You have married a Georgian citizen, or you are about to, and someone has told you residency is now straightforward. It is, but not in the way most people assume. Marrying a Georgian citizen and marrying a foreign resident here are further apart than any two other routes on this site: one gives you permanent residence on day one, the other a permit that expires when your spouse's does. Here is which is which, and what each asks of you.
Two marriages, two completely different positions
Georgian law has no single marriage route. It has two, and which one you are on is decided by your spouse's status rather than by anything about the marriage itself.
| Married to a Georgian citizen | Married to a foreign resident | |
|---|---|---|
| Status you qualify for | Permanent residence, no waiting period | Temporary family residence permit |
| How long it lasts | Indefinite, no expiry date | Follows your spouse's permit and ends with it |
| Renewal cycle | None | Every cycle, alongside your spouse |
| Work authorisation | Exempt from the Special Labour Permit once permanent residence is granted | Ordinary labour permit rules apply |
| Residence needed to naturalise | Five years | Ten years |
| What ends it | Revocation, in limited circumstances | Divorce, or your spouse's permit lapsing |
One line there is worth reading twice. The spouse of a Georgian citizen qualifies for permanent residence immediately, and immediately means the waiting period is removed rather than the application. You still file, still evidence the marriage, still wait for a decision. What you do not do is spend a decade on temporary permits first.
What the spouse of a Georgian citizen actually gets
Permanent status without the decade. Everyone else arrives at permanent residence the long way: ten years of unbroken temporary residence, or five on the investment route, with a single gap between permits resetting the count to zero rather than pausing it. Marriage to a Georgian citizen removes that mechanism entirely. No clock to protect, no 40-day filing deadline to diary every year, no ten-year evidence trail to reconstruct at the end.
Exemption from the Special Labour Permit. Since 1 March 2026 a Special Labour Permit is needed to take a job with a Georgian employer, to trade as an Individual Entrepreneur with Georgian clients, or to apply for a work or IT residence permit. Permanent residents are one of only two exempt categories, the other being investment permit holders. So a citizen's spouse who takes permanent residence sits outside all three, with no parallel application and no parallel renewal cycle.
The exemption attaches to holding permanent residence, not to being married. Between the wedding and the grant the ordinary rules apply to you like anyone else, so a Georgian job offer landing in that window still needs its own permit.
A five-year path to naturalisation rather than ten. Covered below, with the reason it is a smaller prize than it sounds.
Marrying a foreign resident is the ordinary family route
If your spouse holds a Georgian residence permit rather than Georgian citizenship, none of the above applies. You are applying under family reunification, and the permit is derivative in every sense.
It inherits your spouse's expiry date and renews on their cycle. It falls if their permit falls, which makes their deadline your deadline and is the whole subject of what happens when a sponsor's permit lapses. It carries no work authorisation. And it does nothing to your own ten-year clock: you accrue toward permanent residence as on any other temporary permit, with the same rule that a gap resets you to zero.
Two further tests apply here that do not obviously apply on the citizen-spouse route: the household must have adequate accommodation, and the sponsor must show means capable of supporting the people being sponsored. Both belong to the same sponsorship rules that decide who can sponsor whom.
There is no five-year citizenship shortcut on this route. The shortened residence requirement is written against marriage to a Georgian citizen, and marriage to a foreign national who happens to live in Georgia is not that.
Georgia recognises registered marriage, and nothing else
A marriage counts if it is civilly registered. That is the whole test. Long cohabitation does not qualify. An unregistered partnership does not qualify. A religious ceremony never entered in a civil register does not qualify, even where it is personally the real event. Joint tenancies, shared accounts, a decade of photographs and a child in common evidence a relationship, not a marriage.
Same-sex couples therefore cannot use this route, and the position of same-sex partners under Georgian residence rules is that family reunification is not available to them at all. The workable answer there is for each partner to qualify independently on a work, IT or property basis.
And marrying in Georgia does not itself produce residency. Getting married in Georgia as a foreign national is a civil registration process producing a Georgian marriage certificate. If your new spouse is a foreign national too, that certificate gives you the relationship rather than the status, and one of you still needs a basis to be here.
Getting a foreign marriage certificate accepted
Almost every application here turns on one document issued in another country, and that step decides how long everything takes. Plan it first, not last.
Step one: authenticate the certificate where it was issued. Georgia is a party to the Apostille Convention, so a certificate from another contracting party needs a single apostille from that country's competent authority. Which authority that is differs by country and sometimes by document type, and the current membership list is published in the Hague Conference status table.
Where apostille is unavailable, the chain is longer. A certificate from a country outside the Convention needs full consular legalisation: authentication in the issuing country, then the Georgian diplomatic mission, a two-stage process run through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Iran, Egypt, Nigeria and the United Arab Emirates are the origins this affects most often in our files, and a UAE marriage certificate is the one people most often assume can be apostilled. It cannot.
The reverse mistake is just as expensive. China, Pakistan and Canada are now Apostille Convention parties, so a certificate from any of the three takes the single-step route, and anyone applying pre-2023 knowledge there will start a legalisation chain they do not need.
Step two: certified Georgian translation, after the apostille and not before. The apostille or legalisation stamp is part of the document, so a translation prepared before it arrives is incomplete and gets rejected. What counts as certified translation in Georgia is narrower than applicants expect, and not something to improvise with a bilingual friend.
Allow around six weeks for the chain on a straightforward apostille country and considerably more where consular legalisation is involved, and treat it as the critical path for the whole application. The mechanics of both routes, country by country, sit in the guide to apostille and legalisation for Georgia.
Names must also reconcile. If your passport shows a name your marriage certificate does not, through a name change at marriage or a difference in transliteration, you need the document connecting the two, apostilled and translated on the same chain.
The documents
The core of the file is identity, relationship and address, filed in person at a Public Service Hall.
| Document | Notes |
|---|---|
| Your passport | Valid, with the pages showing your lawful entry |
| Marriage certificate | Apostilled or consular-legalised, then translated and certified |
| Your spouse's status document | Georgian ID or passport for a citizen; residence card for a resident |
| Evidence of your address in Georgia | Ownership, lease, or the owner's consent where you live with family |
| Photograph to specification | Taken to the standard, not cropped from a phone |
We are not going to tell you the citizen-spouse route asks nothing beyond the certificate. The accommodation and means tests that shape ordinary family reunification are clearly documented; what a permanent residence file for a citizen's spouse is tested on is less clearly published, so assemble the same evidence and be pleasantly surprised. The eligible relationships and the grounds for refusing any application are set out in the Law on the Legal Status of Aliens and Stateless Persons, and applications are decided by the Public Service Development Agency.
Your spouse, children and, if you are a citizen or permanent resident, your parents can get permits through their relationship to you.
See what it costs, from $450
The five-year citizenship route, and what it is worth
Naturalisation ordinarily requires ten years of continuous residence plus examinations in Georgian language, history and law. Marriage to a Georgian citizen reduces the residence requirement to five years. The examinations do not go away.
Nor does the part that decides most of these cases. Georgia does not generally permit dual citizenship, and a foreign national naturalising here is ordinarily expected to renounce the nationality they already hold. The only exception is a grant by presidential decree on state-interest grounds, which is real, narrow and not a route anyone can plan around. The full position on dual citizenship in Georgia is worth reading before you build any plan on a Georgian passport.
Put the halves together and the arithmetic for a citizen's spouse is unusual. You already hold permanent residence, from day one, with no renewals and no labour permit. Naturalising adds a passport, the vote, the right to hold office and the right to own agricultural land, and it costs you five years, three examinations and, in the ordinary case, the citizenship you currently hold. For some people that is a good trade and we act for them. For most it is not close, because the marriage has already delivered what they wanted. The mechanics, if you want them, are in the guide to Georgian naturalisation.
Divorce, separation and death of a spouse
A permit resting on a marriage rests on the marriage continuing.
On the family reunification route this is clear cut. Divorce removes the basis for the permit, and losing the underlying basis is both a reason renewal fails and a ground for withdrawing a permit before its expiry date. If a marriage is in difficulty and your right to be here depends on it, establish an independent basis while you still hold lawful status. Work, IT and property routes are all available to someone who currently holds a permit and much harder to arrange from outside the country.
On the citizen-spouse route the position is less settled, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Permanent residence has no expiry date and no renewal at which the marriage is re-tested, which is a real structural difference. But permanent status is revocable in limited circumstances, and the published rules do not squarely address what happens to it where the marriage later ends, by divorce or by the death of the Georgian spouse. Take advice on your own facts rather than assume the answer in either direction.
Children are a separate question with a better answer: a minor child of a Georgian citizen qualifies for permanent residence immediately on the same basis a spouse does, covered in bringing children to Georgia.
What it costs
| Item | Amount |
|---|---|
| Our fee, family reunification | from $450 |
| Government fee, 30-day decision | $115 |
| Government fee, expedited | up to $230 |
| Residence card issuance | $23 |
Apostille or legalisation abroad and certified translation are charged per document on top, and that is where costs stack up here. Permanent residence work we quote after reviewing the file rather than from a price list, so a citizen's spouse should ask rather than assume, and should confirm the current state fee at filing. A comparison against the other routes sits in the breakdown of what a Georgian residence permit costs, and where and how any application is lodged is governed by the procedural rules on granting residence permits.
Key takeaways
- Marriage to a Georgian citizen qualifies you for permanent residence immediately. Marriage to a foreign resident gives you a temporary permit that expires with theirs.
- Immediate means no waiting period, not no application. You still file and still evidence the marriage.
- Permanent residents are exempt from the Special Labour Permit, but the exemption starts when the status is granted, not at the wedding.
- Naturalisation drops from ten years of residence to five for a citizen's spouse, and the renunciation expectation is unchanged.
- Only registered marriage counts. Cohabitation, unregistered partnership and unregistered religious ceremonies do not.
- The certificate needs apostille or consular legalisation and then certified translation, in that order, and that chain sets your timeline.
- Divorce removes the basis for a family reunification permit. Build an independent basis before it becomes urgent.
Frequently asked questions
Does marrying a Georgian citizen give you a residence permit?
It gives you more than that. The spouse of a Georgian citizen qualifies for permanent residence immediately, with no waiting period, rather than a temporary permit that has to be renewed. You still apply and evidence the marriage, but you skip the ten years of continuous temporary residence everyone else needs.
How long do I have to be married to a Georgian citizen before applying?
Georgian law sets no waiting period for permanent residence on this basis, so the qualifying event is the registered marriage itself. The separate five-year figure relates to naturalisation, where marriage to a Georgian citizen reduces the residence requirement from ten years to five.
Can I get a Georgian residence permit by marrying a foreign resident?
Yes, through family reunification, but it is a weaker position. The permit is temporary, follows your spouse's expiry date and falls if their permit falls. It carries no work authorisation and no shortened path to citizenship.
Does Georgia recognise a marriage registered in another country?
Yes, provided it is a civil registration and the certificate arrives through the full chain: apostilled in the issuing country, or consular-legalised where that country sits outside the Apostille Convention, and then translated into Georgian by a certified translator.
Do unmarried partners qualify for a Georgian residence permit?
No. Georgian family reunification recognises registered marriage only, and cohabitation or unregistered partnership does not qualify however thoroughly it is documented. A partner in that position needs an independent basis such as a work, IT or property permit.
Can I work in Georgia on a residence permit through marriage?
It depends on who pays you. Work for clients or an employer abroad needs nothing beyond the permit you hold. A job with a Georgian company, or Individual Entrepreneur trade with Georgian clients, needs a Special Labour Permit, and a family residence permit carries no exemption from it. A citizen's spouse granted permanent residence is exempt, but that exemption begins at the grant, not at the wedding.
How long does a marriage-based residence permit application take in Georgia?
The Georgian decision runs to the standard tracks, 30 days on the ordinary fee and faster on the expedited one. The real timeline is set by the certificate rather than the decision: authenticating and translating a foreign one typically takes around six weeks, and considerably longer where consular legalisation is required.
What happens to my Georgian residence permit if I divorce?
On the family reunification route the permit rests on the marriage, so divorce removes its basis and it cannot be renewed on that ground. Where permanent residence has already been granted as the spouse of a Georgian citizen, the position after a divorce is not squarely settled in the published rules and is worth taking advice on rather than assuming.
Can I become a Georgian citizen through marriage?
Marriage to a Georgian citizen shortens the residence requirement for naturalisation from ten years to five. It does not remove the examinations in Georgian language, history and law, and it does not remove the expectation that you renounce your existing nationality, because Georgia does not generally permit dual citizenship.
Does my child qualify if I marry a Georgian citizen?
A minor child of a Georgian citizen qualifies for permanent residence immediately, on the same basis as a spouse. A minor child of yours from a previous relationship is a different question, handled through family reunification, which brings in the consent requirements that apply where parents are separated.
