Argentina's Official CBI Launch
Argentina opens citizenship to investors without requiring prior residency
Welcome Avatar! The CBI day has finally come for Argentina, with the ink on Milei’s decree still fresh. Interested investors will now have a clear roadmap of requirements to be able to apply for Argentina’s citizenship by investment program.
Through Decree 524/2025, published on July 31 in the Official Gazette, the Argentine Government established the procedure for foreigners seeking citizenship by investment. This regulation enforces the concept of citizenship by naturalization, previously introduced in Decree 366/2025, and creates an administrative process with defined procedures and specific deadlines for its processing.
The CBI route allows foreign citizens to obtain Argentine citizenship through naturalization through investments considered as “relevant”, without meeting the traditional minimum residency requirement.
As we have seen in the previous Decree around migration policies, Argentina has become a lot stricter on granting citizenship through the traditional route. The 2 year period remains — very hard to change since this is the time mentioned in the constitution for naturalization — but with a twist: it is not allowed to leave Argentina during that two year period previous to applying for citizenship.
In practice, it is likely to be even harder and it would not surprise me if Migraciones starts demanding permanent residency first, before even being taken into consideration for citizenship. That would mean that for non-Mercosur citizens, the citizenship process would extend to 3 years, the last 2 of which you would not be allowed to leave Argentina or else you can’t apply.
This is why many passport hunters were eagerly waiting on the Citizenship by Investment program that was announced in tandem, but still lacked the fine print of a proper law.
In Immigration DNU Fine Print you can find an overview of the most important changes that weren’t yet discussed in the previous article of Citizenship by Investment in Argentina, and a translation of the complete decree text to English.
The rest of this article will provide an overview of what is known so far about Argentina’s CBI program, and the steps an investor will have to complete in order to be able to apply. Let’s dig in.