Lithuanian Citizenship

Which Route Applies to You?

Answer the first question that fits. Most people stop at the first or second.

Fees from the Migration Department fee list, page updated November 2025. Conditions from the Law on Citizenship, consolidated text in force from 1 January 2024.

The distinction that decides everything

Restoration treats you as holding a right that is being given back. Nothing is asked of your residence or your language, and the dual-citizenship exceptions were written for exactly the families it covers.

The other two are grants. The state is giving you something new, and Article 10(2) and Article 18(1)(6) both make you renounce what you hold to receive it. That single line is worth more than every other difference on this page combined.

Restoration — the Essentials

Most people who arrive on this page have Lithuanian ancestry, so here is the core of it.

The right has no time limit, but it does have a generation limit. People read "unlimited right" and assume the chain runs forever. It does not. The law defines a descendant as the child, grandchild or great-grandchild of the person who held citizenship — three generations, and no more. A great-great-grandchild is outside the definition, however good the documents are.

Count your generations before you spend anything. Start at the ancestor who held citizenship and count down to yourself. Child, grandchild, great-grandchild — those three qualify. If you land on the fourth, restoration is closed to you, but the Lithuanian descent route may not be, because it measures ethnicity rather than a citizenship record. Source: Article 2(7), Law on Citizenship.

A Practical Benefit Before Citizenship Arrives

Lithuanian descent brings a fee exemption. People who have submitted documents proving Lithuanian descent, or the right to restore Lithuanian citizenship, are exempt from the state fee for residence permit administration. If you are moving to Lithuania while your case runs, that is worth knowing — see the residence permit guide.

If You Have No Lithuanian Ancestry

Naturalisation is the route, and it is a long one.

1. Temporary residence permit

   Work, study, family or business grounds. See the permit guide.

2. Ten years of lawful continuous residence

   A year counts as unbroken if you spent at least six months of it in Lithuania. Only a custodial sentence breaks the period outright.

3. Permanent residence

   You must hold the right of permanent residence both when you apply and when the decision is taken — not only one of the two.

4. State language exam and Constitution exam

   The real barrier. Lithuanian cannot be crammed, so start in year one. People aged 65 and over are exempt from both.

5. Renounce, then swear the oath

   You declare in writing that you will give up your current citizenship, and you take the oath within two years of the President's decree.

Permanent residence may be enough for what you want. It gives you indefinite residence, full access to the labour market and access to social benefits. If your goal is to live and work here securely rather than to hold an EU passport, permanent residence achieves it — and it costs you nothing you already hold.

What the Paperwork Actually Looks Like

Every route above is decided on documents, and the documents are the part nobody describes until you are already committed. This is the shape of it for restoration, which is the route most readers of this page are on.

Foreign documents generally need two things done to them before Lithuania will look at them: an apostille and a certified translation into Lithuanian. The apostille is issued by whichever authority in the country of origin issues them; the translation has to come from a certified translator. Do not translate it yourself, however fluent you are — an uncertified translation comes back after the wait, not before it.

1. Prove the citizenship, then everything else

   The document that shows your ancestor was a citizen is the one the case turns on. Do not open a file until you have it.

2. Apostille and translate

   Each foreign document carries its own apostille and its own per-page translation charge, so every extra document you add has a price attached.

3. Submit through MIGRIS — yourself

   Restoration applications go in electronically through MIGRIS, the Migration Information System, personally by the applicant. A lawyer can prepare the whole file; they cannot press submit for you.

4. Wait for the notification, then book

   If there are no deficiencies, MIGRIS messages you to attend a consulate with the originals. Only after that notification can you register for the appointment.

5. Attend once, with the originals

   An officer compares your originals against what you uploaded and hands them straight back. Nothing of yours is retained — the file keeps the copies you submitted.

The four-month window is the deadline people miss. Once MIGRIS notifies you that the documents pass the preliminary check, you have four months to present the originals at a consulate. The two published wordings do not start from the same point: this is normally described as four months from the notification, while the US embassy words it as four months from the MIGRIS filing. Treat the earlier of the two dates as yours, and look at appointment availability the day the notification lands.

Name changes need a document, not an explanation. A marriage certificate, a court order or deed poll, or an immigration or naturalisation file recording the old and new spellings side by side. Each one you add is another apostille and another page rate.

Step-by-step in the restoration guide and citizenship for your child. No validity period is published for apostilles or civil-status extracts in citizenship files, so ask the mission handling your case before you order documents months ahead of filing.

What It Costs Beyond the €120

The state fee is €120 on all three routes, and it is the smallest line on most bills. What actually decides the total is charged by somebody other than the Lithuanian state — archives, translators, notaries, and the country that issues your apostilles.

What a restoration case comes to, all in. The fees above add up to €307–€340 where the family already holds the documents, €402–€467 where a single archive search finds what is needed, and €541–€645 where the archives have to be worked. There is no package price for a citizenship case, so treat any figure presented as one as a quote rather than a tariff. The line-by-line breakdown is on the restoration page.

One line you should not budget for. The expedited archive search is priced at €65.40, but LCVA is not currently accepting expedited requests. Treat the fast option as unavailable and start the archive work early.

Legal help is the line nobody prices, and the only one that can exceed everything else combined. Of the reinstatement firms operating in this market, one publishes a from-€111 starting price and the rest quote case by case, several on success-fee terms. Get the fee structure in writing before you commit — and note that the archives run their searches at the same published rates whether or not a lawyer is involved.

These are restoration figures. On naturalisation and the simplified descent procedure the only fixed costs are the €120 state fee and the €50 certificate; translation, legalisation and legal help on those routes depend entirely on the case.

How Long Each Route Takes

Two different official instruments give the periods, they do not agree with each other, and neither covers the whole journey.

Where the two instruments disagree, the Migration Department's figure is the one above. The Government's procedure description sets 6 months for restoration cases; the Department publishes 12. The Department's figure is the one to plan on, because it is the office that answers your file.

The oath has two deadlines, and which one applies to you depends on how you got there. Article 23(4) gives two years from the entry into force of the decree if you declared in writing that you will renounce another citizenship, and six months if you are stateless, if your other citizenship lapses automatically, or if citizenship was granted by way of exception. People restoring citizenship do not swear the oath at all, and neither do children under 18.

The two stages the timetable does not cover. The research before filing is what decides a restoration case and has no official period: it depends on which archive holds your family and whether the file survived — plan in months, not weeks. At the other end, the three months for naturalisation and the simplified procedure is the period for preparing the case and sending it to the Citizenship Affairs Commission, and nothing official covers Commission to decree. Do not read the 12-month restoration figure across to those routes: different procedure, different decision-maker.

What Blocks Every Route — and When an Old Refusal Is Worth Reopening

Article 22 is the bar, it is not discretionary, and it reaches across all three routes on this page. Citizenship is not granted by naturalisation, by the simplified procedure or by way of exception, and is not restored, to a person who:

• prepared, attempted or committed international crimes;
• prepared, attempted or committed crimes against the Republic of Lithuania;
• was convicted of a serious or grave intentional crime, whether in Lithuania or abroad.

Article 10(2) imports that article into the simplified descent route by reference, and Article 18(1)(7) makes being clear of it an express condition of naturalisation — so it is checked rather than assumed. If it applies to you, no route in the statute is open, however strong the family evidence is.

Two categories of old refusal that no longer describe the law

Refused before 2022 because an ancestor naturalised abroad before 1940? Between a Supreme Court ruling in late 2020 and the amendment of 28 January 2022, the Department treated pre-1940 foreign naturalisation as automatic loss and refused on that basis. The amended law counts anyone who held Lithuanian citizenship at any time before 15 June 1940, excluding only cases where the interwar authorities formally decided the loss at the time. If that was your ground, reapply.

Refused because your family "repatriated"? That exclusion belonged to the pre-2011 law — in practice it hit Jewish families who left for Israel, Poles who left for Poland, Germans for Germany. The Constitutional Court found the ethnic-origin provisions unconstitutional in 2006, and the statute as it stands contains no repatriation bar. A refusal issued under the old rule does not describe the law today.

A rejection is not a bar on filing again. The decision states its grounds, and cases refused for missing evidence are routinely refiled once the archival record improves. Before you refile, have a specialist read the refusal itself: the stated ground is what determines whether you need more documents or a legal argument. And if the refusal was under Article 22, neither restoration nor the descent route is open to you.

Refiling and appealing to a court are different things. If you intend to challenge a decision rather than resubmit, put it to a Lithuanian lawyer the day the decision arrives.

Frequently Asked Questions

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