For most people reading this — arriving to freelance, to contract, or to run a one-person business from a flat in Vera — the route is: enter on the visa-free year, register as an Individual Entrepreneur, get the right to work from the Employment Promotion Agency, and apply for a work-ground residence permit forty days before your lawful stay runs out. In published state fees that is 200 GEL plus 300 GEL, and two mornings of queueing. Everything else on this page is either more expensive, narrower, or not available to you.

The reason the sequence matters more than it used to is that the country changed underneath the guides. Until 2026, the answer to “how do I stay in Georgia” was you already are — the stamp in your passport was good for a year and nobody asked what you did with your days. Two things ended that. From 1 January 2026 you need insurance to get in. From 1 March 2026 you need a permit to work, and the stamp is not one.

The stamp is not a status. That sentence is the whole of this post. The rest is arithmetic.

What changed, in four lines

  • 1 October 2025 — the fines for staying past your lawful time went up sharply and entry bans were attached to them, and the ministry began keeping a database of foreigners who are or have been illegally present in Georgia (Fragomen, Georgia Immigration Reform 2025).
  • 1 January 2026 — health and accident insurance is checked at the border, minimum GEL 5,000 for emergency outpatient care and GEL 30,000 for inpatient treatment (Georgia Today, 9 December 2025).
  • 1 March 2026 — a foreigner without permanent residence who is employed by a local employer, works remotely for one, or is self-employed needs a right to work granted by the State Employment Promotion Agency (KPMG, Georgia — Mandatory Work Authorization Introduced, 29 April 2026).
  • 1 March 2026 — the property purchase that supports a short-term residence permit rose from USD 100,000 to USD 150,000 (reported by Erickson Immigration Group and IMI Daily; confirm on sda.gov.ge before you act on it).

All figures on this page were checked on 2 September 2026. Government fees are quoted in lari because that is the only currency the counter wants; the property and income thresholds are quoted in dollars because that is how they are written.

The routes, ranked by what they cost you

1. The visa-free year — 0 GEL, and not a work status

Government of Georgia Ordinance No. 255 of 5 June 2015 lists the countries whose citizens may enter and stay without a visa. The operative wording on matsne.gov.ge is “for one full year”, and the annex, checked on 2 September 2026, runs to 94 countries. The ordinance has been amended eight times, most recently on 24 February 2026, so the annex is a live document and not a fact you learned in 2022.

This costs nothing and asks nothing. It is also, since March 2026, insufficient for anyone doing paid work here. It buys you time to arrange something else, and it is excellent at that. It is not a plan for year two.

How Georgia counts the year, and what a border run still does is its own post, because the counting is where people get hurt.

2. The right to work — 200 GEL standard, 400 GEL expedited

Granted by the State Employment Promotion Agency. KPMG’s 29 April 2026 alert gives the standard route as 30 calendar days at 200 GEL and the expedited route as 10 business days at 400 GEL, with the employer paying for an employee and the self-employed paying for themselves. Initial validity is six months to a year; for IT specialists, up to three.

The exemption list in that alert is short: refugees, people under temporary or additional protection, asylum seekers, diplomats, accredited journalists, people covered by international agreements, and holders of investment residence permits. Note what is not on it — no general exemption for working remotely for a foreign employer. Whether that reader is inside or outside the requirement is the single most-asked question on this site and it is genuinely unresolved; the ambiguity gets its own post and I am not going to resolve it for you in a bullet.

For the self-employed already active on 1 March 2026, enforcement began 1 May 2026. For labour immigrants registered as of 1 March 2026, the deadline to hold both authorization and a residence permit is 1 January 2027. That second date is on the calendar now.

3. A temporary residence permit on the work ground — 300, 450 or 600 GEL

The Public Service Development Agency publishes the fee as GEL 300 for a 30-day review, 450 for 20 days and 600 for 10. Work, study, family reunification, former citizen of Georgia, investment and short-term permits all sit on the same fee ladder.

The deadline is the part people miss. PSDA’s own wording: an applicant shall apply “40 calendar days before his/her lawful stay in the territory of Georgia expires”. There are exceptions — the lifelong, investment, special, domestic-violence, short-term and IT permits are outside that rule — but the work permit is not one of them. Miss the window and you are not applying late, you are applying from a position where your lawful stay is about to end.

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.

I applied on the IE ground before the March 2026 change, and then took the right to work under the transition. So I have stood in that queue under both regimes, which mostly taught me that the folder you bring matters more than anything you say at the window. The grounds, and which one you actually qualify for is the long version.

4. The IT residence permit — narrow, and worth checking

The government approved it on 27 August 2025 (Georgia Today, 1 September 2025). It is aimed at IT employees registered here, individual entrepreneurs with small business status working in IT, and managers or representatives of international IT companies — families included. The two documented tests are a certificate of at least two years of IT experience and a minimum annual income of USD 25,000 received in at least two separate payments spaced 30 days apart.

If you clear both, this is the best-value route on the page, because it is outside the 40-day rule and the reported term is long. If you do not clear both, it does not bend. Who it is for, and whether you are one of them.

I have not applied for this one. Everything in that paragraph is sourced and dated rather than remembered, and I have marked it that way deliberately.

5. The property route — USD 150,000, and this site does not sell it

A short-term residence permit can rest on owning property above a threshold that rose from USD 100,000 to USD 150,000 on 1 March 2026. That is the entire treatment this route gets here. It is a residence basis, not an investment, and nothing on this site will tell you whether Tbilisi property is a good thing to own.

6. The investment permit — from USD 300,000

Reported as unchanged, granting a five-year temporary permit. Its one structural advantage worth knowing: holders of investment residence permits are on KPMG’s exemption list for the right to work. If you are at that number you are already paying someone for advice, and you should be.

7. Study, family reunification, spouse of a Georgian citizen

Real routes, on the same fee ladder, with document requirements this post cannot summarise honestly because I have not been through any of them. The spouse route runs on a 90-day review rather than 30. If one of these is your ground, that is the case where the fee for a lawyer is cheap relative to the cost of a refusal — see when to pay a lawyer, and when you're paying for a queue.

What is not on this list

Citizenship. This site does not cover naturalisation at all, and any page that treats it as the natural end of a long stay is selling something.

There is also no digital nomad visa. There was a programme in 2020; it closed. The query survives, the visa does not, and pages built around it are how you tell a stale guide from a current one.

The two mistakes that are expensive

Arriving without the insurance. Border officers check it, and the failure mode is denial of entry, not a fine you settle later. Your policy has to cover the whole stay, including the arrival and departure dates. What counts, and what does not.

Working before the permit. A fine of 2,000 GEL is the reported first-offence figure, and it lands on the self-employed worker directly. That is ten times the standard application fee. There is no version of this arithmetic where waiting for the permit is the expensive choice.

Below those two sits a third, quieter one: letting the 40-day window pass because the year felt long in month two. It is not recoverable by apology. The fines, the entry bans, and the database covers where that ends up.

The order to do things in

  1. Before the flight — buy insurance that meets both minimums and covers the whole intended stay. Carry it in English or Georgian, on paper or on your phone.
  2. Week one to four — decide whether you are working here in the sense the law means. If you are, the right to work comes before, not after, the money starts moving.
  3. Register the Individual Entrepreneur if that is your structure, and apply for small business status separately — the 1% is not automatic on registration. The registration, step by step.
  4. Day 300-ish — count backwards. Forty calendar days before your lawful stay expires is the deadline for a work-ground permit application, and the folder takes longer to assemble than you think, mostly because of translations.
  5. After approval — 30 days to collect the card.

Steps 3 and 4 are the ones I did myself, in that order, and I would do them further apart next time. Everything an apostille touches takes two weeks longer than the person quoting you the timeline believes.

What year two looks like

Almost every page about staying in Georgia stops at the first permit, because that is where the sale ends. Year two is the part you plan for now.

A temporary permit does not roll over. Renewal is its own application with its own window and its own folder, and the documents that were fresh last year are not fresh this year — an extract, a certificate, a bank statement all have shelf lives, and the ones from your home country have to go through the apostille and translation chain again. Budget the same effort as the first time and you will be roughly right.

The right to work has its own clock, separate from the permit’s. KPMG gives initial validity as six months to a year for most people and up to three years for IT specialists, which means that for a lot of readers the work authorization expires before the residence permit does. Two renewals, two agencies, two dates. Put both in the calendar the day each one is granted, because nothing will remind you.

And the ground itself can move underneath you. If your permit rests on your IE and you close the IE, or your small business status lapses, the basis for the permit is what changes — not just your tax position. Closing an IE and losing small business status are both, in that sense, residence questions wearing tax clothing.

What this costs, end to end

For the common case — self-employed, no family application, standard processing — the published state fees are 200 GEL for the right to work and 300 GEL for the residence permit. Add translation and notarisation of whatever your ground requires, which is the line item that varies most and the one nobody quotes you in advance. Add the insurance, which is a travel-insurance purchase and not a Georgian product.

Against that: an agency will quote you a package to do the same thing. Sometimes that is worth it. Usually, for this specific route, it is not — the forms are in English, the counters speak English, and the parts that are genuinely hard are hard for your lawyer too. The site’s position on that is not neutral and not for sale.

The part a summary cannot give you

Every page on this subject can tell you the fee. Here is what the fee does not tell you.

The counter is not the problem; the folder is. In my experience of the IE ground in 2026, the operator was helpful and unhurried and told me plainly what was missing. They told me at the window, on the day, having already taken the ticket. Then I came back. Every item you anticipate is a morning you get back, and no amount of politeness at the window substitutes for having brought the document.

Bring two copies of everything. The counter keeps one. This sounds like folklore. It is just cheaper than the alternative.

Do the translations before you think you need them. This is the single most reliable source of delay in the whole process, and it is the one thing an agency genuinely does buy you — not skill, just their own queue at a translator who already knows the format.

Take the earliest appointment of the day. Not because the queue is unmanageable later, but because if something is missing you still have the afternoon to fix it and come back.

Ask, at the window, what the next step is and when. Not “is it approved” — “what happens next, and by when”. The answers are specific and freely given, and they are more current than anything published, including this page.

The routes, and what each one actually costs

Rules here move faster than the pages that describe them. Every figure above carries the date I checked it; where a number came from a law firm or an agency rather than from PSDA, RS.ge, the Employment Promotion Agency or matsne.gov.ge, I have said so in the sentence. Check the primary source before you spend money, and treat any undated page — including this one, a year from now — as a lead rather than an answer.