Temporary Residence Permits: The Grounds, and Which One You Actually Qualify For

For most readers of this site the answer is the work ground, it costs GEL 300 on the 30-day review, and the application is due 40 calendar days before your lawful stay expires. If you work in IT and clear two specific tests, the IT permit is better and is outside that deadline. Everything else on the Public Service Development Agency’s list is either not available to you or is a case where you should be paying someone.

That is the short version. The long version matters because the ground you choose determines the folder you have to build, and the folder is the actual work.

The list, and what each one costs

These are the types PSDA publishes, with the review periods and fees as shown on sda.gov.ge, checked on 2 September 2026. Georgian government fees are always in lari, and the counter has no interest in your dollars.

The fee ladder is the same shape across most of them: pay a third more for a third less waiting, or double for a third of the time. Whether that is worth it depends entirely on how close you cut the 40 days, which is an argument for not cutting it close.

Applications go to the Public Service Development Agency or its territorial offices. After approval you have 30 days to apply for the residence card itself, at a PSDA territorial office, a Public Service Hall branch or a Community Centre. The permit and the card are two steps, and people who treat them as one miss the second.

The 40-day rule, and the six exceptions

PSDA’s wording is that an applicant shall apply “40 calendar days before his/her lawful stay in the territory of Georgia expires.”

The exceptions PSDA lists — the permits that rule does not apply to — are the lifelong permit, the investment permit, the special permit, the temporary permit for victims of domestic violence, the short-term permit, and the temporary permit for a person engaged in Information Technology.

Read that list again for what is missing. Work, study and family reunification are all inside the 40-day rule. Those are the three grounds most readers of this site have. If your route is the ordinary freelancer’s route, the deadline is real and it is the earliest date in your whole plan.

So the date to write down is not the last day of your stamp. It is forty days before it.

Which ground you actually have

Here is the honest sort, in the order I would work through it.

You are in IT, earn at least USD 25,000 a year received in at least two separate payments spaced 30 days apart, and can produce a certificate of at least two years’ IT experience. Then the IT permit is your ground. It is outside the 40-day rule and the reported term is long. It is also narrow: those two tests do not bend, and the categories are IT employees registered here, individual entrepreneurs with small business status working in IT, and managers or representatives of international IT companies (Georgia Today, 1 September 2025). Who it is for, and whether you are one of them.

You are self-employed here, or employed by a Georgian entity. The work ground. Since 1 March 2026 this sits on top of a second thing: a right to work granted by the State Employment Promotion Agency, 200 GEL on the 30-day route or 400 GEL expedited (KPMG, 29 April 2026). KPMG reports that labour immigrants registered as of 1 March 2026 must hold both the authorization and a residence permit by 1 January 2027. Treat the right to work as the thing you get first and the residence permit as the thing that rests on it. What the Special Labour Permit asks for, in order.

You work remotely for a foreign employer and have no Georgian entity at all. This is the uncomfortable one, and I am not going to give you a clean answer because there is not one. The exemption list in KPMG’s alert — refugees, people under temporary or additional protection, asylum seekers, diplomats, accredited journalists, people covered by international agreements, investment permit holders — does not contain a general carve-out for remote work for a foreign employer. Whether you are inside or outside the requirement is genuinely unresolved. The exemption, the ambiguity, and what to do this month is the whole post, and it is the most important one on this site.

You are married to a Georgian citizen. A separate route with a 90-day review. Longer, and not one I have been through.

You bought property above the threshold. The short-term permit, at a threshold that rose from USD 100,000 to USD 150,000 on 1 March 2026 (reported by Erickson Immigration Group and IMI Daily; confirm on sda.gov.ge). It is outside the 40-day rule. This site treats property as a residence basis and nothing else — no view on whether to buy.

A family member here holds a permit. Family reunification, inside the 40-day rule. I have not done this route; it is sourced rather than lived, and it is one where the documents from your home country do most of the work.

You are a former citizen of Georgia, or have one of the special grounds. Then you already know, and the special ground has a free 10-day review, which is unusual enough to be worth asking about.

The folder

Whichever ground you land on, the shape of the work is the same, and it is document preparation rather than form-filling.

The slow parts, in the order they will surprise you:

1. Anything issued in your home country needs to be made usable here — apostilled, then translated, then notarised. Each of those is a separate transaction with a separate turnaround. Start it two months before you think you need to. The step that delays everyone.
2. Photographs to the specification, not to your idea of the specification.
3. Proof of the ground itself — the extract for your registered activity, the contract, the certificate. This is the part that differs by route and the part a generic checklist gets wrong.
4. Bring two copies of everything. This is not superstition. The counter keeps one.

What I learned applying on the IE ground, in 2026: the operator is not adversarial and will tell you what is missing, but they will tell you at the window, on the day, and then you come back. Every item you can pre-empt is a morning you do not spend at the Public Service Hall.

What a permit does not do

It does not, by itself, make you tax resident, and it does not resolve where your income is sourced. Those are separate questions decided by separate rules — 183 days for residency, and a different test entirely for the source of income. A residence permit and a tax position are not the same object, and conflating them is how people end up with a confident answer to the wrong question. The question that decides whether 1% is real is where that lives.

It also does not extend automatically. Renewal has its own window and its own folder, and it arrives faster than the first one did.

If you take one thing

Count backwards from the day your lawful stay ends, subtract forty, and put that date in your calendar today. Then work out which of the grounds above you actually have, not which one you would prefer. Those two steps are most of what separates a routine application from an expensive one, and neither of them costs anything.

The wider sequence — insurance, right to work, permit, card — is in the routes ranked by what they cost you.

Fees, review periods, the 40-day rule and its exceptions from sda.gov.ge, checked on 2 September 2026. Work authorization figures from KPMG’s alert of 29 April 2026; IT permit criteria from Georgia Today, 1 September 2025. Where a table cell above is blank, PSDA does not publish the figure in the same place as the others — ask at the window rather than trusting a third-party page for it.