$145,000, Itemized: Every Line of a Single-Applicant Vanuatu DSP File, 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.

A single-applicant DSP file costs $145,000, all in. The gap between the headline and the wire is not a hidden fee; it is four more line items that most brochures fold into a phrase like “government fees” and hope you do not ask about. We do not fold anything. Below is every line, who it is paid to, and what it costs in sats at today’s close.

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 advisory fee: a flat 5% of the government contribution, not of the total file, which for a single applicant is $6,500. Five percent of $130,000, not five percent of $145,000, and not a number that moves based on how complicated your source-of-funds documentation turns out to be. Four government offices and one advisory firm, five distinct recipients, quoted by most firms in the industry as a single bundled number you only see after a discovery call.

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), here is what each line costs in sats. The $130,000 government contribution runs roughly 2.161 BTC, about 216.1 million sats. The $6,500 advisory fee runs roughly 0.108 BTC, about 10.8 million sats. The $5,000 VFIU due-diligence fee runs roughly 0.083 BTC, about 8.31 million sats. The $2,500 birth registration and national ID fee runs roughly 0.0416 BTC, about 4.16 million sats. The $1,000 passport enrolment fee runs roughly 0.0166 BTC, about 1.66 million sats. All in, the full $145,000 file runs roughly 2.410 BTC, about 241.0 million sats.

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 $145,000 Does Not Include

Radical transparency cuts against the brochure in one more direction. $145,000 is the file, not the total cost of becoming a Vanuatu citizen. It 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, for the life of the passport. It does not include apostille and certified-translation costs for documents issued outside Vanuatu, which vary by your country of origin and how many documents your specific file requires. Neither cost is large relative to $145,000, but neither is zero, and a number this precise should not quietly absorb the ones sitting next to it. It also does not include third-party wire or card-processing fees if you choose the fiat rail instead of BTC, Lightning, or USDT; those are set by your bank or card network, not by this firm. Budget the ladder, then budget the trip.

Beyond A Single Applicant

The $130,000 government line is the only one that scales, and it scales in a straight, published progression: $150,000 for a couple, $165,000 for a family of three, $180,000 for a family of four, and $15,000 for each dependent beyond that. Layer in the fees that scale per person (birth registration, national ID, and passport enrolment) and the advisory fee (a flat 5% of the government contribution at every tier), and the all-in figures come to $169,500 for a couple, $188,750 for a family of three, and $208,000 for a family of four. Each additional dependent beyond four adds $19,250 to the total: $15,000 in government contribution, $2,500 in registration and enrolment fees, and $750 in advisory. The due-diligence fee is flat at $5,000 regardless of family size; it does not multiply per applicant.

The reason the per-person cost falls is structural, not a discount. The $5,000 VFIU fee is charged once per file, not once per applicant, so a family absorbs it as a fixed cost that gets cheaper per person the more of you there are. The same logic applies loosely to the advisory fee’s marginal $750 per dependent, a fraction of the $6,500 a first applicant carries alone. A family of four’s $208,000 works out to $52,000 per citizen; a single applicant’s $145,000 is $145,000 for one. Neither the government contribution nor the advisory fee is a straight per-head multiplication, and that is worth knowing before you assume a family of four costs four times what one person does.

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 one most Bitcoiners on our slate actually use. This post is scoped to the single-applicant DSP ladder on purpose. Run your own family’s numbers, at a live BTC rate, 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 87 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.

What $145,000 does not buy is 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 paying $145,000 specifically for European access is paying for the wrong passport. None of that is hidden in the price, and all of it should factor into whether $145,000 is the right number for you specifically, not just an affordable one.

How The File Settles

The government contribution, along with the advisory and due-diligence fees, is payable in BTC, Lightning, or USDT once compliance clears, with credit cards and bank transfers accepted as needed. Fees settle through BitSettle, the ecosystem’s Bitcoin and USDT settlement rail; this firm holds no keys and custodies nothing between your wallet and the government’s. The contribution itself moves directly to the Vanuatu government’s account once compliance clears, the same custody boundary that governs every other line on this ladder.

Getting to that point starts with a $500 paid screening call, not a free consultation. If you retain within 90 days, the full $500 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 number in Vanuatu’s own brochure, and it is not a lie: it is the government’s exact, non-refundable donation for a single applicant, correctly quoted. It is also four lines short of what you will actually wire. $145,000 is the number to budget, in USD or in the roughly 241.0 million sats it costs today. That is the entire ladder: no rounding, no bundled quote, no line item that only appears after a discovery call. 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. Five lines, not one.

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.