Lithuania · Citizenship by descent
Restoration of Lithuanian Citizenship (Article 7)
Open
Last verified July 2026
Open and stable. This is a statutory right, not a discretionary grant, and it carries an express exception to Lithuania's constitutional ban on dual citizenship.
This is the strongest ancestry route in the Baltics and one of the best in Europe. Where the ancestor was exiled from or left occupied Lithuania before 11 March 1990 — which covers essentially every Litvak family that fled pogroms, the Holocaust or Soviet rule — dual citizenship is retained by statute. No money, no language, no relocation. For a qualifying family this dominates every purchasable programme in the region.
Qualifying routes
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Descent from a person who held Republic of Lithuania citizenship before 15 June 1940
Child, grandchild or great-grandchild only — three generations. Great-great-grandchildren do not qualify.
The facts
- Total landed cost
- Modest state fees; realistically EUR 5-20k in archival research, document retrieval and legal fees — the archives, not the government, are the cost
- Timeline
- 6–24 months — The Migration Department decision is not the bottleneck; assembling archival proof of the ancestor's pre-1940 citizenship is, and can take far longer
- Physical presence
- None
- Family
- each descendant qualifies in their own right within the three-generation limitminor children of a successful applicant
- Permanent residency
- n/a — direct citizenship
- Citizenship
- Immediate on approval; full EU citizenship and free movement
- Language test
- None. No language exam, no Constitution test, no residence requirement.
- Dual citizenship
- Permitted
- Requirements
- documentary proof the ancestor held Lithuanian citizenship before 15 June 1940unbroken chain of birth and marriage records linking applicant to that ancestorwithin three generations of the ancestordid not acquire Lithuanian citizenship before 1 April 2011
What can go wrong
- The binding constraint is archival evidence of the ancestor's pre-1940 citizenship — an interwar passport, internal passport or residence record. Lithuanian Central State Archives searches routinely take months and often fail outright. Start the archive search before anyone quotes you a timeline.
- Hard three-generation limit. Great-great-grandchildren are excluded, so delay across a generation can extinguish the family's claim permanently.
- If the ancestor left Lithuania after 11 March 1990, the dual citizenship exception generally does not apply and renunciation is required.
- Anyone who already acquired Lithuanian citizenship before 1 April 2011 is outside this route.
- 'Person of Lithuanian descent' (ethnic origin) is a separate and much weaker status — it does not itself confer citizenship. Advisors conflate the two.
- We found at least one advisory site claiming that from 2026 Lithuania recognises dual nationality for EU/NATO citizens generally. That is false — the constitutional ban stands. Treat such claims as a red flag on the advisor.