Vanuatu’s $130,000 Government Contribution: Every Separate Fee Line, in USD and sats

Ask most citizenship-by-investment (CBI) firms what their program costs, and you get one number, printed in bold, on a landing page. Vanuatu’s Development Support Program (DSP) quotes $130,000. That number is real, it is public, and it is exactly what the government asks a single applicant to contribute. It is also not what you will actually wire.

Correction, 10 August 2026: the program headline is the $130,000 single-applicant government contribution. This article previously combined separate professional, diligence, registration, and passport lines into one program-price claim. That framing was wrong. The separate lines remain useful, so the article and URL are preserved; below is what each line represented at the original publication-date Bitcoin price.

Most firms in this market charge 15% to 25% of the total file for advisory work, folded into one number that rarely survives a second question. This firm charges a flat 5% of the government contribution alone, and the other four lines are printed next to it rather than absorbed into a vague “government fees” catch-all. That is the whole point of itemizing: not a marketing claim, a schedule you can check.

Five lines, four recipients, one advisory fee. That is the whole file, not a marketing summary of it.

The Five Lines, In Full

Start with the number everyone already knows. The Vanuatu government asks a single applicant for a $130,000 non-refundable donation under the DSP, paid directly to the government through the Vanuatu Citizenship Commission (VCC), the body that administers the program. That line alone is 90% of the total, and it is the only one that scales with family size. The figure has held since the program launched in January 2017 under Government Order No. 215 of 2016; we have covered where that money actually lands once the government has it, from the National Development Fund to what the IMF’s 2025 Article IV Consultation found about the country’s reliance on this exact revenue line. This post stays on the ladder itself.

The Vanuatu Financial Intelligence Unit (VFIU) charges $5,000 for due diligence and background screening: the work that runs your source of funds, your background, and your name against international watchlists before the government will touch your contribution. The full screening architecture, including the police and Immigration checks that run alongside the VFIU, is broken down separately; here, it is simply the line item and its price.

Civil registration costs $2,500: birth registration and a national ID, the paperwork that makes the citizenship real before a passport exists to carry it. Passport enrolment is a separate $1,000, paid to the passport office once the earlier steps clear.

The only line that goes to this firm is the 21 CBI professional fee: a flat 5% of the government contribution, which for a single applicant is $6,500. Five percent of $130,000, not five percent of a bundled file estimate, and not a number that moves based on how complicated your source-of-funds documentation turns out to be. The government contribution, FIU diligence, professional work, registration, and passport issuance are distinct lines and should be quoted that way.

The Same Ladder In Sats

Bitcoin-denominated math should never be a synonym for imprecision. At the close on June 30, 2026 (CoinGecko: $60,160 per BTC), the $130,000 government contribution was roughly 2.161 BTC, about 216.1 million sats. The $6,500 professional fee was roughly 0.108 BTC, about 10.8 million sats. The $5,000 FIU diligence fee was roughly 0.083 BTC, about 8.31 million sats. Registration and passport figures in this historical example were separate lines, not part of the government-contribution headline. These BTC equivalents belong to the publication date and are not current quotes.

None of this is a quote you get after a call. It is the published schedule, converted at a published rate, and you can run your own numbers against a live price on the Vanuatu cost page before you talk to anyone. BTC/USD moves daily; a static sats figure in a late-June blog post is not what the file costs in August, and we would rather you check than trust a number that is already stale by the time you read it.

What The Published Lines Do Not Include

Radical transparency cuts against the brochure in one more direction. A government-contribution headline does not include travel to one of the four cities where biometric enrollment happens, Port Vila, Dubai, Hong Kong, or Nouméa, a trip that is mandatory exactly once. It does not include apostille and certified-translation costs, which vary by country of origin and document count. It also does not include third-party wire or card-processing costs. These are applicant-specific, so they belong in a live itemized quote, not a universal bundled number.

Beyond A Single Applicant

The government contribution scales in a published progression: $150,000 for a married couple, $165,000 for a couple with one child, $180,000 for a couple with two children, and $10,000 for each additional applicant. The professional fee is calculated separately at 5% of the government contribution. The $5,000 FIU diligence fee applies per application, while registration, passport, biometric, and other applicant-specific charges are quoted separately.

The reason the per-person contribution can fall is structural, not a discount. The $5,000 FIU fee is charged once per application, not once per applicant. The professional fee follows the government contribution at 5%, while applicant-specific registration, passport, and biometric costs still scale with the people on the file. Compare each line; do not reduce the family schedule to one universal all-in number.

Vanuatu also runs a second pathway, the Capital Investment Immigration Plan (CIIP): a $110,000 donation paired with a $50,000 investment in the Cocoa Sustainable Fund, redeemable after a four-year hold, a different structure with its own math entirely. We have compared the two pathways separately; this post is the DSP donation route specifically, the route most Bitcoiners evaluating Vanuatu use. Run your own family’s numbers on the Vanuatu cost page.

What The Price Buys, And What It Does Not

A number this specific deserves an equally specific account of what it buys. Vanuatu levies zero personal income tax, zero capital gains tax, and zero inheritance tax on individuals. It does levy a 15% value-added tax (VAT) on most goods and services purchased locally, along with import and customs duties on goods brought into the country, so “zero tax” is not the same claim as “tax-free.” Conflating the two is exactly the kind of imprecision this post has tried to avoid on every line above; the same discipline applies to tax categories as to fee categories. Vanuatu also participates in the Common Reporting Standard (CRS), the OECD framework for automatic exchange of financial account information between participating jurisdictions, so this is not a privacy play; it is a tax-structure play, and the two are not the same thing. The passport itself is a 10-year travel document reaching roughly 86 destinations visa-free, weighted toward Asia-Pacific.

That zero-direct-tax status is a citizenship attribute, not a residency requirement: it applies to a Vanuatu citizen regardless of where they actually live, the same way the DSP itself carries no minimum-stay obligation once the passport is issued. We have covered that non-resident model in full separately, including the one in-person biometric visit the program does still require.

The $130,000 government contribution does not buy Europe. Schengen access was permanently revoked on December 12, 2024, and the United Kingdom has required a Standard Visitor visa from Vanuatu passport holders since July 2023. We have written the honest post-revocation mobility map separately. The short version is that buying this passport specifically for European access means choosing the wrong passport.

How The File Settles

The Vanuatu file, including the government contribution, professional fee, and due-diligence line, can settle through BitSettle in BTC, Lightning, or USDT once compliance clears; credit cards and bank transfers are also accepted as needed. BitSettle processes the payment rail, then cbi.vu completes the required statutory payments to the Vanuatu authorities. 21 CBI does not hold client wallet keys, and each government, professional, diligence, registration, passport, and applicant-specific charge remains separately identified on the file.

Getting to that point starts with a paid screening call: $500 standard, or 5% less when settled via BitSettle ($475; BTC, Lightning, or USDT), not a free consultation. If you retain within 90 days, the amount actually paid credits toward the $6,500 advisory fee, so the only money that never counts toward anything is money spent finding out this specific program is not the right fit. What the 5% advisory fee actually includes, compliance review, source-of-funds construction, filing, and liaison, not a wire transfer with a markup on top, is broken down in full in Five Percent, Flat.

The Number To Actually Budget

$130,000 is the Vanuatu government’s exact, non-refundable single-applicant contribution. It is not an all-in quote. The $6,500 professional fee, $5,000 FIU diligence fee, and registration, passport, biometric, and applicant-specific costs sit beside it as separate lines. The single-program deep dive, including a live calculator, lives at our dedicated vertical, cbi.vu. If mobility rather than cost is the variable you are weighing next, the Bitcoin Passport Index ranks Vanuatu against every other jurisdiction we track, independent of what 21 CBI actually advises on. Begin Your Sovereignty. Every line, not one bundle.

Figures are current as of the sources cited and change as Vanuatu’s government, Henley Partners, and CoinGecko publish new data. This is general information, not legal, tax, or investment advice for your situation. Consult a qualified advisor regarding your specific circumstances.