Kenya

Visa speed

The 14-day norm in the law applies only to the final stage of issuing a work permit: under s. 40(6) of the Kenya Citizenship and Immigration Act, 2011 (No. 12 of 2011), the Director must issue the permit within 14 days of receiving the Permits Determination Committee's recommendation. The time the Committee itself takes, including the initial review of the application, is not limited by law. A Special Pass is issued for up to 6 months — that is its period of validity, not a processing time. No official processing norm could be found for permanent residence, citizenship, or a Dependant's Pass; the Our Service Charter page on immigration.go.ke opens empty.

Changing employer

Class D (“Employment”) is issued for a specific employer and a specific occupation: the permit is cancelled if the holder has not taken up the stated occupation within 90 days, has ceased it, or is engaged in any other paid or unpaid activity besides that stated in the permit (s. 41(1)(a-c) of the Act) — a change of employer requires a new permit. Class K (“Ordinary residents”) expressly prohibits the holder from taking any paid or unpaid work without a permit of the relevant class. Class M (“Refugees”) is the exception: the holder is permitted to engage in any occupation, trade, business, or profession without being tied to a single employer (s. 41(2) of the Act).

Visa types: Class A: Prospecting and mining — exploring for deposits or extracting minerals in Kenya, alone or in partnership; requires the necessary prospecting/mining licence, sufficient capital freely at the applicant's disposal, and a benefit of the activity to Kenya · Class B: Agriculture and animal husbandry — engaging in farming or animal husbandry, alone or in partnership; requires rights to land of sufficient size and designation, capital freely at the applicant's disposal, and a benefit to Kenya · Class C: Prescribed profession — practising a prescribed profession (the list is in the Eighth Schedule to the Regulations), alone or in partnership; requires the prescribed qualification, capital, registration with a professional body in the applicant's own country, and a benefit to Kenya · Class D: Employment — specific work with a specific employer (including the Government of Kenya or an approved UN/other agency technical assistance programme); the holder possesses qualifications or skills not available in Kenya; the permit is tied to the employer and occupation stated in the application · Class F: Specific manufacturing — a specific manufacturing activity, alone or in partnership; requires a licence/registration, capital freely at the applicant's disposal, and a benefit to Kenya · Class G: Specific trade, business or consultancy — a specific trade, business, or consultancy activity (other than a prescribed profession), alone or in partnership; the same requirements for a licence, capital, and a benefit to Kenya · Class I: Approved religious or charitable activities — a member of a registered religious society working as a missionary, or a member of a company limited by guarantee, or a member of a registered trust approved by the Government of Kenya · Class K: Ordinary residents — a person aged 35 or over with a guaranteed annual income of at least $24,000 (or the equivalent in shillings, r. 19(4) of the Regulations) from sources unconnected with any of the activities covered by the other permit classes; the holder undertakes not to take paid or unpaid work without a permit of the relevant class · Class M: Refugees — a person granted refugee status in Kenya under Kenya's refugee law, and the spouse of such a refugee, wishing to take up employment or engage in a specific occupation, trade, or profession; holders of Class M and their children do not need permits and passes under ss. 34-36 of the Act (s. 41(2)) · Class N: Digital Nomad (introduced by amendment L.N. 155/2024, s. 2, in force since 2024) — a person offered remote work by a company based outside Kenya, or a freelancer working remotely for such a company from Kenya; requires a valid passport, proof of remote work, a guaranteed annual income of at least $55,000 from sources outside Kenya, proof of an accommodation arrangement in Kenya, and a certificate of no criminal record from the country of permanent residence; the holder undertakes not to work for an employer/company based in Kenya · Special Pass (r. 33 of the Regulations) — up to 6 months: for appealing a permit refusal, filing an application for a permit or pass, temporarily conducting business, trade, or a profession, or another purpose at the discretion of the immigration officer · Class P: Staff of international organizations (from the eFNS portal information pack; absent from the Seventh Schedule to the 2012 Regulations) — staff of the United Nations, of diplomatic missions and of intergovernmental and international non-governmental organisations accredited to neighbouring hardship countries, and staff of such organisations working there · Class Q: Professionals in religious or charitable organizations (from the eFNS portal information pack) — a member of a prescribed profession employed by a religious or charitable organisation who is NOT engaged in preaching or in the conduct of religious rites; this is what separates class Q from class I · Class R: East African Community nationals (from the eFNS portal information pack) — a citizen of a member state of the East African Community who is not a prohibited immigrant and intends to reside, work, conduct business, trade or practise a prescribed profession; the portal calls both fees zero

**Collected on 07.09.2026 from two state sources at once.** The Directorate of Immigration Services' own site (`immigration.go.ke`), silent for a month and a half, is open again and turned out to be fuller than the application portal: nine permit classes, three passes and all four categories of permanent residence have pages of their own there with the list of requirements and — above all — with the price, which the application portal does not carry. The eFNS application portal (`fns.immigration.go.ke/infopack/`) remains the only source on classes N, P, Q, R and on the exemption from a permit: the department's site has no pages for these routes. There are now 24 grounds against the former 21. **How completeness was measured.** By three lists of the state itself. The Seventh Schedule to the Kenya Citizenship and Immigration Regulations, 2012 as in force on 30.05.2025 knows ten permit classes — A, B, C, D, F, G, I, K, M and N, the last one written in by Legal Notice 155 of 2024. The application portal's guide describes thirteen, adding P, Q and R, which the Schedule does not have, plus the exemption under s. 34(3)(g) of the Act. The Ninth Schedule to the same Regulations — the tariff under rule 59 — lists eighteen items, and among them eight passes: dependant, visitor's, student's, research & interns, transit, for a prohibited immigrant, special and re-entry. Article 37 of the 2011 Act names six grounds of permanent residence, while the department runs four categories. The discrepancies are not smoothed over: every ground is recorded with a note of where it was taken from. **The department takes money other than what stands in its own Regulations, and the discrepancy is a multiple.** The Ninth Schedule in the version in force (the last amendment, Legal Notice 93 of 2025 of 30.05.2025, does not touch the tariff) sets 10,000 shillings for processing and, for issue, 250,000 a year for class A, 200,000 for class D, 100,000 each for classes B, C, F, G and K, and 1,000 and 5,000 for class I. The Directorate's site, the application portal's guide and the 2025 service charter print something else: processing 20,000, issue 500,000 for classes A and D, 250,000 for classes B, C, F, G and K, and 5,000 and 50,000 for class I. There is no legal instrument by which the tariff was raised: the consolidation of the Regulations on `new.kenyalaw.org` is declared to be the latest version and contains no such rates. The figures of the departmental pages are the ones put into the fields — they are what the bill is made out by at the time of applying — and the rates of the Ninth Schedule are named here and nowhere else. **Three state sources diverge in four more places.** Class I: the department's page — 5,000 for processing and 50,000 a year for issue; the 2025 service charter — 20,000 for issue; the application portal — processing «Gratis» and issue 20,000. The interns' and researchers' pass: the department's page — 15,000 shillings a year, the charter — 10,000. The re-entry pass: the department's page and the application portal — 1,000 shillings for a year or part of it, the charter — 5,000. The alien card: the department's page — 1,000 shillings a year, the charter — 5,000. Wherever the route's page and the charter diverge, the field carries the figure of the route's page. **The processing times are taken from the 2025 service charter** — `https://immigration.go.ke/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/DIRECTORATE-OF-IMMIGRATION-SERVICE-DELIVERY-CHARTER-2025.pdf` — and it is the only place where they are published: the pages of the routes themselves say nothing about the time. The charter prints working days: 21 working days to issue a permit and 10 working days to renew it, 7 for a special pass, 15 each for a student pass, an intern's pass and a dependant pass, 1 day for a re-entry pass and for an endorsement, 6 weeks for the registration of an alien and 24 months for permanent residence. The project's time field is in calendar days, so the working ones have been converted by the common coefficient and the original values are named here. Beyond that, article 40(6) of the Act obliges the director to issue the permit within fourteen days of the moment the permits determination committee has made its recommendation — that is the term of the last step, not of the whole examination, and it has not been put into the field. **Citizens of the East African Community member states are issued permits and passes free of charge** — the line «East Africa Community Member States – Gratis» stands on the page of every class and every pass. None of those pages gives a list of the states; the nearest official list is the Seventeenth Schedule to the Regulations as amended by Legal Notice 93 of 2025, where the partners named are Burundi, the DR Congo, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda (Somalia, admitted to the community in 2024, is not among them). That list was drawn up for the exemption from the electronic travel authorisation, not for permits, so it has not been carried into the citizenship field of any ground. **Exemption from a permit: the department's page is corrupted.** On `immigration.go.ke/exemption/`, under the heading «Exemption» and the list of documents, come the rates of other routes — 200 dollars a month (a special pass) and 100 dollars a year (a student pass) — followed by a fragment of the requirements for a student pass. No figures have been taken from that page; the exemption is described from the application portal's guide and from s. 34(3) of the Act. **Part of the requirements is kept by the department in commented-out markup.** On the pages of the application portal's guide almost every permit ends with the items «Copy of the Police Clearance Certificate» and «NDLEA Clearance Certificate (For Nigeria nationality only)», and both are closed inside an HTML comment, that is, are not shown in a browser. They have not been entered into the lists of documents. For the same reason the former wording of class I about a «member of a company limited by guarantee» and a «member of a registered trust» has been removed: on the portal's page those two variants are commented out as well, although the Seventh Schedule to the Regulations does have them. **What did not go into the guide.** The alien card is not a ground of stay but a duty: the department's page says that every foreigner living in Kenya longer than 90 days must register, and charges 1,000 shillings a year or part of it for it; rule 44 of the 2012 Regulations extends the duty to all foreigners aged eighteen and over and exempts service members, public officers with their families, those exempted under s. 34(3) of the Act, registered refugees and those staying in the country no longer than three months on a visitor's pass. Also not recorded are the extension of a visitor's pass (no longer than six months in all, 50 US dollars), the interstate pass for travel to Uganda and Rwanda (free of charge), the endorsement in the passport (free of charge) and the temporary pass for Kenyans. Citizenship was again not examined in this wave: the application portal has a separate section `infopack/citizenship/` with twelve routes, and those are not visa grounds. **About the sources themselves.** The Directorate's site is WordPress; `wp-json` answers with a five-hundred error, but the sitemap is open and lists 120 pages. The class A page lies at `/passes-and-work-permits/`, which does not follow from its name. On two departmental pages (`/exemption/` and `/re-entry-pass-processing-and-endorsement/`) the theme's advertising placeholder is still in the footer — «50% off for lorem ipsum dolor sit amet» — even though the domain honestly answers an invented path with a four-hundred error. The legal database `new.kenyalaw.org` opens from abroad only over IPv4: both curl and fetch hang until the timeout without a forced `-4`.

Permanent residence after

7 years

Citizenship after

7 years

Language

Swahili or a local dialect — for naturalisation by permanent residence (s. 13(1)(e) of the Citizenship and Immigration Act No. 12/2011). For registration by marriage (s. 11), no separate language requirement is specified.

Dual citizenship

allowed

Absence limits: Permanent residence is lost after 2 consecutive years of continuous residence outside Kenya, except for people who were previously citizens of Kenya by birth (s. 39(j) of the Kenya Citizenship and Immigration Act, 2011).

Permanent residence — five grounds under s. 37 of the Kenya Citizenship and Immigration Act, 2011 (No. 12 of 2011), each also extending to the applicant's spouse, children, and dependants: (a) people who were citizens of Kenya by birth but lost that citizenship and are not entitled to dual citizenship under the laws of their new country of domicile — with no statutory residence period; (b) the general case, reflected in prYears — holders of work permits for at least 7 years, the last 3 of which before the application must be continuous residence in Kenya; (c)/(ca) children or dependants of citizens, born abroad and having acquired the citizenship of their domicile, or children of registered citizens born before their parents acquired citizenship — with no separate period; (d) spouses of a Kenyan citizen married for 3 years or more; (e) widows and widowers of Kenyan citizens — with no separate period. Citizenship (naturalisation) — under art. 15 of the 2010 Constitution of Kenya, detailed in ss. 11 and 13 of the Act: people married to a Kenyan citizen for 7 years or more and holding resident status are registered as citizens (s. 11), provided the marriage is contracted under a system of law recognised in Kenya, is not for the purpose of obtaining immigration status, and is subsisting at the time of application; the widow/widower of a citizen keeps the same 7-year count after the spouse's death, provided they do not remarry a non-citizen before the period expires (s. 12). Separately, people who have lawfully and continuously resided in Kenya for at least 7 years, the last 12 months before applying continuously, who are proficient in Swahili or a local dialect and capable of making a substantial contribution to the country's development (s. 13). A special case applies to people of Kenyan origin: those who were citizens of Kenya by birth and lost that citizenship on acquiring the citizenship of another country may apply at any time for restoration (not registration) of Kenyan citizenship under s. 10 of the Act — only proof of former Kenyan citizenship and current foreign citizenship is needed, with no residence-period requirement.

Document certification

consular legalisation

The country does not accept apostilles: documents go through consular legalisation in three steps — ministry of justice, foreign ministry, consulate.

Limit

no limit

Quarantine

no

Antibody titre test

not needed

The authority issuing the import permit is the Directorate of Veterinary Services under the Ministry of Agriculture (kilimo.go.ke), but the domain remains unreachable by every method tried (ECONNREFUSED from IP 41.76.171.226 directly, a DNS timeout from the sandbox, an empty Wayback Machine archive out of more than 5,000 indexed URLs — not a single page on the veterinary service or animal imports; there is no such section on ecitizen.go.ke either). A second pass reconstructed the requirements from the receiving country's rules as seen by the sending side: UK APHA, 'Export of Dogs and Cats from Great Britain to Kenya — Notes for Guidance' (form 2913NFG, revision of 10 November 2023, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5bc702eaed915d0b01a1bd0b/2913NFG_.pdf) — an official document of the British veterinary authority, mandatory for export certification, reproducing the conditions Kenya officially communicated to the UK; this is not a primary source from the Kenyan authority but a mirror of its requirements on the partner's side. Per this document: an import permit is mandatory — obtained in advance from the Director of Veterinary Services (Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock Development and Marketing, Nairobi, P.O. Box 34188/Kabete) or via the Kenya High Commission in London. A microchip and rabies vaccination with an accompanying certificate (date, vaccine, manufacturer, vaccine batch) are required. Quarantine (6 months) is not a routine procedure but a penalty for non-compliance: it is imposed only if the animal enters without a valid rabies vaccination (given no later than 6 months before arrival) or transits through a high-rabies-risk country (other than Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Ireland) without such vaccination; if vaccinated within 6 months before arrival, quarantine is not required regardless of route — hence quarantineDays=0 for the standard case. Antibody titre testing is not mentioned in the document at all — with proper vaccination it is not required, hence rabiesTiterRequired=false. The animal's arrival (other than by sea at Mombasa and by air at Nairobi) must be reported to the nearest veterinary office within 3 days. The document does not state limits on the number of animals or banned breeds — this does not mean they definitely don't exist, but they are absent from the primary source found, so maxAnimals and bannedBreeds are left as-is (null and an empty list). The Kenyan Embassy in Washington (kenyaembassydc.org/petimport/ — an official Kenyan diplomatic body, not a third country) separately states an import-permit fee of $50 per animal (money order/cashier's cheque); the application must be accompanied by the owner's passport, a valid veterinary certificate/vaccination record, and an animal licence; this is only the permit fee, not the full cost of relocating a pet (air transport, veterinary examination, chipping, etc. are not included), so estimatedCostPerAnimalEur is left empty rather than filled in with a partial figure. Neither of the two sources states a minimum waiting period after vaccination before departure — prepTimeMonths is left null rather than filled in by analogy with other countries.

Life expectancy

63.8 years

Bread, 500 g

$ 0,54

Milk, 1 l

$ 0,83

Eggs, 12

$ 1,66

Chicken breast, 1 kg

$ 6,09

Cheese, 1 kg

$ 10,0

Rice, 1 kg

$ 1,79

Potatoes, 1 kg

$ 0,88

Apples, 1 kg

$ 2,84

Coca-Cola / Pepsi, 2 l

$ 1,38

Total

$ 26,0

The same set for every country, so the comparison is fair.

Rent, 1 bedroom

$ 304 a month

Rent, 3 bedrooms

$ 892 a month

Utility bills

$ 46,9 a month

Home internet

$ 34,5 a month

Monthly transport pass

$ 36,1 a month

Single transport ticket

$ 0,81

Petrol, litre

$ 1,48

Cold medicine

$ 2,81 for a week

Country averages. City prices, where collected, are shown above and are more precise.

Life expectancy

63,8 years2024

Homicides

4,7 per 100k2024

Road deaths

28,2 per 100k2021

Unemployment

5,5 %2025

Unemployment, ages 15–24

15,3 %2025

Inequality (Gini)

38,52022

Health spending per person

$ 85,0 a year

Air pollution, PM2.5

20,3 µg/m³2023

Access to clean water

65,6 %2024

Internet, fixed line

22,9 Mbit/s2026

Internet, mobile

45,4 Mbit/s2026

Governance

Political stability

low · -1,4

Control of corruption

below average · -0,8

Rule of law

below average · -0,5

Government effectiveness

below average · -0,3

World Bank estimates on a −2.5 to +2.5 scale, higher is better.

Natural hazards

Earthquakes

2,8 out of 10

River floods

5,2 out of 10

Coastal floods

2,7 out of 10

Tropical cyclones

0 out of 10

Droughts

6,7 out of 10

Tsunamis

3,2 out of 10

Each value carries the year it refers to. “Data lags behind” means this country's figure was collected noticeably earlier than the rest. Natural hazards use one 0–10 scale and are meant to be compared against each other.

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Algeria · Angola · Benin · Botswana · Burkina Faso · Burundi · Cameroon · Central African Republic · Chad · Cote d'Ivoire · Democratic Republic of the Congo · Djibouti · Egypt · Equatorial Guinea · Eritrea · Eswatini · Ethiopia · Gabon · Ghana · Guinea · Guinea-Bissau · Lesotho · Liberia · Libya · Madagascar · Malawi · Mali · Mauritania · Morocco · Mozambique · Namibia · Niger · Nigeria · Republic of the Congo · Rwanda · Senegal · Sierra Leone · Somalia · South Africa · South Sudan · Sudan · Tanzania · The Gambia · Togo · Tunisia · Uganda · Zambia · Zimbabwe

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