Residence Permit Fees, by Country

What's included: the government's own one-off fee to be granted the standard, best-known long-term residence status in that country — the fee alone, for the main adult applicant, via the ordinary (non-premium) route. Where a country prices several residence-permit categories differently (as the Netherlands and France both do), the most common or representative category is shown and the cheaper/pricier alternatives are noted.

What's excluded: immigration lawyer or consultant fees, translation and document-legalisation costs, the earlier work or study visa fee that may have been a precondition (see our work visa fees hub for that), and renewal-only fees except where noted for context.

Why this isn't the same as work-visa-fees. That hub prices the fee to be authorised to work in a country in the first place — often tied to a specific employer and a fixed term. This hub prices a separate, later fee: the right to live there on an ongoing, settled basis, which in the countries here is its own distinct application with its own fee, sometimes years after the original work visa.

Why Germany, Spain and New Zealand aren't here. Germany's Aufenthaltsverordnung fee schedule and Spain's Policía Nacional fee page for the TIE residence card both failed to return a readable, confirmable figure directly — repeated attempts either errored or returned no fee amount, and third-party sources disagreed with each other. New Zealand's own fee pages and fee guide didn't clearly distinguish the Resident Visa fee from the cheaper, different Permanent Resident Visa travel-conditions upgrade that secondary sources kept conflating it with. Rather than publish a guessed or conflated number, all three are left out pending a source that can be read directly.

Limits of this comparison. Figures are each country's own currency, face value, with no FX conversion — treat a 'cheapest/most expensive' ranking as directional, not exact, once exchange rates are applied. The FAQ below naming the most expensive country is the one exception: it converts to a common currency specifically to answer that question honestly, because the gap between the UK and every other country here is wide enough to be clear even with approximate rates.