Draft amendments would delete North Macedonia's €200,000 and €400,000 citizenship thresholds. That reads like liberalisation. It is the opposite — and the European Commission has already said it does not go far enough.
In June 2026 North Macedonia's Ministry of the Interior published draft amendments to the Law on Citizenship. They would delete the published investment thresholds — the €200,000 investment-fund route and the €400,000 direct-investment route — and replace them with case-by-case assessment of whether an applicant represents a "national interest". Most coverage has read that as a reform, and some has read it as a relaunch. We read it the other way round. Removing the price does not open the door. It removes the only part of the process an applicant could actually satisfy.
North Macedonia's citizenship-by-investment programme is currently paused and is not accepting new applications. Nothing in this article changes that, and the draft described here is not in force.
The money was never in the law
Article 11 of the Law on Citizenship permits naturalisation where it is of "special scientific, economic, cultural, sporting or other national interest". That is the entire legal basis. The figures everybody quotes were never in the statute — they lived in a government decree sitting underneath it, which set out what an economic national interest was supposed to look like in practice. That distinction is the whole story, because the draft does not touch Article 11. It removes the decree. The discretionary power to grant citizenship on economic grounds survives intact; what disappears is the published standard for exercising it.
- Fund route, as last published — €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 — €400,000 into new business capacity, excluding hospitality and retail, with at least 10 full-time jobs maintained for at least one year.
A correction to our own earlier coverage while we are here: we had previously described this programme as a single €200,000 route that also required ten jobs. That was wrong. The €200,000 fund route carried no job-creation requirement at all, and the ten-job condition belonged to the separate, larger €400,000 direct-investment route. We have corrected the programme page accordingly.
What the European Union is actually demanding
The draft is often framed as North Macedonia bringing its scheme into line with European expectations. That is not what the European Commission has asked for. Its Eighth Report under the Visa Suspension Mechanism, published in December 2025, says North Macedonia must abolish the scheme and repeal its legal basis, and asks the country to disclose how many applications are already sitting in the queue under the special economic interest provision. The EU Delegation in Skopje has already responded to this specific draft in public. Removing the €400,000 threshold while keeping the possibility of granting citizenship on grounds of special economic interest, it said, would not address the Commission's recommendation — and could make the allocation of citizenship even more discretionary than it is now. There is a sharper instrument in play too. 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 worth having is the same thing the scheme now puts at risk.
One point is widely reported incorrectly, and it matters. The Court of Justice of the European Union's April 2025 judgment against Malta (C-181/23) binds EU member states. North Macedonia is a candidate country, not a member, so that judgment does not apply to it directly. The pressure here is political and conditional — through accession negotiations and the visa mechanism — not legal. If someone tells you a court has struck down North Macedonia's scheme, they are wrong.
Every comparable programme ended the same way
This is not the first time we have watched this sequence. Cyprus terminated its scheme in 2020. Moldova repealed its own 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. In every case the price list died and the discretion survived. North Macedonia's draft follows that template closely — and is reaching it voluntarily, without a binding judgment forcing its hand.
Our view: what to realistically expect
What follows is our assessment rather than a statement of law. We would rather be useful than encouraging.
- Most likely — the transactional route dies and the discretion survives. The published thresholds go, Article 11 stays, and grants continue at a trickle on genuine national-interest grounds. The Ministry has said explicitly that it is not abolishing investment-based citizenship, only what it calls transactional abuse.
- Possible — the draft simply stalls. Nothing has been adopted since June. It has not gone to Cabinet and has not reached the Assembly. Practice continues at one to three grants a year.
- Less likely, but real — full abolition. This is what the Commission has actually asked for, and it becomes likely if accession momentum builds or a visa-suspension threat becomes credible.
For an investor, the first outcome — the most likely one — is worse than today's position, not better. A published threshold is a thing you can satisfy. You either invested €400,000 and held ten jobs for a year, or you did not, and if you did you had a case you could argue. A discretionary opinion on national interest is not something you can satisfy in advance, evidence reliably, or appeal on the merits. The honest base rate is one to three grants a year, nationally. The European Commission records economic citizenship granted to two Turkish nationals in 2024 and one Bosnian national in 2025, and describes the volumes as marginal. Nobody has disclosed the size of the queue those grants are being drawn from — the Commission is itself asking North Macedonia to reveal it.
We would not advise anyone to commit money now in the expectation of a citizenship outcome. The probability is low and genuinely unquantifiable, no official processing time has ever been published, and the legal framework is likely to change before any new file is decided.
So who would actually qualify?
If the draft is adopted and applications reopen case by case, the question stops being how much and becomes who. Article 11's categories — scientific, economic, cultural, sporting and "other" national interest — are not unusual. Several European countries have the same provision, which means there is real evidence about who 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 about a quarter. Austria's equivalent runs at twenty to forty grants a year in total, also weighted heavily toward athletes. Croatia routes 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 — as our inference, not 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.
- 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 behind them.
- 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.
- Excluded: anyone with sanctions exposure, politically exposed person status or adverse media. The national-security condition is the one substantive screen Article 11 does not waive, and grants have been revoked before.
It is worth knowing what Article 11 does waive, because it is a great deal: the eight-year residence requirement, the housing and income tests, the language requirement, the loyalty oath, and the requirement to renounce a previous citizenship. What it has never done is create an entitlement. Meeting every criterion has never obliged the government to grant anything.
What we are telling clients
We are not putting anyone into North Macedonia at the moment, and we would not even if it reopened tomorrow on the terms in this draft. If you are already in the queue from an earlier application, that is a different conversation and worth having individually — legacy files in Montenegro took years to clear, and there is no reason to assume these will be faster. If what you actually want is a second citizenship with a European orientation, there are routes open today that can be assessed against published criteria. That is a better use of your capital than waiting on a discretionary opinion from a programme the European Commission is trying to close.
If you would like to be told when North Macedonia's position changes, send an email to macedonia@itc-canada.com with your name and phone number and we will contact you if it reopens. We will not add you to a marketing list, and we will not tell you it is about to reopen in order to keep you interested. Sources checked 16 September 2026: European Commission North Macedonia 2025 Report; Eighth Report under the Visa Suspension Mechanism (COM(2025) 792); the consolidated Law on Citizenship of the Republic of North Macedonia; and Macedonian reporting on the ENER draft. Processing times and programme status are estimates and subject to change — nothing here is a guarantee of any outcome.
