North Macedonia Citizenship by Investment: €400K Threshold Scrapped

North Macedonia citizenship by investment is losing its headline price tag, with a draft law scrapping the €400,000 (about US$432,000) investment threshold that has defined the route for nearly a decade. The Interior Ministry wants to swap the fixed price for a case-by-case system, but Brussels has already signalled that a tweak won’t do. It wants the whole thing repealed.

SKOPJE, North Macedonia – 16 September 2026

The draft amendments to the Law on Citizenship, posted on the government’s public regulatory register in June, pull out the two numbers that made this a program at all: the €400,000 investment plus a ten-job requirement, and the newer €200,000 (about US$216,000) contribution to an approved fund. In their place goes a discretionary model where officials decide, application by application, whether someone represents a genuine “special interest” to the country. That’s the same pressure Brussels is putting on Caribbean citizenship programs, now landing on an EU candidate country with its accession hopes on the line.

What is North Macedonia changing?

North Macedonia citizenship by investment is being rebuilt around discretion. The country is removing the fixed investment sums and replacing them with a case-by-case assessment. The €400,000 direct-investment route with its ten-job rule, live since 2016, goes. So does the €200,000 fund-contribution option added in 2021. An investment would no longer, on its own, make anyone eligible.

Under the draft, each applicant would need supporting opinions from state institutions judging whether the person genuinely brings a special scientific, economic, cultural or sporting benefit to the country. The Ministry of Internal Affairs frames this as killing the “transactional” version of the scheme while keeping investment as one factor a panel can weigh. There’s a second, quieter change: the wait for former citizens to reclaim nationality drops from three years to three months, pitched as a way to lure diaspora talent home. If you’re weighing an EU-facing passport, this is a moment to look hard at your citizenship by investment options elsewhere, because this door is closing rather than opening.

Why does Brussels say the change falls short?

Because the European Commission wants the legal basis gone, and a rebrand won’t satisfy it. Its Eighth Report under the Visa Suspension Mechanism, published in December 2025, told North Macedonia in plain terms to abolish the scheme and repeal its legal basis, disclose past applications, and run rigorous background checks on each.

The Commission’s spine here is the Court of Justice of the European Union, which ruled against Malta’s investor citizenship program on 29 April 2025, calling it a commercialisation of EU citizenship. Since then, the EU has treated shutting these frameworks, legal basis and all, as a condition of accession for candidate countries. And under the revised Visa Suspension Mechanism, simply operating an investor citizenship program is now grounds to suspend a country’s visa-free access to the Schengen area. For a North Macedonian passport, whose value comes largely from that visa-free reach (see the Passport Freedom Index), that’s the leverage that matters.

Was the North Macedonia program ever worth using?

Barely. North Macedonia citizenship by investment produced only a trickle of passports. Some 121 people gained citizenship on special-economic-interest grounds between 2005 and 2022, then just one grant in 2023 and two in 2024, according to Commission monitoring. The route existed more on paper than in practice.

We’ve fielded questions about North Macedonia for years, and the honest answer rarely changed: the price looked cheap, but the program barely functioned. Clients drawn to the €200,000 fund route usually went quiet once we walked them through documents that moved at the speed of a dormant file. On paper it works, in practice it doesn’t. Anyone who wanted a reliable European base was almost always better served by legitimate second residency programs that lead to citizenship the slow, unimpeachable way.

What are the alternatives for an EU-facing second passport?

The durable routes run through ancestry and long-term residency. A fast investment cheque was never really one of them. If you have a qualifying grandparent or parent, citizenship by descent remains the cleanest path to an EU passport, and it’s immune to the pressure Brussels is applying to investment schemes. Residency-then-naturalization is the other reliable track, though the timelines are stretching: Ireland’s tougher citizenship rules now point to an eight-year wait, and other member states are tightening too.

Let’s be blunt about the direction of travel. The EU has decided that buying a passport, at any published price, is incompatible with membership, and it’s willing to use visa-free access as the stick. Montenegro closed its program at the end of 2022. Moldova repealed its own in 2020. Malta fought to the top court and lost. North Macedonia citizenship by investment is simply the latest route to feel the squeeze, and Skopje is reading the room.

The €400,000 number grabbed the headlines, but it was never the story. North Macedonia citizenship by investment barely functioned, and the draft law mostly formalises a route that had gone quiet. What matters for a Plan B is the signal: the EU is closing the door on bought passports, candidate countries included, and the passports worth having are the ones you earn through blood or time.