Costs, Timelines & Due Diligence

The headline government fee is never the whole cost, and the marketed timeline is never quite the real one. Both are set out below. Where a government publishes a schedule, this page uses it; where one genuinely does not — legal fees, agent fees, and several of the due-diligence schedules — the table says so rather than filling the gap with a plausible-looking figure. What a strategy call adds is the all-in number for your own family composition and the sequencing of purchase and application behind it.

Most pricing disputes come from collapsing four separate things into one number. The qualifying investment is the government threshold. Government fees are processing, certificate and passport charges. Due-diligence fees are what the state pays an outside firm to investigate the family, charged per applicant and per dependant aged sixteen and over. Professional fees are the agent and the law firm, which no government publishes because no government sets them.

What costs real money is which route a fee attaches to. St. Kitts & Nevis charges a post-approval government fee of $25,000 for a main applicant, $15,000 for a spouse and $10,000 to $15,000 per dependant — on the real-estate route. The Sustainable Island State Contribution carries none of it. Bolt that schedule onto a contribution file, as plenty of pricing sheets quietly do, and a US$267,500 application inflates to something north of US$327,500.

Family of four throughout: a main applicant, a spouse and two children under sixteen. Composition matters, because due diligence is charged by age rather than by headcount.

Work two rows out. St. Kitts & Nevis on the contribution route is $250,000 plus $17,500 of due diligence — roughly US$267,500, or $274,600 with the biometric line. Dominica is $250,000 plus the fees above, near US$263,500 before certificate, passport, legal and agent charges. Neither includes the law firm, and neither is a quote.

An independent trade-press analysis published in February 2026 ran all five contribution routes all-in for a family of four and found barely $12,500 between them: St. Lucia $258,000, Grenada $258,300, Antigua & Barbuda $260,000, Dominica $267,861, St. Kitts & Nevis $270,544. Use it for the ordering, then ask the relevant citizenship unit for the current schedule in writing, itemised applicant by applicant. That document settles the number; no comparison table does, this one included.

The real-estate side adds a layer agent quotes routinely omit: a separate non-refundable $50,000 government contribution in Grenada for a family of up to four, government fees from $75,000 for a single applicant on Dominica’s property route, and in St. Lucia an Alien Landholding Licence tiered by acreage from roughly $2,500 to about $20,000. What that route buys is on real-estate-backed citizenship; the head-to-head is on donation versus real estate.

Where the two columns diverge, plan around the second. St. Lucia is the clearest case — not a reason to rule the program out, but a reason to sequence properly, and a conversation for the first call rather than after the wire. What moves these windows is application volume and each unit’s adjudication capacity that quarter, which is why a figure lifted from a competitor’s page in 2024 says nothing about a file opened today. The regional picture sits in the ECCIRA explainer.

A refusal now travels. Under the Six Principles agreed with the US Treasury in February 2023 and the memorandum signed by four of the five states on 20 March 2024, with St. Lucia joining that June, the programs share denial information and do not process an applicant refused elsewhere. A sloppy first application is no longer a low-stakes trial run.

This is the single most common cause of delay, and it is rarely about the size of the number. Every program wants a story that can be traced: tax returns, bank and brokerage statements, audited accounts, a signed sale agreement for a business, clear documentation for anything gifted or inherited. What kills a file is a gap — money with no documented origin, a business sale with no agreement behind it, a gift with no paper trail. How far back the trail runs depends on the file rather than a published rule, so anything material is prepared before it is asked for.

Two things to disclose rather than hope about. A structure due-diligence teams are trained to catch, flagged in the joint FATF-OECD report on the misuse of these programs, is a higher-risk individual gifting wealth to a spouse who applies as main applicant while the first rides along as a dependant. And an old visa refusal is a statutory bar in some programs, not a judgment call: an officer forgiving a refusal you disclosed is a very different conversation from that officer finding it three months in — the real reason CBI applications get denied.

For an American family the paperwork is usually the easy part; US statements, returns and closing documents are exactly what these units want. It changes nothing about the tax position. US citizens remain taxed by the United States on worldwide income regardless of a second citizenship, and none of the five programs has a US income tax treaty — which is why the practice treats a Caribbean passport as insurance for US buyers and settles the tax-residency question alongside the application.