Paraguay’s Cédula: What the State Actually Charges, and What It Opens at a Bank

There are two numbers in circulation for Paraguayan residency, and they are not two estimates of the same thing. One is printed on a government fee schedule. The other is the price of a service that stands between you and it.

The round figure that travels with Paraguay is five thousand dollars. The Dirección Nacional de Migraciones publishes its own price for permanent residence, and on 1 September 2026 it was 2,926,925 guaraníes in cash, about 495 dollars. The Policía Nacional publishes a separate price for the cédula that permanent residence entitles you to, and that one is 8,500 guaraníes, about a dollar and a half. Add the residence certificate the cédula application requires and the state’s own line items come to roughly 3,169,579 guaraníes, about 536 dollars, read on the two agencies’ own pages on 1 September 2026.

That is not the whole cost of getting there, and this article does not pretend it is. Apostilles, sworn translations, notarised copies and plane tickets are real and are not on any government tariff. What the tariff settles is a narrower question that gets answered wrongly a lot: how much of the five thousand is the state, and how much is the seller.

What the Paraguayan state publishes as its own price

Migraciones publishes a single page headed “Aplicación de la escala de aranceles según la Ley N° 6984/2022 de Migraciones”, self-dated “Vigente desde el 01/07/2026 – Decreto N°6225/2026 – Resolución DNM N°478/2026”. Fees are expressed in jornales, daily minimum wage units, and the same page publishes the unit it uses: a minimum wage of 3,044,000 guaraníes and a jornal mínimo of 117,077 guaraníes.

Migraciones rows read on migraciones.gov.py/aranceles-migratorios on 1 September 2026; the cédula row is not a Migraciones fee and was read the same day on policianacional.gov.py, where the Departamento de Identificaciones publishes it as “Tarifa: Gs. 8.500.-“ under Resolución N° 717/26 de la Comandancia de la Policía Nacional. Dollar figures are ours, converted at the Banco Central del Paraguay’s floating-market closing sell rate of 5,912.90 guaraníes for 31 August 2026, read on bcp.gov.py on 1 September 2026; they move when the rate moves. The same Migraciones page publishes higher figures for card payment: 2,991,317 by debit and 3,023,514 by credit for the permanent residence line, and it states that cash is accepted only in guaraníes and that card and online payments carry a surcharge from the payment provider. The table reproduces the published schedule and ranks nothing.

The cheapest line on that list is the document you will actually carry. The residency decision costs 25 jornales; the plastic card that proves it costs 8,500 guaraníes, and that gap is the first sign that the price of Paraguayan residency is not really about the card.

The cédula costs 8,500 guaraníes and takes 90 business days

The cédula de identidad for foreign residents is not issued by Migraciones. It is issued by the Departamento de Identificaciones de la Policía Nacional, under Resolución N° 717/26 of the Comandancia de la Policía Nacional, articles 24 and 25. Its published page states two numbers plainly: “Tarifa: Gs. 8.500.-“ and “Tiempo de Entrega: 90 días hábiles.”

Ninety business days is roughly four and a half months of calendar time, and it starts after everything else is finished, because the same page lists what has to exist before you can file for the card. Among the requirements read on 1 September 2026: the original Certificado de Radicación Permanente issued by Migraciones, a notarised copy of the valid Carnet de Admisión Permanente, a notarised copy of your home-country identity document, a notarised copy of the valid Carnet del Registro de Extranjeros issued by the Policía Nacional’s own foreigners’ registry, a birth certificate apostilled under the Hague Convention or legalised, an INTERPOL record, a home-country criminal record covering the last three years of residence, and a certificado de vida y residencia from a Juzgado de Paz or the local police station. Documents not in Spanish must be translated by a sworn translator registered in Paraguay.

One state cost on that path we could not price. The Carnet del Registro de Extranjeros is a required input to the cédula application, and the Policía Nacional’s requirements PDF for it did not download in two attempts on 1 September 2026, returning no response at all. We are not going to publish a figure for it from a third-party page, so the number is missing here and stays missing.

One divergence is worth flagging rather than resolving quietly. A relocation service’s guide states that “first-time issuance for foreign residents is free, and renewals or replacements are Gs. 8.500”. The page we read at the Departamento de Identificaciones is the one headed Cédula de identidad por primera vez a extranjeros con radicación temporal o permanente, and it publishes “Tarifa: Gs. 8.500.-“ on that first-issue procedure. Where a government page and a service provider’s page disagree about the government’s own fee, we print the government page and say the other exists.

What sellers publish next to the same fee

The state’s number only means something next to the other number, so here is the other number. We opened the pricing pages of five services selling standard Paraguayan residency to foreigners and read them on 1 September 2026. Investor routes are excluded here because they buy a different product and are outside what this article measures.

All five pages opened and read on their own domains on 1 September 2026, with the quoted strings taken from the pages themselves. The state figure they are set against is the published sum of the Migraciones permanent residence fee (2,926,925 guaraníes), the Certificado de Radicación (234,154) and the Identificaciones cédula fee (8,500), which is 3,169,579 guaraníes or about 536 dollars at the Banco Central del Paraguay close of 31 August 2026. The multiples are ours and they are not a verdict: the two figures do not buy the same thing, and the difference is set out below. The rows are ordered by published price and carry no ranking. Two of the five name a state fee; three fold it into the package without a number.

The gap is real and it is not the same as a markup. The Migraciones fee buys a decision. The package price buys apostille coordination, sworn translation, notarised copies, the transport between offices that keep their own hours, and someone who goes back when a paper is refused. ParaguayProfis is the clearest case precisely because it does the arithmetic in public: it charges 1,298 euros and states on the same page that about 450 dollars of that is the state’s own fee. Everything above that line is the service, and the service is a real thing that people buy on purpose. What the reader is owed is the ability to see the line at all, and on three of the five pages there is no line to see.

“I have been quoted everything from $1100 all the way up to $5200 (!) and as you say, the main difference between them seems to be in the wrapping, though the cheapest quote at $1100 is from someone who doesn’t speak any english (and I don’t speak spanish).” expat.com Paraguay forum, April 2023, replying to a poster who had written that the offers ran “from about $1000 and up”

One poster in the same forum broke their own bill into its two halves, which is the split this whole section is about:

“I used a proper lawyer, useful for other advice too, and very personable. His firm is moderately priced, TR is 500 USD which includes taking you to all the right placs at the right time – important as there are a number of steps. The government costs, translations, certain notarisations, interpol fingerprinting etc were about 750 USD.” expat.com Paraguay forum, October 2024

Where the five-thousand-dollar number lives now

The figure that follows Paraguay around is not any of the package prices above. It is a bank deposit, and on 1 September 2026 two sellers published flatly contradictory statements about whether it still exists.

Paraguay Residencia answers it in its FAQ: “Do I need to deposit ~$5,000 with the Central Bank of Paraguay to get residency? No. Since October 2022, this is no longer a requirement. You do not need to make any deposit at all, or prove your wealth or income in any way.”

Paraguay Sovereign publishes a page about residency scams, and on it, under a green tick labelled Actual Requirements, it states: “Standard Paraguay residency requires: valid passport, apostilled birth certificate, apostilled police background check, $5,000 refundable bank deposit, and passport photos. That’s it.”

Both pages were read on the same day, and the state’s own current requirements support neither of them in full. The Migraciones requirements document for the change of category, self-dated 1 July 2026, contains no deposit and no minimum sum anywhere in its six pages, set out in the next section: on that document, Paraguay Sovereign’s line does not hold. It does ask for economic solvency in documentary form, so Paraguay Residencia’s “or prove your wealth or income in any way” does not describe the conversion step either.

Two things we could not establish, and they matter enough to name. We did not find a primary Paraguayan text that ever fixed the deposit at five thousand US dollars: the figure appears in English-language expat material, while the first-hand forum accounts that describe paying it name Banco Nacional de Fomento, a state commercial bank, rather than the central bank named in the FAQ above. And we could not open a Migraciones or Gaceta Oficial text showing the moment the deposit was removed. What we can show is what the published rules require today, and today they do not require it.

The half-life of the number explains why this article exists. In December 2023, fourteen months after the date the FAQ above gives for the change, someone in the Paraguay expat forum was still writing this to a newcomer:

“For the cedula, they do require cash deposit of close to $5000 usd or equivalent in guaranies cash deposit to their central BNF bank downtown of which you keep the deposit receipt so that after you get your cedula almost 8 months later, you can show the cedula ID with your deposit slip to withdraw the money you deposited.” expat.com Paraguay forum, December 2023

What the published rules require you to prove, and the number that is not in them

Paraguayan permanent residence is reached through temporary residence rather than directly. The Migraciones page for temporary residence states the sequence in one line: “La residencia temporal será requisito previo al otorgamiento de la Residencia Permanente.” The temporary carnet is valid for up to two years and is renewable for the same period.

The conversion is governed by the requirements document Migraciones publishes for the change of category, self-dated 1 July 2026, which we downloaded and read end to end on 1 September 2026. Its ninth general requirement is the one worth quoting in full, because it is the requirement that people arrive expecting to be a bank deposit:

“Acreditación de solvencia económica mediante documentación idónea, suficiente y comprobable, que evidencie la generación efectiva de ingresos o la disponibilidad real de recursos económicos, conforme a las categorías y criterios establecidos en el Anexo.” Dirección Nacional de Migraciones, published requirements for the change of category from temporary to permanent residence, requirement 9, read 1 September 2026

That annex, headed “Anexo – Categorías de acreditación de solvencia económica”, sorts applicants into twelve named categories and tells each one which documents it accepts: Profesionales, Técnicos, Empleados, Trabajadores Independientes (comercio y servicios), Trabajadores a distancia o nómadas digitales, Propietarios de bienes inmuebles, Accionistas o socios, Agricultores y ganaderos, Religiosos, Jubilados o pensionados, Dependientes and Estudiantes. Remote workers have their own category, named in those words.

Across all six pages of that document there is no minimum sum, in any currency, and no bank deposit. We searched the extracted text for dollars, for guaraní amounts, for the phrase salario mínimo and for the word banco: the only monetary figures in the file are the fees themselves, the only occurrence of depósito is in the list of ways a dependant can show that someone transfers money to them, and the only occurrence of monto is the instruction that a pensioner’s certificate must state the amount received and the financial channel it arrives through. Solvency is a documentary test, not a threshold.

The document also sets out what does not count on its own. Two footnotes say so directly: “La sola posesión del título de profesional no constituirá prueba suficiente de solvencia económica”, and, for students, “La sola condición de estudiante no constituirá por sí misma prueba suficiente de solvencia económica”. Property owners are told their title must have been registered for at least two years, and that the authority may ask for further evidence that the property produces income.

Two more lines from the same document belong in any honest reading of it. “La admisión de los documentos en las mesas de entrada de documentación de la Institución no presupone el otorgamiento de la residencia solicitada”: filing is not approval. And “La Dirección Nacional de Migraciones podrá requerir cualquier otro documento adicional que considere necesario, dependiendo de cada caso en particular”: the published list is a floor, not a ceiling.

The timing rule that costs money if you miss it

The same document sets a window rather than a deadline. The change of category must be filed within the three months before the temporary carnet expires. If the carnet has already expired you have one further month, and you pay the overstay fine of 702,462 guaraníes. After that month the change of category is off the table and only an extension of temporary residence remains, available up to six months past expiry, again with the fine. That is a state cost that is entirely avoidable and entirely calendar-driven.

How much time you have to spend in Paraguay, to get it and to keep it

These are two different questions with two different answers, and the confusion between them is where most of the bad advice lives.

To get it, you have to be there. The Migraciones requirements document states it in one sentence: “El trámite es personal y presencial.” The temporary residence application that precedes it requires proof of your entry into the country, either the stamped migration slip or the entry stamp in the passport, so the file itself contains evidence that you turned up. The cédula adds its own appearance: the Policía Nacional takes fingerprints, a photograph and a signature in person, and then the 90 business days begin.

That is two separate appearances, and people who have been through it describe it the same way:

“You DO need to visit to apply for temporary residence, and then come back once again to apply for the cedula. […] Temporary residence cannot be requested by someone else through a PoA, the applicant needs to apply in person.” expat.com Paraguay forum, February 2024, poster self-identified as an immigration attorney

An anonymous poster does not prove a rule. This one matches the rule, which Migraciones publishes in the sentence quoted above.

To keep it, the published rule is not a days-per-year count at all. Ley N° 6984/2022 de Migraciones, in the PDF published on the Migraciones site and read on 1 September 2026, sets the test in Article 54, headed Pérdida de la Residencia Permanente por ausencia injustificada:

“Los admitidos con Residencia Permanente perderán esta calidad si se ausentaren del territorio nacional por más de 3 (tres) años sin justificar su ausencia ante la Dirección Nacional de Migraciones.” Ley N° 6984/2022 de Migraciones, Article 54, read on the Migraciones site 1 September 2026

Article 55, which lists the grounds on which residence can be cancelled, repeats the same period from the other direction: unjustified absence from the country for more than three consecutive years for a permanent resident, or more than one year for a temporary resident. The article also allows the period to be extended by resolution of Migraciones, and the law provides that someone who lost the status this way can recover it by proving again that they meet the legal requirements.

So the maintenance obligation, as published, is an absence limit rather than a presence quota. The permanent carnet itself is described as definitivo, renewable every ten years at 468,308 guaraníes, and the cédula it gives access to is issued with a ten-year validity.

A caveat about the source, not about the rule

The Ley 6984/2022 PDF hosted by Migraciones renders with alternating corrupted lines when its text is extracted, so parts of Articles 54 and 55 are unreadable in that file. The sentences quoted above are intact in it, and the three-year period appears twice, in two separate articles. Where a line was unreadable we have not guessed at it.

Whether a lawyer is a legal obligation or a convenience

On the document that would impose it, it is not an obligation. The Migraciones requirements sheet for the change of category answers the question in the sentence immediately after the one about being there in person:

“El trámite es personal y presencial. El seguimiento del proceso puede realizarse de manera personal o a través de un representante legal.” Dirección Nacional de Migraciones, published requirements for the change of category, general observations, read 1 September 2026

Read plainly: filing is something you do yourself and in person, and a legal representative is an option for following the file afterwards, not a condition of opening it. The Policía Nacional’s cédula rules point the same way from a different angle. Their article 37 on collecting the finished card lets a third party collect it with the original receipt and a notarised power of attorney, and it names lawyers and registered procuradores among the people who may do so. A lawyer appears in these documents as one permitted channel, never as a gate.

That is a finding about what the rules require, and it is not an argument that hiring someone is wasted money. The file is in Spanish, the certificates come from several institutions that keep their own hours, and the requirement list ends with the line about additional documents at the authority’s discretion. Paying someone to absorb that is a legitimate purchase. It is a purchase, though, and the documents are clear that it is not a legal condition.

What the cédula actually opens at a bank counter

This is where the document stops being an immigration story. Paraguayan banks publish their own account-opening requirements, and read side by side they agree on one thing and split on another. They agree that the Paraguayan cédula is the entry document. They disagree on whether the cédula alone is enough.

All read on 1 September 2026 on the banks’ own domains and help centres, and the rows carry no ranking. The 1,544-dollar figure is ours: Itaú publishes the ceiling as three minimum wages, and the current legal minimum wage of 3,044,000 guaraníes is published by Migraciones on its own fee page, converted at the Banco Central del Paraguay close of 31 August 2026. Banco Continental is absent from this table because we could not read its published requirements: its help centre lists articles titled “¿Cuáles son los requisitos para abrir una Caja de Ahorro?” and “¿Quiénes pueden acceder a una Caja de Ahorro?”, but the article bodies did not render without JavaScript on three URLs we opened, and a list of article titles is not a requirements page.

So the cédula opens an account on the day it exists, and it opens the smaller one. At ueno bank the savings account asks for the card and an age; at Itaú the equivalent account asks for the card and a selfie, and then caps what can move through it at three minimum wages a month. Neither bank asks a foreigner for anything the cédula does not already prove.

People who have done it describe the same two tiers from the other side of the counter. The most recent account we found, from July 2025, states the split in two sentences:

“For the basic account, you will be fine with just the cedula; they don’t require any additional documentation. If you need a complete account with international transfers and a dollar account, it is a different story. Not impossible, but very few know how to swim in these rivers.” expat.com Paraguay forum, July 2025

And a poster who had the card and the account, and still could not use it for the thing they needed it for:

“I do have a bank account, but it is a so called BASIC / DIGITAL account without being able to send or receive money internationally like my pension.” expat.com Paraguay forum, June 2024

The ceiling is lifted by documents you can only generate locally

Look at what the three banks ask for when the account gets bigger, and the same three documents come back in every list: an IPS receipt, a payslip or work certificate, or VAT filings. Those are records of economic activity registered inside Paraguay. A resident whose income arrives from clients abroad, into an account abroad, has residency and a cédula and none of the three.

That is the structural point, and it survives every fee change on this page: Paraguayan residency buys you identity, not banking capacity. The identity is genuinely cheap and genuinely fast to use once the card is in your hand. The capacity is priced separately, in a currency the cédula does not hold. If you have ever watched an account work perfectly until the moment a monthly ceiling arrived, the mechanism will be familiar; we took it apart in why an account suddenly caps a transfer and what actually lifts the cap, and the logic there is the same one operating here.

The other document that recurs is an address. Itaú’s savings route asks for a utility bill showing a home address, and notes that it does not have to be in your name; the cédula file itself required a certificado de vida y residencia from a Juzgado de Paz or the local police station. For anyone whose life does not produce a tidy utility bill in the right country, what actually works when you have no fixed address covers the evidence that tends to be accepted and the kind that gets a file sent back.

The order the documents come in

• ✓

  Enter Paraguay and keep the entry evidence: the stamped migration slip or the passport entry stamp is a named requirement of the temporary residence file.

• ✓

  Get home-country documents apostilled before you travel, not after. Birth certificate and criminal record are needed in original form, and translation into Spanish must be done by a sworn translator registered in Paraguay.

• ✓

  File temporary residence first. It is the legal precondition for permanent residence, and it carries the same 25-jornal fee.

• ✓

  Pick your solvency category from the twelve in the annex before you assemble evidence, because each category has its own accepted document list and the wrong evidence for the right category is still the wrong evidence.

• ✓

  Diarise the conversion window: the three months before the temporary carnet expires. Missing it costs 702,462 guaraníes and, after one month, the option itself.

• ✓

  Order the Certificado de Radicación (234,154 guaraníes) and the Registro de Extranjeros carnet, then file for the cédula and plan around 90 business days before the card is in your hand.

• ✓

  Open the account the cédula alone opens, then treat the ceiling as the real question and find out what your bank counts as proof of income before you need the headroom.

If the destination here is an account rather than a passport stamp, the comparison worth doing next is between the providers that hold money for people who move: our ranking of the accounts that hold up best for people living outside their home country is ordered by reliability rather than by fee, which is the axis that matters once a local card has solved the identity half of the problem.

FAQ

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Written by Daniel Hart, who covers neobanks, account freezes and cross-border banking for neobankfit. Based on documents read on 1 September 2026: the Dirección Nacional de Migraciones fee schedule dated “Vigente desde el 01/07/2026” under Decreto N°6225/2026 and Resolución DNM N°478/2026; the Migraciones requirements document for the change of category from temporary to permanent residence, self-dated 1 July 2026, read in full including its annex of solvency categories; the Migraciones page for temporary residence under Ley 6984/2022; the PDF of Ley N° 6984/2022 de Migraciones published on the Migraciones site, Articles 54 and 55; the Departamento de Identificaciones de la Policía Nacional pages on first issue of a cédula to foreign residents and on Resolución N° 717/26; the Banco Central del Paraguay floating-market close for 31 August 2026; the published account-opening requirements of ueno bank, Itaú Paraguay and Sudameris Bank; and the public pricing pages of Paraguay Residencia, ParaguayProfis, Move Paraguay, Paraguay Sovereign and Paraguay Pathways. First-hand accounts are from the expat.com Paraguay forum, collected on 1 September 2026 and dated individually. The Policía Nacional’s requirements PDF for the Registro de Extranjeros carnet did not respond in two attempts, Banco Continental’s help-centre article bodies did not render, and no primary text setting the former deposit at five thousand US dollars was found; the article says so where it matters.

This article is general information, not legal or financial advice. Rules, fees and thresholds change and depend on your nationality, residence, account and provider. For your situation, check current terms and consider a qualified adviser.