North Macedonia · Business & founder
Temporary Residence for Business and Self-Employment with Personal Work Permit
Open. Amendments of 26 September 2025 simplified temporary residence procedures generally. The business/self-employment route requires no labour-market test and no educational documentation, making it materially easier than the employment route.
North Macedonia has the cleanest tax proposition of the Western Balkans — a true 10% flat rate and no capital gains tax at all on securities held over two years — and, under Article 2 of its Citizenship Law, fully permits dual citizenship with no renunciation. That combination is the most permissive on this list. The business route, not the phantom CBI, is how you actually get there.
Qualifying routes
no labour-market test; requires a detailed business plan and proof of substantial means
1-year permit, unlimited extensions, but a labour-market test applies
The facts
- Total landed cost
- EUR 2,000–5,000 for company formation and permit; ongoing accounting modest.
- Timeline
- 1–3 months — Ministry of Interior plus Employment Agency processing.
- Physical presence
- Required to build the 3-year permanent-residence clock
- Family
- spousedependent children
- Permanent residency
- 3 consecutive years of temporary residence, plus financial means, accommodation and health insurance
- Citizenship
- 8 years of legal and continuous residence
- Language test
- Macedonian language, to an understandable-by-the-community standard
- Dual citizenship
- Permitted
- Requirements
- registered Macedonian company or self-employmentpersonal work permitdetailed business planproof of substantial means and accommodationhealth insuranceclean criminal record
- THE PROPERTY ROUTE IS RESTRICTED TO NATIONALS AND RESIDENTS OF EU OR OECD MEMBER STATES. A non-EU, non-OECD national — a Russian national, for instance — cannot use it at all. This is a hard blocker that most comparison tables omit.
- EIGHT YEARS IS THE LONGEST NATURALISATION CLOCK among the viable Balkan jurisdictions.
- NORTH MACEDONIA APPEARS NOT TO BE A CRS PARTICIPANT — the OECD appears to list it among developing countries with no first-exchange date set — but we could not confirm this because the OECD portal returned 403. If correct, it is a wasting asset, not a strategy: EU accession eliminates exactly this status, and we would not build a plan on it.
- Inheritance tax, CFC rules and exit tax could not be verified. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence — do not represent these as 'none'.
- The business route requires a genuine business plan and substantial means; it is not a shell-company route.