POSTERN

Uruguay

Fast-Track Naturalisation (Article 75). Uruguay runs one of the fastest naturalisations in Latin America: 3 years of legal residence with a spouse or child in the country, or 5 years single, on top of any legal residence category.

Free · The law behind every answer · Checked Sep 27, 2026

Fast-Track Naturalisation (Article 75)

Uruguayan citizenship by naturalisation.

Who qualifies

Whether you keep your U.S. citizenship depends on the route you take later.

1

It could fit.

Uruguay runs one of the fastest naturalisations in Latin America: 3 years of legal residence with a spouse or child in the country, or 5 years single, on top of any legal residence category.

Every door that fits your family

Not legal advice.

2

What it takes.

Time
3–5 years of legal residence, plus processing and interview.
Cost
A few hundred dollars in filing fees, plus $1,500–3,000 in typical legal assistance.
The hard part
The 183-day presence rule and the 6-month-absence clock reset are the most commonly overlooked traps for part-time residents.
3

Citizens by 2031.

If your first permit is issued in 2027 and you keep living there, this is the road.

  1. 2027
    Residence begins

    No permit term of its own; the clock runs on legal residence.

  2. 2030
    Apply for citizenship

    With a language test.

  3. 2031
    Citizenship
Language
You must understand and speak Spanish; the Corte Electoral will not process the case otherwise. There is no formal test; it is checked at the hearing.
Time away
Habitual residence counted from arrival: no absence may exceed 6 months in a row, or the count restarts from zero on return. You must prove with dated documents (migration records, social-security history, bank, school or medical records) that you lived in Uruguay on specific days, months and years, and bring two witnesses who have known you for the whole period.
Two passports
Yes. You keep your U.S. citizenship.
  • Not a permit: 3 years of habitual residence with family in Uruguay (5 if single), then a letter of legal citizenship from the Corte Electoral; it gives citizenship and a Uruguayan passport, but not Uruguayan nationality.
  • Legal citizenship is not nationality. A naturalised person becomes a Uruguayan legal citizen but keeps their birth nationality, cannot vote until 3 years after the letter of citizenship, and loses legal citizenship by later naturalising anywhere else (Constitution art. 81). Since 23 April 2025 the passport shows 'Nacionalidad/Ciudadanía: URY' and no longer prints the place of birth, which fixed most border problems (Ministry of the Interior, https://www.gub.uy/ministerio-interior/comunicacion/noticias/uruguay-actualiza-introduce-cambios-pasaporte-para-mejorar-movilidad), but some countries' visa rules may still look at the birth nationality.
  • A bill rewriting Ley 8.196 (the citizenship procedure, including the witness hearings) passed the Chamber of Representatives in May 2026 and awaits the Senate; the Corte Electoral reports a growing backlog (https://www.uruguaypais.uy/2026/06/ciudadania-legal-corte-electoral.html).
  • The program file's '183 days a year' rule is not in the Corte Electoral manual; the official rule is the 6-month continuous-absence reset plus dated proof of living in Uruguay. Lawyers commonly advise spending more than half of each year there.
  • Whether the clock runs from arrival or from filing the residence application: the Corte's page says from entry into the country; in practice the residence has to be proven by dated documents from that date.
  • No official decision-time figure; about a year is commonly reported.
  • UY-RENTISTA's permit is shown as 5-year cards only as a placeholder: the status is indefinite, and the identity-card length for permanent residents was not found on an official page.
  • How long the decision takes isn’t published; we allow a year.
The law behind these dates
4

Living there.

Time you must spend there
183 days a year; a 6-month continuous absence resets the clock.
Tax
Citizenship itself has no tax status, but the 11-year foreign-income tax holiday may still be running.

We never file a tax return. We tell you what applies and brief the professional who does.

5

Start today.

  1. File an initial legal-residency application; the filing date starts the citizenship clock.Open gub.uy ↗
6

Or let us run it.

$900for your first year as a founding member. Then $399 a year, automatically.Standard first year: $1,200. Everyone renews at $399.One membership, the whole family. Accounts and activation included.

11 steps, from the first paper to the passport. You do 2 of them: send what we ask for, sign, and show up. We run the rest, and keep every permit renewed on time. Accounts and activation are included, whether you move now or keep the plan ready. Accounts depend on provider availability. Government, record and approved third-party charges are extra.

Run it for my family →
7
ISSUED TO

YOUR FAMILY

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