How To Get a St Lucia Passport Through Their Citizenship By Investment Program in 2023
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AUTHOR
Marat Kurbanov -
LAST UPDATED
January 18, 2023
St Lucia is the most populous Caribbean country offering a Citizenship By Investment (CBI) program. Launched in 2016, the program is one of the cheapest Caribbean passport programs for single applicants.
With non-refundable donations priced at only $100,000 for singletons, couples and families of up to four people, it offers exceptional value.
St Lucia has a very decent passport, offering visa-free access to over 120 countries. Their CBI enjoys a sterling reputation, and numerous of our Total Access members have successfully become St Lucian citizens on the basis of investment.
And while we typically prefer the donation-based options for CBI in the Caribbean over the typically overpriced real estate options, St Lucia’s newly launched government bonds option is certainly worth a look. (More on this topic below.)
If you want to buy a passport, then the past couple of years have been a great time to acquire a second passport through Citizenship By Investment. All the Caribbean Citizenship By Investment (CBI) programs went ON SALE during Covid, and you were able to save tens of thousands of dollars (more on that below…)
In this article, you’ll learn how to take advantage of this special situation to get an excellent St. Lucia passport through their Citizenship By Investment program.
And if you’re married and/or have children, we’ll tell you which other island offers the cheapest second passport program for your entire family.
Compare ALL Citizenship-By-Investment Options At A Glance...
St. Lucia is not your only option…
Download our Citizenship By Investment Comparison Sheet
to see at a glance which options are right for you…
It could potentially help you save tens — or even hundreds of thousands — of Dollars by picking the best passport for your personal situation at the lowest price.
Inside, you’ll find…
Saint Lucia is an English-and-French-Creole speaking British Commonwealth in the Caribbean, famous for its volcanic mountains (It even has a drive-through volcano!).
It’s located just north of Venezuela in the far Eastern Caribbean, bordering the Atlantic.
Economically speaking, St. Lucia is a midrange island, neither as rich as the Bahamas nor anywhere near as poor as Haiti. It has a laid-back sensibility and is a real pleasure to visit.
But why pick Saint Lucia for your second passport?
The cost of St. Lucia citizenship is currently one of the cheapest among Caribbean citizenship by investment programs, especially for single applicants (i.e., those not applying with a family or other dependents).
A CBI program – also known as an economic citizenship program – allows you to quickly and legally acquire a second passport by making a donation or investment in that country. You basically purchase a passport — and you get it, fast.
Unlike naturalization programs, which require waiting times of several years (plus lots of hurdles to clear), investment citizenship programs can provide citizenship in just a few months.
St. Lucia has one of the newest CBI programs in the Caribbean; they started it in 2016 (In contrast, Saint Kitts, another island nearby, has had their program for decades.)
Before that, Saint Lucia, mostly relied on tourism, agriculture and light manufacturing to provide income for the island…
(The tourism engine is big. American author James Michener once called Marigot Bay, part of St. Lucia, “the most beautiful bay in the Caribbean.” He was not off base.)
The economic citizenship program is indeed new, but the benefit of going with a relatively untested program is that they’ve studied what worked (and what didn’t) in other CBI programs and made theirs more efficient.
Additionally, there’s no massive backlog of applications, so yours won’t likely be bottlenecked.
If you’re single, you’re in luck: Saint Lucia’s citizenship by investment program is one the cheapest options for single applicants.
(The island of Dominica’s program is very similarly priced, but the reputation of Dominica’s program is much worse, and we are not comfortable with it.)
But there are more benefits than just the low price of the passport:
But remember...
St. Lucia is not your only option…
There are many more citizenship by investment programs both in the Caribbean and around the world that might be more suitable for your personal situation.
That’s especially true if you want to get a second citizenship for your entire family. You could literally save tens of thousands of dollars by going with a different program.
That’s why we created a comparison sheet that will give you a birds-eye view of the most important things you need to know about each citizenship-by-investment program…
It could potentially help you save tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars by picking the best passport for your personal situation at the lowest price…
There are four routes to gaining St. Lucia investment citizenship:
St. Lucia is the best option for single applicants going the donation route. And it is also the best option for singles and families purchasing government bonds.
But when it comes to applicants with larger families interested in the donation option, Antigua and Barbuda is still the winner, offering the lowest prices.
Below we explain the four options for buying a second passport in St. Lucia in more detail.
Keep in mind that you’ll also have to pay a commission to a registered agent (a required middleman) who will lodge your citizenship application with the government.
You can choose to work with a world-famous service provider and pay tens of thousands of dollars in fees, or work with a much smaller firm and pay a fraction of that. The end result, however, will generally be the same – second citizenship and a passport.
If you’d like to get the government’s take on things, here’s the official site of St. Lucia ’s citizenship by investment program.
St. Lucia’s donation option is one of the best and cheapest second passport options for a single person right now in the Caribbean.
Unless you’re planning on living in St. Lucia full-time, gaining citizenship through buying property might not make as much sense as just donating to the National Economic Fund.
And again, this option is a much cheaper economic citizenship route:
Instead of buying a property for $200,000, plus $59,500 in government and processing fees (for a single applicant), you just donate $110,550 for a single applicant.
That includes all processing and due diligence fees, but not the local provider fees.
The donation amount for a married couple is $140,000, but your total cost will be around $168,600 inclusive of due diligence costs and service provider fees.
Moreover, as a Total Access (TA) member, you can save up to up to $20,000 if you’re applying as a family of four:
| St Lucia CBI: Donation Option (Inclusive of fees) |
Total Access Member Pricing | Standard Market Rates | Total Access Members Save |
| Single Applicants | $107,550 | $120,550 | $13,000 |
| Married Couples | $150,600 | 168,600 | $18,000 |
| Family of Four | $162,700 | $182,700 | $20,000 |
The major drawback with this option is that you will not get that money back – it really is a donation. But it is still far cheaper than the real estate, business, or bonds route.
Be sure to use our CBI Cost Calculator to determine exactly how much you can save based on your family composition by joining TA.
Since Saint Lucia depends on tourism, it was hit hard by Covid-19 lockdowns and travel restrictions.
That is why for the rest of 2022, Saint Lucia extended its “Covid-19 Relief Bond” Citizenship By Investment option. This limited time offer lapsed on 31 December 2022, and been replaced with a new government bond option. (Details below.)
Under the Covid Relief Bond option, you were able to invest in Covid-19 Relief Bonds to obtain citizenship.
This involved purchasing a bond of at least $250,000 for a term of at least five years — the bond amount and time frame increase for couples, or if you were applying for citizenship for your whole family.
And today, we are happy to report that starting from January 2023, St Lucia introduced the permanent version of the discounted program – the National Action Government Bonds (NAB) program.
Under this program, you are required to invest $300,000 in a bond yielding no interest for five years. In addition, a non-refundable fee of $50,000 applies.
And as an added benefit, you can apply with any number of dependents for the same price. (You will just need to pay the standard per-person due diligence and processing fees.)
For example, for a family of four, the NAB Bond’s total cost would be $368,700 after including all applicable government fees (but not your service provider charges).
And after receiving the initial $300,000 principal back five years later, your final cost would be $68,700 or just $17,175 per passport.
This is an exceptional deal – AND that’s even before you’ve taken our TA discounts into account.
We also cover St Lucia’s NAB bond program in our Interactive CBI Pricing Calculator.
Feel free to review all the applicable price points depending on your family’s size. And if you’re a Total Access member, you’d also qualify for a hefty discount (not reflected above).
However, only consider investing in this option after assessing the country’s ability to pay you back in five years. (We cannot and do not guarantee this.)
St Lucia has not defaulted on its government bonds since its independence from Britain over 40 years ago. And defaulting on the CBI-related investment would severely tarnish the program’s reputation.
But we’re living in uncertain times, where anything is possible.
Remember: If you’re a member of Total Access, our highest-tier membership program, you can obtain an economic citizenship and passport in St Lucia – or any of the four other Caribbean programs – for less than ANYONE else in the world.
The program’s real estate option also got sweeter in 2023 – in the form of a reduced Real Estate investment amount.
Starting from January 1, 2023, the new minimum amount is $200,000 (previously, you had to purchase a property worth at least $300,000).
The administrative fee, which starts at $30,000, remains unchanged though.
Ensure you know what you’re getting into before choosing a Caribbean real-estate investment option for a second passport.
Governments sometimes require you to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an overpriced government-approved property that will likely be difficult to sell at a profit later.
Unlike, say, Antigua, where the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Eric Clapton have bought property, the former British colony of St. Lucia isn’t as star-studded.
You might still find luxury properties with beautiful views and classic mountain-studded coastline, but selling them later might prove problematic.
But again, only consider this option after carefully assessing the practicality of owning overpriced real estate on a far-flung Caribbean island…
To qualify for St. Lucia immigration via real estate, the rules currently require you to invest at least $300,000 in a government-approved real estate project on the island and hold it for a minimum of five years.
Right now, there are only a handful of approved projects, falling into two broad categories: high-end branded hotels and high-end boutique properties.
Five years after you acquire citizenship, you can sell the property and keep your second citizenship.
St. Lucia allows investors to invest money into a local business in exchange for citizenship.
The upside of this option is the potential for profit.
The downside is that it requires a substantial investment — $3.5 million directly into an eligible business as a sole investor; or via a joint investment involving at least two people totaling $6 million or more, with each investing at least $1,000,000 individually.
You also must create three jobs.
Approved categories for businesses include: restaurants; cruise ports and marinas; agro-processing plants (think: bananas); pharmaceutical products; ports, bridges, roads and highways; research institutions and facilities; and offshore universities.
St. Lucia has not approved any projects as of this writing. But even if it did, this route creates tremendous risk, as well as liabilities and taxation issues.
Are you looking for the lowest cost citizenship by investment program?
Then perhaps our highest-end membership, Total Access, could be right for you. This is where I share the best private opportunities I come across, as well as other information that is just too sensitive to put into print.
For example, we help Total Access members, obtain a fantastic second passport from St. Lucia or Antigua at the lowest price you can find anywhere, and save up to $36,000 compared to what other providers are charging.
But, we only offer this service to members of Total Access.
One of the reasons we are able to provide such a big discount is that we don’t earn a single penny from fees, commissions, etc. from these passport programs.
We do this to add serious value to the Total Access membership.
But access to the lowest cost citizenship by investment program is just one of many benefits we offer…
One of the most popular benefits of Total Access is our private investment service. Inside, we present opportunities to invest in early-stage businesses that have explosive potential.
We cover a wide range of fields– such as cannabis, AI, developing markets, etc.
As an example, in 2015 we introduced our members to a small private company, and people were able to invest at 50 cents per share. The company went public in 2019 — and the stock price quickly rose to nearly $10, a return of nearly 20X.
Several of our members have re-invested the profits they made from our private investment deals into our citizenship-by-investment service and have saved tens of thousands of dollars.
If this sounds interesting to you, I encourage you to learn more about Total Access…
Saint Lucia offers a decent quality passport, which ranks 82 on the Sovereign Man Passport Index, and gets a score of B-.
A St. Lucian passport gives you visa-free access to over 120 countries. This includes the UK, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the Schengen Area, which is a 26-member region in Europe that allows for passport-free travel once you’re within its borders.
Other countries in the Caribbean, like St. Kitts or Antigua, — offer visa-free access to eight or nine more countries than Saint Lucia does.
And Antigua is currently the cheapest economic passport option for families, so if those factors are important to you, check out our research on those options as well– here for Antigua Citizenship By Investment and here for St. Kitts Citizenship By Investment.
Does "More Visa-Free Countries" Equal "Better Passport"?
The answer is “it depends”… on which additional countries you get and how likely you are to visit them.
For example, a passport may offer 10 additional countries, but also cost tens of thousands of dollars more. Therefore, we encourage you to think it through carefully and consider whether these additional visa-free countries are worth the cost.
To help you do this, we created a detailed Citizenship By Investment Comparison Sheet that shows you the differences in visa-free travel between all citizenship-by-investment passports.
Use this sheet to ensure you don’t overpay for a passport that doesn’t provide significantly more value.
If you don’t have ancestors from Europe (citizenship by ancestry), or a few years to spare in a new country (citizenship by naturalization)… and if donating six figures won’t make a severe dent in your budget, then you should indeed consider economic citizenship.
It’s fast. It’s permanent. And your children will have it as well. Even children up to 30 could qualify, based on the relaxed requirement for dependents.
St. Lucia’s citizenship program is a solid option. You should especially consider it if you are currently single – St. Lucia is the cheapest donation option in the Caribbean for single applicants, save for Dominica’s less reputable program.
And remember, Antigua and Barbuda has a cheaper option for families.
And as we mentioned earlier, Total Access members, our highest tier service, can get a St. Lucian or Antigua passport cheaper than anyone else in the world.
While the lockdowns and travel restrictions persist, you can apply for a St. Lucia passport from the comfort and safety of your own home.
Having a second passport as part of your Plan B is critical. Just look around your home country right now, and chances are you can see how civil unrest, Covid restrictions, or economic destruction could quickly spiral out of control.
You don’t want to wonder where you will go while you’re packing your bags.
You want to know where you are going, and get in no questions asked, no delays at the airport, no snafus.
Think of a Plan B as a crucial insurance policy… and the passport element one of its cornerstones.
Diversifying makes as much sense in life as it does in investing. That’s why it makes a lot of sense to think about your international options and take action… now (before the rules and/or fees change).
And even if nothing happens and you never “need” your Plan B, you’ve got a second passport from a tropical paradise.
How bad could that be?
Caribbean passport donations from only $100,000.
Contact us now to request a free professional consultation.
