Cyprus grants permanent residency to non-EU nationals who put €300,000 into property. The scheme runs under Regulation 6(2) of the Aliens and Immigration Regulations, and it is one of the few property-linked residency routes left in the EU now that Portugal and Spain have shut theirs. The detail that matters for anyone underwriting Cypriot real estate is narrower than the headline. On the residential route, the €300,000 must buy a new home from a development company. First sale only, VAT on top. A second-hand flat in the same building does not qualify. That one clause walls off an entire category of demand from the resale market and points it at new-build stock.
The channel is not small. Figures presented to the Cypriot parliament in April 2026, reported by IMI Daily, put the count at 7,088 fast-track permits issued to main applicants since 2013, all of them still valid, or roughly 28,660 permits once family members are added, with Chinese and Russian nationals the largest groups. On the market side, PwC Cyprus counted 7,255 properties bought by foreign purchasers in 2025, up 16 per cent on the year and around 28 per cent of everything transacted, from 25 per cent in 2024.
What the rule now requires
The programme was tightened on 2 May 2023. The secured annual income an applicant must show, from sources outside Cyprus, rose from €30,000 to €50,000, with another €15,000 required for a spouse and €10,000 per dependent child, according to a client note from law firm Michael Kyprianou summarising the interior ministry revision. Parents and parents-in-law, who could previously piggyback on a single investment, were removed entirely. Compliance also stopped being a one-off event. Permit holders now file annual evidence that the investment is still held and the income requirement still met, and permits can be revoked when the paperwork stops.
What did not change is the shape of the qualifying investment. The residential option must be a new dwelling, or up to two new dwellings, bought from a developer for a combined €300,000 plus VAT. Resale stock qualifies only under the commercial route, which covers premises such as offices and hotels. A proposal to lift the threshold to €500,000 has been under review in government since late 2025, according to a November client note from Savva and Associates, and has gone nowhere yet. In April 2026 the opposition party AKEL got a bill through the House Interior Committee to move the programme from ministerial circulars onto statutory footing, with the final vote scheduled for 23 April, the same day parliament dissolved for May's elections. IMI Daily's read of the bill: the €300,000 minimum and the €50,000 income floor carry through unchanged.
Where the demand lands
Foreign demand is not evenly spread. Figures the interior ministry gave parliament in September 2025 show foreign buyers behind 44 per cent of property transfers in Paphos during 2024, 34 per cent in Larnaca, 27 per cent in Limassol and under 8 per cent in Nicosia.
The stock they buy is overwhelmingly new and overwhelmingly flats. Landbank Analytics, which tracks sale contracts filed with the Department of Lands and Surveys, counted 7,819 contracts for new homes in 2025, worth more than €2.5 billion, as reported by the Cyprus Mail in February 2026. Apartments made up 6,382 of those contracts, 81.6 per cent of the total. The averages tell you where the visa money sits. New apartments in Limassol averaged above €425,000. Larnaca came in near €200,000 and Nicosia near €190,000. Paphos averaged €320,000 for a new apartment and about €710,000 for a new house, the highest house figure on the island.
Prices have responded in exactly the segment the rule feeds. The Central Bank of Cyprus residential property price index for the fourth quarter of 2025 has apartment prices up 9.6 per cent year on year against 3.4 per cent for houses. Limassol led every district at 9.9 per cent.
The gap between new and second-hand
Put Landbank's two series side by side and the split is hard to miss. In the first half of 2025 the average resale apartment in Limassol changed hands for €261,378. The average new apartment there sold for €372,000 in the first quarter and above €425,000 across the full year. Paphos is starker: €129,774 for the average resale flat against €320,000 for a new one. Call it a 60 per cent gap in Limassol and nearly 150 per cent in Paphos.
Some of that gap is honest quality difference. New stock skews towards seafront towers and higher specification, while the resale sample includes forty-year-old walk-ups in inland suburbs, so the averages are not like-for-like comparables. But a spread this wide is not explained by insulation standards. Part of it is the permit itself, capitalised into the sticker price of the only stock that carries it. Developers know where the threshold sits, and it would be odd if they did not price to it.
The VAT wedge
Tax pushes the tiers further apart. New homes carry VAT at 19 per cent, with a reduced 5 per cent rate that became much harder to reach after Law 42(I)/2023 came into force in June 2023. The reduced rate now covers only the first 130 square metres of a primary residence valued up to €350,000, and it disappears altogether above €475,000. A resale carries no VAT at all, just transfer fees. So a PR buyer paying €300,000 for a qualifying flat is really paying somewhere between €315,000 and €357,000 depending on the rate they secure. They pay it anyway, because the thing being bought is the permit, and the permit does not exist in the resale market.
Volumes make the same point. Landbank's resale tracker logged 1,714 resale transactions across the island in the first half of 2025, worth about €375 million. Its new-build series recorded 7,819 contracts over the year. The windows and counting methods differ, but the imbalance is structural. Since the citizenship-for-investment scheme closed in November 2020, the €300,000 route has been the island's main investment-migration channel, and the construction pipeline is built around the buyer it delivers.
Underwriting the exit
Here is the problem for anyone modelling these assets. The permit does not transfer with the title. The residential route counts first sales only, so the next owner of a PR-qualifying flat cannot use it for residency. The buyer pool at exit is whatever the resale market looks like, which in practice means local households plus the minority of foreign buyers who want the flat rather than the visa. That pool currently pays €261,000 for the average Limassol apartment, not €425,000.
The practical consequence is that entry price plus index growth is the wrong exit model. If the new-build premium in your district is 60 per cent, and some meaningful share of it is visa capitalisation, capital value at exit should be marked to the resale curve from day one, with the premium treated as consumption rather than investment. Rental underwriting is less exposed. A tenant does not care whether a title is first-hand. Capital-growth exits carry the full weight of the gap.
Policy risk runs in both directions. If the threshold moves to €500,000, today's €300,000 to €350,000 product loses its captive buyer and finds its level against resale comparables sooner than owners expect. Schengen pulls the other way. The European Commission judged Cyprus technically ready to join at the end of 2025, in an assessment reported in May 2026, and accession now waits on a political sign-off from member states. Entry would make the permit worth more and probably widen the wedge before it narrows. Neither scenario changes the direction of the advice, only the timing.
This is a market where a single average will mislead you. The useful number is what second-hand apartments in the same district actually achieve, and how wide the spread around that figure runs. Torquity's underwriting works from that end of the evidence, whole-market resale comparables with explicit confidence ranges, rather than developer list prices rolled forward at an index growth rate.
Cyprus has legislated a two-tier housing market into existence. The €300,000 rule is good business for developers and, for now, for the state. For an investor it defines both the price you pay and the very different market you sell into, and only one of those is printed on the contract.