Egypt · Citizenship by investment
Egyptian Citizenship by Investment
Open and unchanged in price since the 17 April 2023 repricing. Legal basis is Law 190 of 2019 (amending Nationality Law 26/1975), which replaced the 'deposit residency' route created by Law 173/2018. Volumes are very small — an industry source reports just 36 approvals in 2025. Note that GAFI publishes the process and the USD 10,000 state fee but does NOT publish the investment amounts; those come from Henley, Fragomen and licensed agents.
At USD 250,000 this is the cheapest citizenship-by-investment anywhere and one of only two in the region. But you are buying a rank-85 passport with roughly 50 visa-free destinations — no Schengen, no UK, no US. The honest use case is narrow: a second nationality as pure political insurance for someone holding a worse one, not a mobility upgrade.
Qualifying routes
cheapest route; payable in instalments over one year; nothing comes back
5-year hold; sources conflict on whether government-owned projects only or private developers are also accepted
plus a further USD 100,000 non-refundable donation; 5-year hold
refundable after 3 years WITHOUT interest and — critically — in Egyptian pounds, not dollars
The facts
- Minimum investment
- $250k
- Total landed cost
- From USD 250,000 (donation route) plus a USD 10,000 state fee paid from abroad to the Central Bank, plus agent and legal fees typically USD 15-40k. We could not verify the per-dependant fee schedule from any official source and will not guess at a family-of-four figure — insist on a written GAFI-referenced quotation.
- Timeline
- 3–12 months — GAFI states 3-6 months; practitioners report 6-12 months in practice
- Physical presence
- Officially none — GAFI states there is no required residency period. But an industry source reports a minimum 2-day visit during the application and a further month (or two visits totalling four weeks) after approval. This conflict is unresolved and matters.
- Family
- spouseminor children up to the age of 21
- Permanent residency
- Not applicable — this route delivers citizenship directly, without a prior residency period. Egypt offers no permanent residency at all, even via its separate property-residency tiers.
- Citizenship
- This is the citizenship route — granted by Prime Ministerial decision
- Language test
- none
- Dual citizenship
- Permitted
- Requirements
- clean criminal recordfunds transferred in hard currency from abroadvalid passportmedical/health documentationnationality on the accepted listUSD 10,000 state fee paid from abroad to the Central Bank
- The E-2 pitch is dead and any adviser still making it is wrong. Egypt is a genuine E-2 treaty country, but the NDAA (P.L. 117-263, signed 23 December 2022) requires anyone who obtained treaty-country citizenship BY INVESTMENT to have been domiciled there for a continuous three years before applying for E-1/E-2. Grandfathering only applies if citizenship was obtained before 27 December 2022. The single most-marketed reason to buy Egyptian citizenship no longer works.
- The deposit route is a currency bet, not a deposit. USD 500,000 is refunded after three years in Egyptian pounds, without interest. The EGP went from 8.85/USD in 2016 to roughly 50.5/USD in July 2026. You are lending half a million dollars to a state with a chronic FX shortage and taking the devaluation risk yourself. If you must use Egypt, the USD 250k donation is more honest about what it costs.
- Volumes are tiny — roughly 36 approvals in 2025 on industry figures. This is not a mature, well-trodden programme with predictable administration.
- GAFI publishes no investment amounts. Every figure in circulation is agent-sourced. Get the number confirmed in writing before transferring anything.
- The 2023 cut was deliberate policy to attract hard currency during an FX crisis, not an FX artefact. If the FX position eases, a reprice upward is entirely plausible.
- Syrian applications have been suspended since December 2024, and applications are processed from only around 15 nationalities. Confirm your nationality is accepted before starting.
- Foreign buyers are capped at two residential properties of up to 4,000 sqm each, with a five-year resale bar — the property route locks you in twice over.
- Egypt is a CRS non-participant, which sounds like a feature and is a liability: it is exactly the profile that attracts enhanced scrutiny from banks and revenue authorities elsewhere, and it will not last forever.
- Sources conflict on whether the real-estate route requires government-owned projects. Do not commit to a private developer without written confirmation.