Lithuanian Citizenship for Your Child

Your Child Is Probably Already a Citizen

If one of you is a Lithuanian citizen, your child did not become Lithuanian when you filed a form. Your child became Lithuanian at birth, in the delivery room, in whatever country that room was in.

Article 14(1) of the Law on Citizenship: a child both or one of whose parents are citizens of the Republic of Lithuania acquires citizenship at birth, wherever the child is born. There is no application, no discretion and no decision to wait for. The state is not granting anything. It is recording something that already happened.

The distinction this whole page turns on. There is nothing to apply for. There is something to register.

Your child is a citizen in law from the day of birth. What your child does not yet have is a Lithuanian civil-status record, a personal code, or a passport. Registering the foreign birth is the administrative act that turns an existing legal fact into documents your child can travel on. Everything below is about that gap.

That is good news for most readers, and it means the anxiety that brought you here — that you have missed something — is usually misplaced. Article 14(1) gives the citizenship at the moment of birth, and Article 28(1) protects a citizenship acquired at birth even when the parents later lose theirs. But there is one situation where families genuinely do lose the outcome they expected, and it involves a parent who restores citizenship rather than one who already held it. That is the section on the restoration trap, and if you are restoring your own citizenship, read it before you read anything else.

Who Is a Citizen at Birth

Work through these against your own facts.

The Dual-Citizenship Rule, Which Is Unusually Generous

Lithuania is restrictive about dual nationality in general. For children who are citizens from birth, it is not. This is the part of the law that most surprises parents who have read about Lithuania elsewhere.

Article 7(1): a person who acquired Lithuanian citizenship and the citizenship of another state at birth may hold both. Article 7(1¹), in force since 1 January 2021, extends that: a child who held Lithuanian citizenship from birth and acquired the other citizenship otherwise than by birth, before turning 18, keeps both as well.

No choice at 18. None at 21 either. The Migration Department puts it in one line: "Įgiję daugybinę pilietybę iki 18 metų, tokie asmenys ją išlaikys ir sulaukę pilnametystės" — having acquired multiple citizenship before the age of 18, such persons will keep it on reaching adulthood. Migration Department announcement.

Several countries do force that choice on dual nationals. Lithuania does not, for this class of child.

The practical effect: a child born in Chicago to a Lithuanian mother is a US citizen by birth and a Lithuanian citizen by Article 14(1), and holds both for life. A child who was Lithuanian from birth and was later naturalised somewhere else as a minor — by a family move, not by birth — is covered by the 2021 amendment and keeps both too.

Note the boundary. The generosity attaches to citizenship held from birth. It is not a general permission for anyone under 18, and it is not what saves the child in the restoration case below.

Registering a Foreign Birth

This is the administrative step that produces documents. Do it before you think about a passport. It is also what assigns the child an asmens kodas, which everything else in Lithuania is keyed to.

1. Get the foreign birth certificate apostilled

   The certificate issued by the country of birth needs legalisation for use in Lithuania. Order it from whichever authority in that country issues apostilles.

2. Have it translated into Lithuanian

   Use a certified translator. Do not do it yourself, however fluent you are — a translation nobody certified is the cheapest way to lose a round trip.

3. Gather the parents' documents

   The Lithuanian parent's passport or ID proving the citizenship the child's claim rests on, plus the other parent's identity documents.

4. File it — at a consulate, or in Lithuania

   Two routes are published. Through a Lithuanian consulate abroad, or at a Lithuanian civil registry office. The fees differ and so does the wait.

5. Wait for the record and the personal code

   The registration produces a Lithuanian birth record and a personal code. That code is the precondition for the passport, so this step is not optional and cannot be run in parallel.

Check your own consulate’s tariff. The €50 above is the figure published by the Lithuanian Embassy in the United Kingdom. The €10 and the 20 working days are the Vilnius civil registry's. Consular fee schedules are published per mission, so the number your consulate charges may differ from the €50 above — find your own consulate's fee page and read it before you budget.

Neither the consular pages nor the Vilnius civil registry service page states whether filing by post or through an online system is available. Both describe an in-person route only. If you are told about another channel, confirm it with the office that would receive it.

The First Passport

The passport is a separate act from the registration, and it has a hard precondition.

Who files, and whether the child has to come

Two questions parents ask constantly. Both have published answers — but the answers are published per consulate, and one Lithuanian authority sets a different age from the rest.

The Lithuanian Embassy in the United Kingdom is the most explicit. On citizenship applications: "Vaikų iki 18 metų prašymus pateikia vienas iš tėvų" — applications for children under 18 are submitted by one of the parents — and "Vaikams iki 18 metų dalyvauti vizito metu nebūtina" — children under 18 need not attend the visit. For registering a birth, one parent or a guardian may submit, and the child need not attend.

The passport is where the age matters.

The age-2 rule and the age-1 rule are both real. They belong to different services. A first passport applied for at a consulate follows the consular practice above; a document issued inside Lithuania follows the police page, which requires a child from age 1 to be present. The two do not average into a single figure. Work out which service will issue your child's document, then follow that one.

Two parents are not required where a post says so plainly. The UK embassy names one parent for citizenship, and one parent or a guardian for a birth registration. The US embassy writes legal representative, in the singular. Neither wording asks for both. That is the answer for most readers, and it is worth having before you plan a trip around an appointment.

Consular practice is published per mission, so the UK and US wording is evidence about those two posts and nothing more. The Consulate General in Chicago and the Embassy in Spain describe the applicant only as "representatives": neither states whether one parent alone suffices, and neither publishes an age from which a child must attend. Ask your own post when you book the appointment.

The Trap: Restoring Your Own Citizenship Does Not Carry Your Child

This is the single most expensive misunderstanding in the whole subject, and it hits exactly the families who are doing the most work.

Now the second half of the trap, which is the part that catches people even after they have understood the first. Parents reason: fine, the child does not come along on my case, but the child is my child, so Article 14 will cover them anyway.

It will not. Article 14(1) asks whether the parent was a Lithuanian citizen when the child was born. After a restoration, they were not. That is the whole answer, and it is why the two articles fail the family in sequence: Article 27(1) excludes the child because the child already holds another citizenship, and Article 14(1) does not reach the child because at the moment of birth the parent was not yet a citizen.

So the family ends up in the position it least expected: the parent has an EU passport, and the child, who was the entire reason for the exercise, has nothing automatic.

What that leaves you. Your child's route is their own, later — as a descendant in their own right under the routes described on our restoration by descent page, where the generational limits and dual-citizenship conditions have to be checked against your child's own position rather than yours. Because the answer turns on which ancestor held citizenship and when, and on whether your child's own case meets the dual-citizenship conditions, this is the point in the whole page where a paid legal opinion is worth more than anything you will read online. Get it before you file your own restoration, not after — the order in which a family files can matter, and a decision already taken is harder to work around than one still being planned.

Decision period, for planning: the Government's procedure description gives 3 months for the preparation and submission of Article 27 child cases to the Citizenship Affairs Commission (act TAIS.446024). For the parent's own restoration, the Migration Department gives 12 months — 11 to prepare the submission to the Minister of the Interior, then 1 for the decision. The Government's description sets 6 months for restoration; the two differ, and the figure above is the Department's own.

Losing It

Citizenship acquired at birth is unusually hard to lose, and the law protects children specifically.

• Article 28(1): if the parents lose Lithuanian citizenship, a child who acquired it at birth keeps it. A parent's renunciation does not sweep the child out with them. This is the mirror image of the Article 27 trap — the parent's status carries the child out even less readily than it carries them in.
• Article 28(2): a child aged 14 to 18 can lose citizenship only with the child's own consent. The consent requirement runs in both directions, and 14 is the age at which the child acquires their own voice in the matter.
• Article 28(4): never into statelessness. A child cannot be left with no citizenship at all.

The practical reading for a parent: nothing you do to your own status after your child is born removes what your child acquired at birth. If someone tells you your child must give up Lithuanian citizenship because you gave up yours, that is not what Article 28(1) says.

What It Costs

Every figure here comes from a named published tariff, and the source is in the row. Consular fees are set per mission — treat the consular rows as the tariff of the embassy named, not as a national price list, and confirm against your own post.

For a straightforward case — one Lithuanian parent, a child born abroad — the state-side cost is the registration plus the passport. Apostille and certified translation are charged by third parties in your own country and are not on any Lithuanian tariff, so nobody can quote you those in advance.

Six Ways Families Get This Wrong

Assuming birth in Lithuania is enough. There is no jus soli. A child born in Lithuania to two foreign parents acquires nothing from the birthplace. The claim comes from a parent's citizenship, not from the hospital's address.

Applying for the passport before registering the birth. The first passport can only be issued after the birth is registered and a personal code assigned. Doing it in the wrong order does not speed anything up; it wastes an appointment.

Assuming a child rides along on a parent's restoration. Article 27(1) attaches the child to the parent's case only if the child is not a citizen of another state. A child who already holds another passport does not come along, and Article 14 will not rescue it afterwards.

Letting the 14th birthday pass without consent. From 14 to 18 the child's own written consent is required, both to acquire citizenship with a parent under Article 27(1) and to lose it under Article 28(2). Under 14 nobody asks the child. The rule changes on the birthday, so the timing of a filing is a real decision.

Not telling the Migration Department about the other citizenship. The other citizenship is the condition the Article 27 decision turns on, not a detail. Concealing it does not create a right that the statute withholds, and it puts the whole file's credibility in question.

Using a translation that is not certified. The Lithuanian translation of a foreign birth certificate has to be a certified one. A translation you did yourself, or a friend did, comes back — after the wait, not before it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Next Steps