If you are planning to stay past your first year on the strength of a border run, stop planning that. It may still work. Nobody can tell you it will, the written rule does not promise it, and since March 2026 it does not solve the problem most readers actually have — which is not time in the country but permission to work. Start a residence permit instead, forty days before your lawful stay expires.
That is the verdict. Here is what is actually written down, checked on 2 September 2026.
What the rule says
The instrument is Government of Georgia Ordinance No. 255, of 5 June 2015, On Approval of the List of Countries Whose Citizens May Enter Georgia without a Visa. Its operative wording, on matsne.gov.ge, is that citizens of the listed countries may enter and stay in Georgia without a visa for one full year.
Two facts about that list are worth more than any blog’s summary of it:
- The annex ran to 94 countries when I checked it on 2 September 2026.
- The ordinance has been amended eight times, most recently on 24 February 2026.
A list that has moved eight times in eleven years, twice in the last eighteen months, is not something to remember. It is something to look up, with your passport in hand, before you book. The English consolidated text is on matsne.gov.ge under document 2867361.
What the rule does not say
Here is the part the guides skip, and it is the reason this post exists.
The ordinance’s wording does not resolve whether the year runs per entry or as an aggregate period. “One full year” is the whole of it. There is no sentence in the operative text that says a fresh year begins when you cross the border again, and none that says it does not.
That silence is filled, on the open web, by confident numbers. You will find pages stating a 540-day cycle, pages stating a strict 365-in-any-365 count, and pages stating that any exit resets the clock outright. I could not confirm any of them against matsne.gov.ge or the consular service, and I am not going to repeat one to give this post a cleaner ending.
What that means in practice: the person who decides is the officer at the border, not the ordinance. Admission is a decision made about you on the day, and no reading of a government ordinance obliges anyone to let you back in.
What a border run still does
It still moves you physically out of and back into Georgia, and it still costs a day and a bus fare. Three things have changed about what that buys.
It does not create a work status. Since 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 — 200 GEL on the 30-day route, 400 GEL expedited (KPMG, 29 April 2026). No number of border crossings produces one. If work is why you are here, the border run was never solving your problem; it was solving the calendar’s.
Re-entry now has a document check. From 1 January 2026 every visitor must hold health and accident insurance covering the stay — minimum GEL 5,000 for emergency outpatient care and GEL 30,000 for inpatient treatment (Georgia Today, 9 December 2025). That applies to the re-entry as much as the first entry. A one-day trip out and back is still an entry, and your policy has to be live for it. This is the most common way a routine border run turns into an unrouted afternoon.
The downside got heavier. From 1 October 2025, staying past your lawful time carries 1,000 GEL and a six-month entry ban for an overstay of up to three months, rising from there, and the ministry maintains a database of foreigners who are or have been illegally present in Georgia (Fragomen, Georgia Immigration Reform 2025). A miscounted year used to be a fine. It is now a fine, a ban, and a record. See the fines, the database, and the day it stops being cheap.
The counting mistakes people actually make
Not the exotic ones. These three:
Counting from the date on the ticket rather than the stamp. The stamp is the fact. If a flight was delayed across midnight, your year did not start when you meant it to.
Assuming the year is a calendar year. It is not. “One full year” runs from the entry, and nothing about 1 January resets anything.
Counting to the last day instead of to the deadline. This is the expensive one. The Public Service Development Agency’s rule is that you apply 40 calendar days before your lawful stay expires. So the date that matters is not day 365. It is day 325. If you are on the work ground — the ordinary case for a freelancer here — that deadline is real; the lifelong, investment, special, domestic-violence, short-term and IT permits are the listed exceptions to it, and the work permit is not among them.
Put day 325 in your calendar the week you arrive. It is the single cheapest thing on this whole site, and I did not do it the first time.
“Lawful stay” is not the same thing as “the stamp”
This trips people once they are past the first year, and it is worth reading carefully because the two phrases get used interchangeably and are not interchangeable.
The Public Service Development Agency’s deadline is worded against lawful stay, not against the visa-free year. For someone on the stamp, those are the same date. For someone already holding a temporary residence permit, lawful stay is the permit’s expiry — so the 40-day deadline for a renewal counts back from the permit, and the visa-free year has nothing to do with it.
Two consequences worth holding on to:
A permit does not sit on top of your remaining stamp days. Once your basis for being here is the permit, it is the permit’s dates that govern. There is no accumulated balance of visa-free days waiting underneath it.
Leaving and returning while you hold a permit is not a border run. It is an exit and an entry on the permit, and it still requires the insurance check on re-entry. Nothing about it resets or extends anything.
If you are not sure which of the two you are on, the residence card in your hand is the answer, and its date is the date to count from.
What I would do, in order
- Look your passport up in the annex to Ordinance No. 255 before you book anything, because the list moved in February 2026 and will move again.
- Photograph the entry stamp at the airport, before you leave the hall. Georgian entry stamps are small and the ink is not always generous.
- Set day 325. Not day 365.
- Decide by month three whether you are working here in the sense the law means it. If you are, the right to work is the first thing to fix, and it is independent of how many days the stamp gives you.
- If you do leave and come back, carry the insurance for that crossing, and do not treat the return as automatic.
The honest summary
The visa-free year is still the most generous entry rule in this part of the world, and it is still why most people reading this are here. What it no longer does is stand in for a status. It buys you a year to arrange one — which is a lot of time, and exactly enough to be complacent with.
The other post to read next is the residence permit grounds, and which one you actually qualify for, because that is where the year is supposed to end.
Figures and the annex count checked on 2 September 2026 against matsne.gov.ge. The ordinance is a live document; check it, not this page, before you buy a ticket.