How to Obtain Residency in Uruguay
Uruguay is an often-overlooked residency option that may offer appeal versus the more popular Latin American residencies. It is important to note that this is not a Plan B residency like Paraguay or Panama, because you are required to spend significant periods of time in the country.
Uruguay
Uruguay Residency:
PLAN “A”
Why get residency in Uruguay?
- Uruguay is a peaceful, neutral and reasonably developed country in the Southern Cone.
- Located between Argentina and Brazil offering easy access to the major cities of each country.
- Straightforward and easy process with low income requirement.
- You will be able to work in any capacity in Uruguay.
- You will have a clear and relatively quick path to citizenship if you continuously reside in Uruguay.
- Take advantage of Uruguayan health insurance.
Documents needed to apply for residency in Uruguay
All documents from overseas must be apostilled. If your country is not part of the apostille treaty, then you must get them stamped at a local Uruguayan consulate.
- Get an appointment at immigration
- Birth certificate
- Marriage certificate if applicable
- Clean criminal record from your country of birth and recent residence (no older than 6 months)
- Proof of income (pension, dividends, rental income, foreign job or local income), generally for OECD countries $1500 per month is sufficient. Proof of income documentation must be no older than 6 months.
- Open a Uruguayan bank account to prove that your income is being duly received in the country. This can be done easily in one day in the country.
- Medical exam from a registered provider in Uruguay. Easily accomplished with a quick appointment.
How to apply for residency in Uruguay
This process is easy for anyone that does not need a visa to travel to Uruguay, which includes most OECD countries. It is known to be very complicated for nationalities that need a visa to come to the country as a tourist.
The first step is to obtain an appointment with immigration. At this stage all you need is your passport, health card and passport photo. With just these items, you can apply for residency as a tourist in Uruguay, with the understanding that you will submit the rest of your documents within the next two years. Once you file your application, you will be given a temporary resident cedula which serves as your identity card and permits you to stay in the country during the two-year submission window.
After all of the above mentioned documents are submitted, the National Migration Office may inquire about your proof of income and ask other standard questions, and potentially request an in-person interview.
After they fully review and process your application (around 6-12 months), you are given a permanent resident cedula that is valid for 3 years. However, you must stay in the country for a minimum of 6-8 months of the initial two-year period and prove to the Uruguayan authorities that Uruguay is indeed your residence. This is why Uruguay is not a Plan B residency, but a Plan A.
How to get citizenship in Uruguay
After three years if you are married, or five years if you are single, you can apply for a Uruguayan passport. The clock starts the moment you first arrive in the country. But you are expected to live in the country consistently for 3 years – you cannot simply come for a few months a year to meet the stay requirement.
You are also required to learn Spanish to carry out an interview where you explain why you are in Uruguay, what you do for a living in the country and demonstrate proof of assets and income.
Once you have applied for citizenship in Uruguay, the process takes around 1 year.
Tax incentives in Uruguay
There are many tax incentives in Uruguay. First of all, Uruguay does not tax foreign income apart from dividend and interest income (flat 12%).
However even for these, it is possible to reduce them.
New tax residents can choose to either:
- Not pay any taxes on foreign income earned for 10 years.
- Pay 7% flat on foreign income earned for life.
Typically one is expected to spend over half the year to qualify for tax residency, but if one invests $400,000 in real estate, then one can apply for tax residency after 60 days of presence in Uruguay.
If one invests $1.7 million in real estate one can obtain tax residency without spending time on the ground.
My immigration agent in Uruguay
Contact my immigration agent for more information.
Macarena can help you with the following:
- Ensuring all documents satisfy the requirements of the National Migration Office
- Determine the best source of income to use and create supporting documentation
- Translation and notarization of documents
- Registration of documents such as birth and marriage certificates with the Foreign Ministry
- Accompaniment to interviews, health checks and Interpol office to obtain criminal record
- Active monitoring of your application as it is processed
Video: How to apply for residency in Uruguay?
Contact Macarena to get Residency in Uruguay
Transcript of “How to obtain residency in Uruguay “
LADISLAS MAURICE: Hello, everyone. Ladislas Maurice from thewanderinginvestor.com. Today, I’m in Punta del Este in beautiful Uruguay, together with my immigration agent, Macarena. Macarena, how are you?
MACARENA: Good, and you?
LADISLAS MAURICE: Good, good, good.
MACARENA: Okay. Do you like Punta del Este?
LADISLAS MAURICE: It’s gorgeous. Very calm, very pretty, good infrastructure. It’s nice.
MACARENA: Okay.
LADISLAS MAURICE: I see why people like it here.
MACARENA: Is it your first time here in Uruguay?
LADISLAS MAURICE: First time, yes.
MACARENA: Okay.
LADISLAS MAURICE: We’ll be discussing how to obtain residency here in Uruguay. Obviously, there are the usual ways, like, getting married, getting a job–
MACARENA: Having a baby.
How to get residency in Uruguay
LADISLAS MAURICE: Having a baby, that’s another one. But today, we’ll be discussing the more common one for people who just want to come live here. Let’s say, I come here and I tell you I want to get residency. How do I go about it?
MACARENA: Okay. First, you contact me, and I will book you an appointment at immigration office to apply for residency. The requirements are birth certificate. You have to apostille your birth certificate. Maybe you don’t know what is apostille, but it’s like a simple stamp that you can obtain in your country. You will need clean police record from the country you were born and from the country you lived in the past years. You will need to show proof of income. And the proof of income can be proven in a number of ways, pension, dividends, rental income, or a job here in Uruguay.
LADISLAS MAURICE: What about a job overseas?
MACARENA: Yes, it will work. Yeah, of course, you can work remotely and you can ask your accountant to write a CPA letter stating that you work, for example, a translator or whatever you are, and you’re receiving a monthly income of blah, blah, blah. The idea is just to show the authorities that you can support yourself in Uruguay. You don’t need to show a large amount of money, $1,500 per person, it will be okay for immigration purposes.
LADISLAS MAURICE: If my understanding is correct, this is mostly valid for people from OECD countries, so the West, Singapore, Japan, Korea, South Africa, etc. Other countries, especially countries that need a visa to come to Uruguay, it’s very complicated and doesn’t quite work, just to be clear.
MACARENA: Yeah.
LADISLAS MAURICE: Essentially, anyone that has a job in Canada, or the US, or Europe essentially qualifies and can just come here as long as [earn 02:30] remotely.
MACARENA: Yeah, for sure, and they are very welcome to be here. Uruguay is a solid, stable, and safe country. It is easy to blend in. Everybody looks like me, and most of the people speak English.
LADISLAS MAURICE: And it’s attractive from a tax point of view. This is not a tax conversation here, but generally speaking, Uruguay is known for its relatively low tax rates.
MACARENA: Let me tell you about that. You have the option to apply for residency only with your passport and submit the rest of the documents later on. You come here, you enter as a tourist and apply for residency, and you will get an Uruguayan ID card right away, and then you will have to submit the rest of the documents whenever you have.
LADISLAS MAURICE: Within two years?
MACARENA: Yes, because your Uruguayan ID is valid for two years.
LADISLAS MAURICE: This is really interesting. Essentially, if you just need a residency just for a year or two, you essentially just book an appointment through Macarena. The appointments are not, like, tomorrow, you need to book them one or two months in advance. Then you come here, and within a week, you can get an actual cédula valid for two years, whether or not you actually submit the documents later on. If you don’t submit, then, obviously, you won’t be able to renew it, but for two years, you have a residency.
MACARENA: Yeah, you will be able to stay indefinitely in the country, because once you apply, you are not a tourist anymore, you are a resident in process until your residency is granted, and then you will be a legal resident in Uruguay.
Converting temporary residency to full residency
LADISLAS MAURICE: Okay, so let’s say, I come here, I just show my passport. Within a week, you give me that cédula, the ID, Uruguayan ID. How do I convert this temporary residency to a more permanent one?
MACARENA: If you file the documents needed, such as proof of income, clean police record–
LADISLAS MAURICE: All that?
MACARENA: Yeah.
LADISLAS MAURICE: And then, essentially, this temporary residency gets given back to immigration?
MACARENA: Yeah, and they will give you a cédula as a permanent residency valid for three more years.
LADISLAS MAURICE: For three more years?
MACARENA: Yeah.
LADISLAS MAURICE: Okay. And during that time, I have to be present?
MACARENA: Yes, you have to stay at least six to eight months in order to get your residency approved. You have to show the authorities the intention to reside, that Uruguay is your second home, or your home.
LADISLAS MAURICE: Very important. If you want to upgrade from that temporary two-year to an actual permanent residency, you need to live here. It’s not a paper residency. You can treat it as a paper residency for two years, knowing that you won’t be able to renew it, but if you actually want to upgrade, you need to live here in Uruguay. It’s not a Plan B residency, unlike other countries such as Paraguay, this is a Plan A. But once, if you actually stay here initially for a year, then it becomes a Plan B residency, because once you have the three-year one, just to renew it, you just need to come back. That’s it.
MACARENA: Yeah, yeah. Because you will lose your legal residency if you stayed out of the country for three years.
LADISLAS MAURICE: Okay. Every three years, you come back, renew the card–
MACARENA: Yeah, you renew the card, and you are free to leave wherever you want to.
How to get Uruguayan citizenship
LADISLAS MAURICE: Okay. Let’s say that I want to get the Holy Grail, one of those beautiful Uruguayan passports.
MACARENA: [laughs]
LADISLAS MAURICE: Nice blue, by the way. How do I do it?
MACARENA: After three years if you are married, and after five years if you are single, you can apply for residency and second passport. But the good things is that the clock start ticking from the moment you arrived in Uruguay. For example, if you arrived now and you apply for residency for them at the end of this year, but they are going to count from today, because you enter to Uruguay today.
LADISLAS MAURICE: And let’s say, I’m married, so during those three years, I’m expected to essentially live here for three years.
MACARENA: Yeah.
LADISLAS MAURICE: It’s not like I decide to come and live for the six months before the application. They want to see that we’ve been living here for those three years, if single, for five years.
MACARENA: Yeah, five years, yeah. And the application process for citizenship takes around a year. You will need two witnesses that can testify that they know you, that who you are, and you will have to learn Spanish. They’re going to interview about yourself, where do you live, for how long have you been here, just simple questions about you.
LADISLAS MAURICE: Cool. Clear.
MACARENA: You don’t need to study history of Uruguay. And you need to show, again, proof of income, social insertion in the country, that, for example, medical records or something that prove that you live here.
LADISLAS MAURICE: Clear.
MACARENA: Bank statements, if you are renting a house, or if you buy a house, or whatever you have here in Uruguay.
LADISLAS MAURICE: This is not a paper country where you just come and work towards a passport without doing anything. You need to live here, but then you have an amazing passport. It’s a really good travel document.
MACARENA: Yeah.
LADISLAS MAURICE: Well respected, very neutral. No one hates Uruguay. Does anyone hate Uruguay?
MACARENA: No.
LADISLAS MAURICE: Maybe just Argentines are jealous of you?
MACARENA: [laughs] No.
LADISLAS MAURICE: They’re probably just jealous.
MACARENA: With Argentine, it’s, like, we love them, we hate them, and they like us, and then they hate us, because we are very stable, we don’t have any economic social problems, and maybe Argentina–
LADISLAS MAURICE: Yeah, sounds like a Latin relationship. [laughs]
MACARENA: [laughs] Yeah, yeah.
How to become a tax resident of Uruguay
LADISLAS MAURICE: And tell us how to get tax residency here, because there’s a bit of a shortcut, which is interesting.
MACARENA: Yeah. You have two options. One is live here for six months, and the other, you have to live 60 days and buy a property for $400,000, and you will have tax residency.
LADISLAS MAURICE: Okay. This is interesting. For people that want to travel, do things, but still really want an actual tax certificate, yeah, $400k will get you a decent apartment here in Punta del Este or in Montevideo. You stay here for two months of the year, pretty relaxing, no stress here, and then you can travel the world and have a pretty solid document. Okay, this is very good. Cool, fantastic. Macarena, thank you very much. If you’re interested in obtaining residency here in Uruguay, there’s a link below with more information, and you can use that link to get in touch with Macarena as well.
MACARENA: Okay, thank you very much for inviting me.
LADISLAS MAURICE: Always a pleasure.