Paraguay residency, and the day count that is not there

Paraguay occupies a particular place in relocation discussions because its appeal is, unusually, the day count itself. Almost every other jurisdiction asks you to be somewhere. Paraguay asks remarkably little, and that is the entire pitch.

It is worth being precise about what that leniency does and does not buy, because the two things most often written about Paraguay — that residency comes with a small deposit, and that tax residence requires a certain number of days a year — are both inaccurate, and in different ways.

What the 2022 law changed

Law 6984/2022 replaced Paraguay’s previous migration statute and, with it, the route that made the country famous in this field. Under the old regime a modest deposit with a Paraguayan bank supported an application for immediate permanent residence. That is no longer the ordinary path.

The framework now separates the routes:

Temporary residence is the standard entry point, granted for a defined period and renewable, after which permanent residence may be applied for. The documentary requirements are ordinary — identity, criminal record certification, medical certification, apostilled and translated — and the process is administered by the Dirección General de Migraciones.

Permanent residence directly remains available to qualifying investors. The thresholds have been set and adjusted by regulation rather than by the statute itself, which is why published figures diverge. As at August 2026, reporting indicates a lower threshold for productive or business investment coupled with a business plan and a formal job-creation commitment, and a higher, unconditioned threshold for real property.

The commonly cited figures are approximately USD 70,000 for the productive investment route, requiring a business plan and around five formal jobs, and approximately USD 200,000 for the real estate route.

Both routes now sit within a compliance framework that did not meaningfully exist a decade ago. Source-of-funds evidence is expected, and Paraguay’s anti-money-laundering supervision through SEPRELAD reaches the professionals who file these applications. The practical effect is that the paperwork burden has risen even where the financial threshold has not.

Anyone acting on guidance written before 2022 — and a great deal of it is still online, undated — is acting on a regime that has been repealed.

The territorial system

Paraguay taxes income from Paraguayan sources and does not tax the foreign-source income of individuals. Domestic personal income is taxed at a low flat rate, and there is a separate regime for dividends and for business income.

As with Panama, the exemption depends on source characterisation rather than on residence alone. Foreign dividends, foreign interest and gains on foreign assets sit outside the Paraguayan net. Work physically performed in Paraguay is a harder question, and remote work conducted from a Paraguayan address for foreign clients is the fact pattern most likely to attract a different answer than the one assumed.

The presence question, correctly stated

There are three separate presence questions in Paraguay, and conflating them produces most of the bad advice in circulation.

To keep the immigration status. Temporary residents are expected to enter Paraguay at least once in each twelve-month period. Permanent residents may be absent for up to three years before the status is at risk. This is genuinely permissive, and it is a real advantage for people who travel constantly.

To be Paraguayan tax resident. Paraguay does not impose a statutory day-count threshold on individual tax residence in the way most countries do. The frequently repeated figure of a hundred and twenty days derives from Article 152 of Law 125/1991, which creates a presumption of fiscal domicile — an address for administrative purposes — rather than a residence test. Repeating it as a residence threshold is a category error, and it has been repeated a great deal.

To obtain the certificate. The tax residency certificate is issued by the tax administration on a procedural basis: an active RUC registration, filings up to date, and a constancia de movimiento migratorio — the official record of your entries and exits. There is no stated day threshold in that process either. But note what the certificate application asks for. It asks for your movement record. The absence of a threshold does not mean the days are not looked at; it means nobody has told you in advance what will be enough.

A cheap residency is not a defensible tax residence

This is the paragraph that most Paraguay material omits.

Residency and tax residence can both be obtained in Paraguay at low cost and with very little presence. Neither of those facts binds the country you left. Your former jurisdiction applies its own test — days, domicile, permanent home available to you, family location, centre of economic interests — and reaches its own conclusion. Paraguay’s treaty network is small enough that in most corridors there is no tie-breaker article to invoke at all, which means the argument is conducted purely under the other country’s domestic law.

In that argument, a certificate obtained on a handful of days a year, with a family, a house and a business visibly elsewhere, is weak evidence. It may be worse than weak: a certificate that is plainly inconsistent with the pattern of your life invites the enquiry rather than closing it.

The jurisdictions that ask more of you are, for exactly that reason, easier to defend. Paraguay’s leniency is real, and it transfers the burden of proof rather than removing it.

Planning notes

• Verify the current investment thresholds and route structure directly with the Dirección General de Migraciones. Regulation has moved more than once and undated summaries are unreliable.
• Do not rely on the hundred-and-twenty-day figure as a tax residence test. It is a domicile presumption in a 1991 statute.
• If the point of the exercise is to establish tax residence somewhere, plan the presence you would need to defend it in the country you are leaving, not the minimum Paraguay will accept.
• Keep the migration movement record clean and consistent. It is the document the certificate process is built on, and the one a foreign authority will ask to see.

What Residay tracks

Residay records which country each day belongs to and keeps the evidence behind each attributed day on your device, which is what a constancia de movimiento migratorio can be checked against and what a foreign tax authority will ask for when it disputes the position.

Paraguay is covered as an advisory presence counter, not a researched rule set, because there is no determinative day threshold to compute — that absence is the whole character of the jurisdiction. The counter exists for the other half of the problem: showing where you actually were, across every country, for the period the enquiry covers. Where Paraguay asks nothing, the country you left will ask everything, and that is the count worth having.