North Macedonia Citizenship by Investment

Where the programme stands

North Macedonia has never run a retail citizenship-by-investment programme the way the Caribbean states do. Citizenship for investors is granted under Article 11 of the Law on Citizenship, which permits naturalisation where it is of "special scientific, economic, cultural, sporting or other national interest". The money was never in the statute — the investment figures lived in a government decree sitting beneath it.

The programme is currently paused and is not accepting new applications. No reopening date has been announced. Two further facts are worth knowing before reading anything else about it: the government's own programme website, mkcitizenship.gov.mk, is no longer online, and the European Commission records only a handful of recent grants — economic citizenship to two Turkish nationals in 2024 and to one national of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2025. The Commission describes the volumes as marginal.

Source: European Commission — North Macedonia 2025 Report (SWD(2025) 753)

What the June 2026 draft would change

In June 2026 the Ministry of the Interior published draft amendments to the Law on Citizenship on the national regulatory register (ENER). The draft does not rewrite Article 11. What it removes is the decree beneath it — the fixed, published investment thresholds.

If adopted, the two investment routes below disappear as qualifying criteria. In their place comes individual, case-by-case assessment, with supporting opinions from the competent state institutions on whether an applicant genuinely represents a national interest. Investment becomes one consideration among several rather than a threshold that qualifies anyone.

• Fund route, as last published: EUR €200,000 into an approved private investment fund, held at least two years. No job-creation requirement attached to this route.
• Direct route, as last published: EUR €400,000 into new business capacity, excluding hospitality and retail, with at least 10 full-time jobs maintained for at least one year.

Source: Law on Citizenship of the Republic of North Macedonia — consolidated text

What the European Union is actually demanding

Coverage of the draft often frames it as North Macedonia bringing its scheme into line with EU expectations. That is not what the European Commission has asked for. Its Eighth Report under the Visa Suspension Mechanism, published in December 2025, states that North Macedonia must abolish the scheme and repeal its legal basis, and asks the country to disclose the applications already submitted under the special economic interest provision.

The EU Delegation in Skopje has already responded to this specific draft in public, saying that removing the EUR €400,000 threshold while keeping the possibility of granting citizenship on grounds of special economic interest would not address the Commission's recommendation — and could make the allocation of citizenship even more discretionary than it is now.

There is also a sharper instrument in play. Under the revised Visa Suspension Mechanism, operating an investor-citizenship scheme is in itself a ground for suspending a country's visa-free access to the Schengen Area. The visa-free travel that makes the passport attractive is the same thing the scheme now puts at risk.

Source: European Commission — Eighth Report under the Visa Suspension Mechanism (COM(2025) 792, 19 December 2025)

Our view: what to realistically expect

What follows is our assessment rather than a statement of law, and we would rather be useful than encouraging.

Across every comparable programme, the same thing happened: the price list died and the discretion survived. Cyprus terminated its scheme in 2020. Moldova repealed its in the same year. Bulgaria abolished investment naturalisation in 2022. Montenegro formally terminated its programme at the end of 2022 and was still issuing decisions on legacy files into 2025. Malta repealed its investor programme in July 2025 after losing in the Court of Justice, and replaced it with discretionary, merit-based naturalisation carrying no fixed financial threshold at all.

North Macedonia's draft follows that template closely — and is reaching it voluntarily, without a binding judgment forcing its hand. That is why we read the draft as the beginning of the end of the investment route rather than its modernisation.

Who would realistically qualify under a national-interest test

If the draft is adopted and applications reopen on a case-by-case basis, the question stops being how much and starts being who. Article 11's categories are scientific, economic, cultural, sporting and "other" national interest, and the same categories exist in several European countries — which gives us real evidence about who actually receives these grants rather than who is told they might.

Spain's carta de naturaleza produced 426 grants in thirty years, of which athletes were the largest single group at around a quarter. Austria's equivalent provision runs at twenty to forty grants a year in total, heavily weighted to athletes. Croatia administers its athlete cases through the national Olympic Committee. Italy's provision is effectively dormant. Serbia's national-interest route has been driven by geopolitics rather than investment. Not one of these regimes publishes an investment threshold, and no published grant data from any of them shows a passive-capital category.

On that evidence, and as our inference rather than as settled law, this is how we would rank the profiles:

• Strongest: elite athletes recruited toward national squads, with a federation nomination and sports-ministry backing behind them.
• Strong: scientists and academics with an endorsement from the Academy of Sciences and Arts or a line ministry, and a named institutional post in the country.
• Plausible: artists and cultural figures of demonstrable national significance, with a Ministry of Culture opinion.
• Weaker than it used to be: founder-operators physically running a real Macedonian company, on its payroll, in a priority sector, with audited accounts. This profile previously had a threshold to satisfy; under the draft it has only an opinion to win.
• Effectively excluded: the passive investor — a fund subscription, no residence, no operations, no sector connection. This is precisely the profile the reform is aimed at, and the one the European Commission is watching.
• Excluded: anyone with sanctions exposure, politically exposed person status or adverse media. Article 7(1)(8), the national-security condition, is the one substantive screen Article 11 does not waive, and grants have been revoked before.

Source: Law on Citizenship of the Republic of North Macedonia — consolidated text