadline to both: three months from the Commission’s approval. A further two months can be requested in writing from the Secretary General, but the request must be made before the original three months expire. If the deadline passes, the approval expires and a fresh application is required.
The one written test in the process, the Bislama test on the general knowledge of Vanuatu, applies only to Forms A and B, which are naturalisation and marriage. Investors do not sit it.
Timing
The Citizenship Office publishes no end-to-end processing time, and we will not invent one. What it does publish is the sequence and two hard dates inside it. An application is examined by the responsible officers, checked by a compliance officer, assessed by the Internal Screening Committee, and then decided by the Citizenship Commission. One week after the Commission meets, the Secretary General’s office issues a letter with the decision. From that approval, the three-month clock on the oath and the fee starts running.
The Office’s page still names the Internal Screening Committee. Regulation (EU) 2025/11 records that Vanuatu’s March 2023 amendment replaced it with three bodies, the Vanuatu Police Force, the Financial Intelligence Unit and the Vanuatu Immigration Services, which report to the Secretary-General of the Commission, and that on Vanuatu’s own information their screening and due diligence take at most 14 days, extendable to 30. The Commission’s press release of 2 December 2024 says the enhanced verification may extend processing times.
Honorary citizenship follows a different chain. Section 20 of the Citizenship Act, in the form Act No. 39 of 2013 gave it, lets the President, on the advice of the Prime Minister, confer honorary citizenship on a person who has contributed or will contribute to the advancement of Vanuatu’s development, once the Commission has assessed the person and advised the Prime Minister. The person must have no criminal record and be of high standing. The Office’s application page describes the chain under the name of the Vanuatu Economic Rehabilitation Program: a designated agent puts the name to a Technical Working Group, which runs intelligence checks through the Financial Intelligence Unit. The Group then submits the name to the Citizenship Commission for due diligence, the Commission submits it to the Prime Minister, and the Prime Minister advises the President, who confers the citizenship.
What sinks a file
Three things show up in the Office’s own publications.
Due diligence. The Financial Intelligence Unit runs the due diligence for the DSP, the CIIP and the VCP. Its notice of 14 January 2025 requires every submission made from 16 January 2025 to carry a passport copy valid for more than six months, a valid police clearance, a notarized curriculum vitae and the government payment receipt, sent by e-mail to the Unit’s Director. Designated staff run the checks, a screening committee of senior FIU staff reviews them weekly, and the Director signs the due diligence letter. The USD 5,000 due diligence fee is a line of its own on the fee table.
Revocation after the fact. The Commission states that it has revoked close to thirty citizenships granted contrary to the Citizenship Act and the national Constitution, and that further revocations are under suspicion. A grant is not the end of the exposure.
The agent. Applications reach the Commission through designated agents, and the Office publishes both a register of them and a separate list of canceled agents. The register carried 61 entries on 23 August 2026 and 61 again on 16 October 2026: 44 for the Development Support Program, under the heading “Development Support Program (DSP) to Engage in a New Contract with COC in 2026”, 2 for the Contribution Program and 15 for the Capital Investment Immigration Plan. The Commission’s press release of 2 December 2024 announced that all agents’ agreements would lapse by January 2025, so an agent’s standing is read on the register on the day a client is sent to it. The Office also warns in terms that only domains ending in .gov.vu are official Vanuatu government sites, which tells you how much impersonation surrounds this program.
Where Vanuatu is strong, and where it is not
Vanuatu’s advantage is the shape of the process rather than the price. There is no language test for investors, no residence requirement published, and the decision chain is short. Dual citizenship is recognized. For a buyer whose objective is a second nationality held for its own sake, the file is unusually simple.
The weaknesses are equally concrete. The European Union has legislated Vanuatu onto the visa-required list, and no restoration has been published. The Office states in writing that an applicant living abroad must travel to Vanuatu to swear the oath, so the process is not remote from end to end. The Office publishes no processing-time commitment. And the Commission’s own revocation record shows that a granted certificate can be revisited.
Against the Caribbean programs, the comparison is straightforward on the point most buyers care about. Antigua and Barbuda remains in Annex II of the same EU regulation, the visa-exempt list, and its published minimum contribution to the National Development Fund is USD 230,000. Vanuatu’s published single-applicant figure is the lower of the two, though the two are charged on different bases, one as a contribution and one as a citizenship fee, so they are not a like-for-like price. The choice between them is usually decided by what the passport is for rather than by what it costs.
Vanuatu and Türkiye: what each price buys
Vanuatu carries the lowest published price among the programs on our country comparison and Türkiye one of the higher ones, so the useful comparison is not the price but what each price buys. The Vanuatu column is the Citizenship Office’s own fee table and process; the Türkiye column is the Turkish regulation.
| Point of comparison | Vanuatu | Türkiye |
|---|---|---|
| What the investment buys | Citizenship on the Development Support Program, which the Office lists as honorary, approved and certified by the Citizenship Commission under Order No. 33 of 2019; the other routes also decided by the Commission | Full Turkish citizenship, by Presidential decision (Article 12(b), Law No. 5901) |
| Published price | USD 130,000 single applicant, USD 150,000 married couple, USD 180,000 couple and two children, plus a USD 5,000 due diligence fee; USD 260,000 on the Capital Investment Immigration Plan | USD 400,000 in real estate; USD 500,000 on any of the five capital routes; or 50 jobs |
| What the money becomes | A citizenship fee paid to the government | An asset the investor keeps: real estate, a lira deposit, state debt, fund units, a pension or a business |
| Holding period | None published | Three years on property, deposit, debt, fund units and pension; nothing on fixed capital or jobs |
| Family | Priced by head on the fee table, USD 10,000 for each additional applicant | Spouse, plus children who are minors or dependants, covered by the one investment |
| Travel to the country | The oath in a Vanuatu court, in person, within three months of approval | In person for the Certificate of Conformity, the short-term residence application, the residence card and the citizenship application |
| Schengen short stays | Visa required since the EU moved Vanuatu to Annex I of Regulation (EU) 2018/1806 | A visa is needed as well; the Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs publishes the rule destination by destination |
On European travel the two passports are level: both need a Schengen visa. The difference is what the money becomes, a fee in Vanuatu and an asset the investor owns in Türkiye, and what the grant is, honorary citizenship on Vanuatu’s Development Support Program and full citizenship on every Turkish route. The Turkish routes, with their documents, are on our Turkish citizenship by investment page.
How Serka works on a Vanuatu file
Vanuatu applications must be lodged through a designated agent appointed by the Commission. Serka is not one, and does not present itself as one. We act as independent counsel: we read the source of funds file the way the Financial Intelligence Unit will read it, we check the identity and standing of the agent a client is being routed through against the Office’s own register and its canceled list, we build the document set to the checklist attached to the form rather than to an agent’s summary of it, and we tell a client plainly when the program does not do what he has been told it does.
That last point is the reason this page exists. A buyer who needs European access is being sold the wrong passport, and no fee structure fixes that.
Give us the passport you hold, the countries you need to enter and the agent’s name. The other programs are compared on our citizenship by investment country comparison.
Every figure and status on this page was taken on 23 August 2026 from the Vanuatu Citizenship Office and Commission and from EUR-Lex, the European Union’s official law database; the fee table and the application steps were read again on 30 September 2026, and on 16 October 2026 with the Citizenship Act and its 2013 amendment, the agents’ register, the Financial Intelligence Unit’s notice of 14 January 2025, the Commission’s press release of 2 December 2024, Council Decision (EU) 2022/2198, Regulation (EU) 2025/11 and the Citizenship (Development Support Program) Regulations Order No. 33 of 2019, a scan read page by page.