Why This Site Exists
Moving to a new country is mostly a sequence of small administrative problems that nobody explains in the right order.
You need a bank account, but the bank wants a personal code. The personal code comes with your residence permit. The residence permit needs health insurance, and an address, and documents legalised in your home country โ which takes weeks you didn't budget for. Meanwhile you've landed, you have rent to pay, and none of the official websites explain what to do first.
The information exists. Lithuania's government sources are decent, and studyin.lt in particular is genuinely good. But official pages tell you what the rule is, not what it means, what it costs, what order to do things in, or what people routinely get wrong.
That's the gap this site fills.
What we try to be
The practical layer above the official sources. We link to the Migration Department, VMI, Sodra and studyin.lt constantly, because they're authoritative and we aren't. What we add is sequence, context, honest cost, and the mistakes worth avoiding.
Who Writes It
Allen Shor
I moved back to Lithuania after living abroad for 25 years and had to deal with all the things I describe on this site.
After living in four different countries, I know how it feels to move abroad. It can be exciting, but at the same time, overwhelming. There are a lot of things you need to do before you can settle down and call a new country โhome.โ
I created this website to help expats navigate moving to and living in Lithuania โ so you can stress less and enjoy more!
Have any questions or comments? Feel free to reach out!
Personal website: allenshor.comEmail: shorallen@gmail.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/allenshor
How We Approach This
Four commitments, covered in full in our editorial guidelines:
We verify against primary sources
- Migration Department for immigration
- VMI for tax, Sodra for contributions
- Providers' own published terms
- If we can't verify it, we don't publish it
We disclose how we're funded
- Bank, fintech and insurer links earn us nothing
- One affiliate programme: Amazon, on book links
- Never costs you more
- No paid reviews or placements
We list the downsides
- Every recommendation names its drawbacks
- We say when the free option is better
- We tell you when you can stop paying
- A comparison with no criticism is an advert
We correct errors visibly
- Report anything that looks wrong
- We check it against the source
- We fix it and update the date
- We don't quietly delete mistakes
Who This Site Is For
Broadly, four groups:
- People moving to Lithuania for work, particularly into the tech and fintech sector in Vilnius โ where the English-language jobs actually are.
- International students, including the large cohort studying medicine in Kaunas, who face a specific set of permit, insurance and banking problems on arrival.
- Russian-speaking arrivals from across the region, for whom Lithuania is unusually accessible linguistically and who are underserved by English-only guides. Russian versions of these guides are live and growing.
- People with Lithuanian ancestry exploring citizenship by descent โ a distinct and much easier route than general immigration.
Languages
The site is built in English first, and the Russian version follows behind it. That reflects the audience: Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian citizens are the largest groups of foreign residents in Lithuania, and Russian remains widely spoken here.
Where the two versions differ, it isn't only translation. Country visa guides exist in Russian only for countries where Russian is widely spoken, and where a claim holds in English but we have no source for its Russian equivalent โ subtitle availability, a Russian edition of a book โ the Russian page says so rather than guessing.
What We're Not
We are not lawyers, tax advisers or immigration consultants
This is general information, not advice about your circumstances. For anything consequential, get professional advice and confirm current requirements with the relevant Lithuanian authority. Where an official source disagrees with us, the official source is right.
Get In Touch
Corrections, questions, partnership enquiries, or a topic you can't find covered โ all welcome via the contact page. Reader corrections in particular are genuinely useful; the people going through these processes right now often know things before we do.