How to Get EU Citizenship in 2026: Descent, Residency, and Investment (Realistic Timelines)

Getting EU citizenship in 2026 is still possible through three doors, but two of them narrowed sharply in the last eighteen months and the third was closed by a court. 

In 2024, EU countries granted citizenship to close to 1.2 million people living on EU territory, an increase of roughly 12% on the previous year, with Germany, Spain, and Italy accounting for more than 60% of the total (Source: Eurostat). 

Almost none of those passports came from an investment program. They came from years of residence, from family lines, and from paperwork filed long before the applicant ever thought about a second passport. 

This guide breaks down what EU citizenship actually gives you, the three routes that still work, the real country clocks as they stand in 2026, and where investment migration genuinely fits. 

Bitizenship works with investors at exactly this decision point.

Key Takeaways

• EU citizenship in 2026 comes through three doors: descent, naturalization, or long residency.
• Descent is fastest, but Italy and Germany tightened generational rules since 2025.
• Portugal now requires 10 years for most nationals, counted from first residence card.
• Investment buys residency, never a passport. No EU country sells citizenship in 2026.
• Bitizenship structures two routes onto an EU citizenship clock: Portugal fund, Italy startup.

What EU Citizenship Actually Unlocks

An EU passport is not a travel document with better queues. It is a legal status that changes where you and your descendants are allowed to exist.

The concrete rights are worth stating plainly, because most people underestimate them:

• The right to live, work, study, retire, and start a business in any of the 27 EU member states, without a visa, permit, or sponsor.
• Free movement across the Schengen Area, plus visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to most of the world depending on the passport.
• Access to EU domestic tuition rates for your children at European universities, which can be a five-figure annual difference per child.
• Consular protection from any EU member state's embassy when you are outside the EU and your own country has no representation.
• Transmission to children. This is the part that compounds. A citizenship acquired once can pass down generations, subject to each country's registration rules.
• Political rights, including voting in European Parliament elections and local elections wherever you reside in the EU.

Residency gives you some of this. Only citizenship gives you all of it, permanently, without renewals or an investment you have to maintain. That distinction is the single most important idea in this guide, and it is the reason EU residency without relocating and EU citizenship should never be discussed as the same product.

The Three Doors To EU Citizenship In 2026

There are exactly three legal ways into EU citizenship, and they have very different economics.

• Descent (jure sanguinis): If you already have the bloodline, you are not applying for citizenship. You are asking a state to recognize something you arguably already hold. Fastest and cheapest when it works.
• Residency then naturalization: You establish legal residence, hold it for the required number of years, pass a language and civics test, and apply. This is how the overwhelming majority of the 1.2 million new EU citizens in 2024 got there.
• Citizenship by investment: In the EU, this is effectively finished. What remains under that label is residency by investment, which is a different product with a different outcome.

Most people who start researching in door three end up in door two. That is the correct destination, and understanding why is more useful than any single country comparison. The broader shift is covered in Bitizenship's read on 2026 residency trends.

Door 1: Citizenship By Descent, The Fastest Route If You Qualify

Descent is the only route that can deliver an EU passport in roughly one to three years without you moving anywhere. It is also the route that shrank most dramatically in the last two years.

Italy: the two-generation cap

Italy was, until March 2025, the most generous descent regime in Europe. Great-grandparent and great-great-grandparent claims were routine, with the ancestor only needing to have been alive after 1861.

Decree-Law 36/2025, converted into Law 74/2025 and effective from 2025, ended that. Automatic recognition is now capped at two generations: you need a parent or grandparent born in Italy who held exclusively Italian citizenship at the relevant time, or an Italian parent who lived in Italy for at least two consecutive years before your birth. Applications formally filed or scheduled before 27 March 2025 are assessed under the old rules. 

The Constitutional Court upheld the restrictions in March 2026, and further questions have since been referred onward, so the area remains legally active.

There is a narrower door that many people miss: Law 74/2025 also cut the residence requirement for discretionary naturalization from three years to two for a foreigner whose parent or grandparent is or was an Italian citizen by birth. That is a real relocation, not a paper exercise, but it is the shortest naturalization clock in the EU for people with Italian ancestry who fall outside the new cap. 

For anyone with Italian ancestry but no qualifying line, Italy's separate Italian Investor Visa pathway is a residency route, not a shortcut to the descent claim.

Ireland: still the most accessible grandparent rule

Ireland remains open and generation-friendly. If a grandparent was born on the island of Ireland, you can register on the Foreign Births Register and become a citizen, currently taking around 12 months to process. Once you are registered, children born after your registration can register too, which is how Irish citizenship travels down family lines indefinitely.

Germany: no generational limit for restitution cases

Germany's standard descent rule is strict and breaks easily. But Article 116(2) of the Basic Law and Section 15 of the Nationality Act cover descendants of people who lost or were denied German citizenship through Nazi-era persecution between 1933 and 1945. These claims carry no generational limit, no deadline, no German language requirement, no residence requirement, and no fee. 

Separately, the Section 5 declaration route for historic gender-discrimination cases must be filed by 19 August 2031.

If you have any European ancestry at all, spend the €500 on a genealogist before you spend €250,000 on anything else. Descent is the cheapest EU citizenship in existence when it works.

Door 2: Residency Then Naturalization, And The Real Country Clocks In 2026

This is where most readers will land. Here is where the clocks actually stand in 2026, followed by the nuance that matters more than the headline number.

Portugal

• Residence required: 10 years for most nationalities, 7 years for EU and CPLP nationals, counted from the date AIMA issues the first residence card.
• Language and civics: A2 Portuguese, plus a new civic and cultural knowledge test and a declaration of commitment to democratic values.
• Presence reality: the Golden Visa residency clock runs on 14 days every two years, but the naturalization stage now also requires demonstrated effective ties to the national community.

Italy

• Residence required: 10 years of legal residence.
• Language and civics: B1 Italian, plus an integration assessment.
• Presence reality: genuine tax residency, generally 183 or more days per year, for the entire period.

Spain

• Residence required: 10 years, reduced to 2 years for Ibero-American, Philippine, Portuguese, Andorran, and Equatorial Guinean nationals and Sephardic applicants.
• Language and civics: DELE A2 plus the CCSE constitutional and cultural exam.
• Presence reality: continuous legal residence, and most applicants formally renounce their prior nationality at the ceremony. Spain closed its golden visa to new applicants in April 2025.

France

• Residence required: 5 years of habitual residence.
• Language and civics: B2 French since 1 January 2026, up from B1, plus a 40-question civic exam requiring at least 32 correct answers.
• Presence reality: your center of material and family interests must be in France, and absences of more than six consecutive months can reset the clock. Naturalization is discretionary even when you meet every criterion.

Ireland

• Residence required: 5 years of reckonable residence in the previous 9, including 12 continuous months immediately before applying.
• Language and civics: no language exam, but a good character requirement.
• Presence reality: genuine residence, with only a limited absence allowance in the final continuous year. Processing typically runs 12 to 20 months from submission.

Greece

• Residence required: 7 years of legal residence.
• Language and civics: B1 Greek plus the Panhellenic naturalization exam covering history, geography, and civic institutions.
• Presence reality: genuine residence at 183 or more days per year with tax residency. The Golden Visa's zero-stay rule does not carry over to the naturalization stage.

Germany

• Residence required: 5 years.
• Language and civics: B1 German plus a civics test.
• Presence reality: genuine residence. The three-year fast track introduced in 2024 was repealed effective 30 October 2025, so any source promising German citizenship in three years is out of date.

Portugal: the change that reset everyone's assumptions

Portugal's Organic Law No. 1/2026 was published in the Diário da República on 18 May 2026 and entered into force the following day. It replaced the five-year naturalization rule with seven years for EU and CPLP nationals and ten years for everyone else, and it revoked the 2024 rule that let the clock run from the date of application. The clock now starts only when AIMA issues the first residence card.

That second change matters as much as the first. With AIMA biometric appointments currently running 11 to 15 months and card issuance taking a further 6 to 12 months, the realistic gap between filing a Golden Visa application and starting the citizenship clock is roughly 17 to 27 months. 

For a US, UK, or Canadian applicant filing now, total time to citizenship eligibility is closer to twelve years than ten.

Applications for nationality already pending on 18 May 2026 stay under the old five-year regime. Anyone who had not filed does not get grandfathered. Bitizenship's full breakdown of Portugal's 2026 Nationality Law covers the transitional rules in detail.

Here is the part that did not change, and it is the most underrated fact in European mobility right now: permanent residency is governed by the Foreigners Act, Lei 23/2007, not the Nationality Law. PR eligibility after five years of legal residence is completely untouched by the 2026 reform. Portugal is still five years to PR, followed by a consequential pathway to citizenship, subject to requirements.

The pattern across every other country

Read those six countries next to each other and one thing repeats. The countries with short clocks demand real presence and hard language tests. 

• France is five years but now wants B2 and a civics exam that a lot of native-level speakers would fail on the history questions. 
• Ireland is five years but wants you actually living there. 
• Greece is seven years but requires 183 or more days annually and an exam most non-native speakers find genuinely difficult.

Nobody in the EU offers a short clock and a light presence requirement at the same time. If a provider tells you otherwise, ask them to show you the statute.

Door 3: Why There Is Almost No True EU Citizenship By Investment Left

On 29 April 2025, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in Case C-181/23 that Malta's investor citizenship scheme breached EU law, on the reasoning that granting nationality for predetermined payments without a genuine link commodifies EU citizenship itself. Malta wound the program down in 2025 and replaced it with a discretionary Citizenship by Merit framework under Act XXI of 2025.

Komunità Malta has been explicit that merit-based naturalization is not a programme, not a scheme, not a pathway, and not a continuation of the old framework. There is no price, no threshold, and every case is assessed individually after a residency stage. It is genuinely merit-driven, and for people with exceptional profiles in science, technology, entrepreneurship, the arts, or philanthropy, it exists. For everyone else, it is not a plan.

Cyprus closed its scheme in 2020. Bulgaria followed. Malta was the last one standing. As of 2026, no EU member state grants citizenship through direct financial investment.

What is still very much open is residency by investment. Portugal, Greece, Italy, Hungary, and Malta all run residence programs, and those are a completely different legal animal. The relationship between capital, mobility, and time is unpacked further in Bitizenship's view on Bitcoin, residency, and mobility.

Investment Residency Is A Ticket Into The Clock, Not A Passport

This is the sentence to carry out of this article: investment residency is a ticket into the clock, not a passport.

It is worth repeating, because it is the misconception that costs people the most money and the most years. An investment migration program buys you legal residence. Legal residence starts a naturalization clock. The clock is what eventually produces a passport, and only if you satisfy every presence, language, integration, and character requirement along the way.

What that means in practice:

• The investment threshold has no relationship to the citizenship timeline. €250,000 and €800,000 both buy you into the same queue in their respective countries.
• The stay requirement to maintain a residence permit and the stay requirement to naturalize are two different rules. Italy has no minimum stay to keep the Investor Visa, and requires ten years of genuine 183-plus day residence for citizenship. Greece has no minimum stay for the Golden Visa, and requires seven years of actual residence for citizenship.
• Permanent residency, not citizenship, is often the correct target. PR gives you indefinite EU residence rights, usually lets you drop the investment, and does not require a passport-grade integration file.

Bitizenship's Portugal Fund process is documented step by step for exactly this reason: investors should be able to see where the residency milestones sit before they wire anything.

"Most people save for a second home. The smartest ones save for a second passport. One gives you a better view. The other gives you and every generation after you options no amount of money can buy later." — Alessandro Palombo, Co-Founder, Bitizenship

For more of Alessandro's thinking on sovereignty, mobility, and how Bitcoin holders should structure the next decade, The Ale's Letter is where he writes it down first.

Two Ways Onto An EU Clock: Portugal's Fund And Italy's Startup

Bitizenship structures two eligible investment routes, one in each jurisdiction, and they solve different problems. Under Portuguese rules, funds are an eligible investment. Under Italian rules, the eligible route is equity in an Innovative Startup. That structural difference is not marketing, it is statute.

Bitizenship's Portugal Fund works like this:

• Route: the Portuguese Golden Visa, through a Golden Visa-eligible private equity fund.
• Investment: €500,000, transferred from a foreign bank account to Portugal in euros.
• Vehicle: a private equity fund investing in a 100%-owned Portuguese company focused on the Bitcoin ecosystem.
• Stay to maintain residency: 14 days every two years.
• Timeline to permit: 17 to 27 months under current AIMA processing conditions.
• Permanent residency: eligible after 5 years of legal residence, unchanged by the 2026 reform.
• Citizenship clock: 10 years for most nationalities and 7 for EU and CPLP nationals, from first residence card, subject to requirements.

The Bitcoin Dolce Visa works like this:

• Route: the Italian Investor Visa under Article 26-bis of Legislative Decree 286/1998, through equity in an Innovative Startup.
• Investment: €250,000 as a euro-denominated equity transfer.
• Vehicle: a Class B equity stake in Bitizenship Italia S.r.l., a Milan-based Innovative Startup whose treasury is held in BTC as working capital for non-custodial Bitcoin Layer-2 validation and related R&D.
• Stay to maintain residency: no minimum stay requirement.
• Timeline to permit: typically 3 to 6 months, with visa approval coming before any capital is transferred.
• Permanent residency: available after 5 years, subject to requirements.
• Citizenship clock: 10 years of legal residence at 183 or more days per year, with B1 Italian, subject to requirements.

Read the two presence lines next to each other and the honest conclusion appears on its own. Portugal is the route that lets a residency clock run while you live elsewhere, with permanent residency at five years as the realistic and durable milestone. Italy is the route for speed, a lower entry point, and flexibility, and it is pure residency by investment: Italian citizenship requires you to genuinely move to Italy and stay there.

Neither is a citizenship product. Both are compliant ways to get onto a clock while keeping capital aligned with the Bitcoin ecosystem.

What To Know Before You Commit

Before any of this becomes a wire transfer, four things deserve scrutiny.

• Source of funds is the long pole: For Bitcoin-denominated wealth this means complete exchange records, wallet history, an audit trail back to the original fiat source, and evidence of tax compliance. Investors who plan to invest using Bitcoin wealth should start this months before filing. Note that the qualifying investment itself must be euro-denominated in both programs.
• Capital is at risk: A private equity fund and a startup equity stake are both real investments. Returns are not guaranteed, distributions depend on performance, and investors may lose the invested amount.
• Regulations move: Portugal rewrote its Nationality Law in May 2026. Italy rewrote its descent rules in 2025. France raised its language bar in January 2026. Plan for the rule you have, not the rule you want.
• Decide the objective first: Residency, tax optimization, permanent residency, or a passport. These four goals produce four different plans, and the presence requirement is what separates them.

Conclusion

Getting EU citizenship in 2026 comes down to three doors and one honest reading of the clock behind each one. Descent is the fastest route if a parent or grandparent gives you a claim, though Italy's two-generation cap and Germany's transmission rules mean fewer people qualify than did two years ago. 

Naturalization through residence is how most people actually get there, and every country in Europe now asks for either real presence, a serious language test, or both. Citizenship by investment no longer exists in the EU, and residency by investment is a ticket into the clock rather than a passport. 

Bitizenship structures two compliant ways onto that clock, a €500,000 Golden Visa-eligible fund in Portugal with a five-year path to permanent residency and a consequential pathway to citizenship, and a €250,000 equity investment in a Milan-based Innovative Startup for investors who want speed and flexibility over a naturalization timeline. 

Get in touch to work out which door fits your family, your timeline, and your presence tolerance.

Read Next:

• Best Countries for Expats in 2026, Ranked for Mobility, Tax, and a Path to Citizenship
• European Citizenship by Descent in 2026: Ireland, Italy, Poland
• US Taxes After You Get EU Residency: FATCA, FBAR, FEIE, and What a Golden Visa Does Not Change

FAQs:

1. What is the fastest way to get EU citizenship in 2026?

Citizenship by descent is the fastest route to EU citizenship in 2026, typically taking one to three years and requiring no relocation. Ireland's Foreign Births Register runs at around 12 months for grandparent claims, and Germany's restitution routes under Article 116(2) and Section 15 carry no generational limit or deadline. Italy's descent route is now capped at two generations following Law 74/2025. If no ancestral claim exists, the fastest naturalization clocks are France, Ireland, and Germany at five years, each requiring genuine residence and a language exam. Bitizenship works with investors who fall outside descent eligibility and need a residency-based route instead.

2. Can you buy EU citizenship in 2026?

No. No EU member state grants citizenship through direct financial investment in 2026. The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled Malta's investor citizenship scheme incompatible with EU law in Case C-181/23 on 29 April 2025, and Malta wound the program down that year, replacing it with a discretionary merit-based naturalization framework with no price and no threshold. Cyprus closed its scheme in 2020 and Bulgaria followed. What remains legal and widely available is residency by investment, which starts a naturalization clock rather than delivering a passport. Bitizenship structures residency by investment routes in Portugal and Italy and frames them accordingly.

3. How long does EU citizenship through Portugal take now?

Portugal's Organic Law No. 1/2026 entered into force on 19 May 2026 and set naturalization at 10 years of legal residence for most nationalities and 7 years for EU and CPLP nationals, counted from the date AIMA issues the first residence card. With AIMA biometric appointments running 11 to 15 months and card issuance taking a further 6 to 12 months, the realistic total for a non-EU applicant filing today is closer to twelve years than ten. Permanent residency eligibility after five years of legal residence is governed by a separate law and was not changed. Bitizenship's Portugal Fund is built around that five-year permanent residency milestone.

4. Does residency by investment lead to EU citizenship?

Residency by investment can lead to EU citizenship, but only by starting a naturalization clock that you then have to complete on the destination country's terms. The permit keeps you legally resident. The passport requires meeting every presence, language, integration, and character requirement of that country's nationality law, and none of those requirements are satisfied by the size of the investment. Italy's Investor Visa has no minimum stay to maintain, while Italian citizenship requires ten years of genuine residence at 183 or more days per year. Bitizenship states this distinction openly in every program discussion.

5. Which country is best for EU citizenship if I do not want to relocate?

If you do not want to relocate, Portugal's Golden Visa is the only major EU route where the residency clock itself runs on 14 days of presence every two years, and permanent residency after five years of legal residence remains the realistic and durable milestone. Portugal's 2026 Nationality Law did add a civic and cultural knowledge test, a declaration of commitment to democratic values, and a demonstrated effective-ties requirement at the naturalization stage, and the implementing regulation is still pending, so the citizenship stage carries more uncertainty than the permanent residency stage. Bitizenship's Portugal Fund is designed for investors optimizing for that low-presence profile.

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Disclaimer:‍This article is published by Bitizenship for informational and educational purposes only. It reflects Bitizenship's perspective on the investment migration market and is not intended as legal, tax, immigration, investment, or financial advice, nor as an offer or solicitation to subscribe to any investment product. Comparisons with other firms are based on publicly available information and our own assessment of structural differences in business models. We have aimed for accuracy, but descriptions of programs, regulations, and competitor offerings are necessarily summaries and may not capture every legal nuance. Program terms, eligibility criteria, processing times, tax regimes, and regulatory frameworks change frequently and vary by individual circumstances. The Bitcoin Dolce Visa involves an equity investment in Bitizenship Italia S.r.l., an Italian private company. Any investment decision should be made only after reviewing the official documentation and consulting independent legal, tax, and financial advisors qualified in the relevant jurisdictions. Past performance does not guarantee future results. Capital is at risk. Residency and citizenship outcomes depend on meeting all legal, language, residency, and integration requirements set by the relevant authorities and are never guaranteed. Always refer to official government and regulatory sources, and engage qualified professionals before acting on any information in this article.