Grenada Defers Its 30-Day Residence Requirement for Citizenship Investors Indefinitely
Grenada has shelved the 30-day physical presence requirement it was due to impose on citizenship by investment applicants from 31 August 2026, deferring commencement indefinitely and leaving the country's US$270,000 real estate route open on its existing terms. The postponement was confirmed days before the rule was to take effect, and no replacement date has been set.
What changed
The requirement sits inside the Grenada Citizenship by Investment (Amendment) Bill, 2026, which was tabled in the House of Representatives on 28 July 2026 and debated in the Senate on 31 July 2026. The bill amends the Citizenship by Investment Act, No. 15 of 2013, adding 23 new sections across 16 clauses.
Its centrepiece is what the drafters call a "genuine and effective link" to Grenada. Investors granted citizenship would have to accumulate 30 days of physical presence in the country during or up to any of the first five calendar years after the certificate of citizenship is issued, with each applicant required to be physically present for not less than five days within the first 12 months of the grant. Practitioner guidance published on 1 September describes the 30 days as a family total, with several family members present on the same day counting once toward it, while the bill text as reported frames the aggregate around the applicant. That ambiguity is one of several the commencement Order will have to resolve.
Commencement was always contingent on a ministerial Order, and that Order has not been published. The deferral ties it to the Eastern Caribbean Citizenship by Investment Regulatory Authority becoming operational and to all five participating states agreeing a common start date. Until then, applications proceed under the current rules.
The mechanism
The part of the bill that carries the most commercial risk is section 7B(6), which provides that the requirements may be applied retroactively to pending applications at the discretion of the Minister, subject to transitional guidelines. The bill does not define what counts as a pending application. An investor who files today and receives citizenship after the Order takes effect has no statutory guarantee of being grandfathered; the protection depends on ministerial discretion and on transitional guidelines that do not yet exist.
The deferral is not a Grenada-only decision. The residence requirement descends from the 2024 Citizenship by Investment Memorandum of Agreement signed by five Eastern Caribbean states, the same instrument that drove Grenada's earlier threshold changes. Grenada moving alone would have put its programme at a price and convenience disadvantage against neighbours still selling citizenship with no presence obligation, which is the practical reason the start date is now pegged to regional coordination rather than a national calendar.
What it means for a foreign buyer
For anyone buying Grenadian property to obtain citizenship, three things follow.
Nothing about the investment arithmetic changes. The approved real estate route still requires US$270,000 for a qualifying share in an approved project or US$350,000 for a full unit, with a mandatory five-year holding period. The National Transformation Fund contribution route remains US$235,000 for a family of up to four.
The travel obligation an investor was pricing into the decision has disappeared for now. A buyer who had structured around flying to Grenada inside the first year no longer has to, and one who was deterred by the requirement has a window in which it does not apply.
The retroactivity clause is the reason not to treat that window as risk-free. Because section 7B(6) reaches pending applications at the Minister's discretion, an application filed now and decided after commencement could still be caught. Investors closing in this period should be documenting file dates carefully and reading the eventual transitional guidelines rather than assuming today's rules attach permanently at the point of purchase.
Context
Grenada's programme has been repriced twice in recent years under regional pressure. The Citizenship by Investment (Amendment) Regulations 2024, S.R.O. No. 12 of 2024, raised the qualifying share in an approved real estate project from US$220,000 to US$270,000 with effect from 1 July 2024, left the full-unit minimum at US$350,000, and banned discounting, rebates and guaranteed buy-back arrangements across every route. The enterprise option sits separately at US$1.5 million for a single investor, or US$350,000 per investor in a joint venture with a US$5 million total.
The direction of travel across the Eastern Caribbean is toward higher prices, tighter due diligence and some form of physical connection to the issuing state. Grenada has not abandoned that; it has synchronised its timing with the region. Investors comparing residency and citizenship routes across the wider Caribbean and Central America, including Belize's Qualified Retired Persons programme and Panama's Friendly Nations Visa, should note that presence and tax-residence conditions vary sharply between them, as do the incentive regimes attached to qualifying property, such as the CONFOTUR framework in the Dominican Republic.
Sources
- Grenada Bill to Introduce Residency Requirement That "May Be Applied Retroactively" - IMI Daily
- Grenada Delays New 30-Day CBI Residency Requirement - Savory & Partners
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