Tanzania

Visa speed

The only officially found statutory deadline for residence permits is 14 days for the Director's decision on applications submitted through the Tanzania Investment Centre by a holder of an investment-incentive certificate (art. 18(5), Immigration Act, 1995); no statutory deadline exists for ordinary applications outside TIC. For work permits, the initial processing time is not fixed in days by article 11 of the Non-Citizens (Employment Regulation) Act, 2015 ('immediately... inform the applicant... of his decision', with no numeric standard); only a minimum filing deadline for a RENEWAL application is set — no later than 60 days before the current permit expires (art. 10(7), 2025 amendment). **Supplemented on 24 August 2026 from the department's client service charter.** The agency publishes issuing times by class separately: residence permit class A — fourteen WORKING days, class B — seven working days, class C — seven working days. The exemption certificate and the dependant pass — five working days; endorsing a dependant on a permit already issued — the same day. The figures are recorded as printed, and the caveat about working days is here. The charter says nothing about student passes or the migrant pass, so their time is marked unpublished. The charter is laid out as a table with shifted columns: row labels and values sit in different vertical blocks. For classes A, B and C the pairing is unambiguous — the class labels are printed next to the times. For the exemption certificate and the dependant pass the correspondence was restored by row order, and little restoring was needed: both rows carry the same value — five working days.

Changing employer

No, for the Class B residence permit and the work permit: both are tied to the specific employer and occupation stated on the permit. A Class B residence permit is cancelled immediately if the holder ceases the stated employment or engages in other paid activity (art. 20(3), Immigration Act, 1995); the employer must notify an immigration officer within 30 days. The work permit is 'non-transferable and valid only for the purpose for which it was issued' (art. 12(3), Non-Citizens (Employment Regulation) Act, 2015); when a permit of a different class is obtained, the previous one must be surrendered to the Labour Commissioner (art. 13(3)).

Visa types: On mainland Tanzania, the residence permit (issued by the Immigration Service under the Ministry of Home Affairs pursuant to the Immigration Act, 1995, Cap. 54) and the work permit (issued by the Labour Commissioner under the Ministry of Labour pursuant to the Non-Citizens (Employment Regulation) Act, 2015, Cap. 436) are two separate documents from two different authorities; legal paid employment requires both at the same time (confirmed by court practice, e.g. TZCA 17567 (2023), TZHC 247 (2023), TZHCLD 1163 (2022)) · Residence permit Class A (art. 19, Immigration Act, 1995) — for a person conducting trade, business, a profession, agriculture, livestock farming, mineral prospecting, or manufacturing on their own or in partnership; financial security (a deposit or guarantee from one or more sureties) is required in case of repatriation of the holder, wife, and dependent children; after 10 or more years of residence with an 'immeasurable' contribution to the economy, it may, at the Director's discretion, be renewed for a further term without the general 5-year cap (art. 19(4)) — this is the only officially found exception to the general term limit · Residence permit Class B (art. 20, Immigration Act, 1995) — for a person offered a specific job with a specific employer in Tanzania whose employment is deemed beneficial to the country; the employer must provide security before the holder and their dependants enter; the permit is cancelled if the holder ceases the stated employment or engages in other paid activity — changing employer requires a new permit · Residence permit Class C (art. 21, Immigration Act, 1995) — a residence permit for a person not falling under Class A or B; the conditions are set individually at the Director's discretion; an official list of typical grounds (students, researchers, etc.) is not detailed in the text of the Act itself — it is likely detailed in the Immigration (Rights and Privileges) Regulations, 2022 (GN 138 of 2022), whose text did not open either on tanzlii.org (Cloudflare block on every method tried — direct request, WebFetch, Wayback Machine cache, proxy) or on immigration.go.tz (a JS application without server-side rendering, content unavailable for automated collection) · All Class A/B/C residence permits are issued for up to 3 years with a renewal of up to 2 years, but no more than 5 years total per permit (art. 18(2), Immigration Act, 1995), with a specifically noted exception for major investors under Class A (see above) · Work permit (a work permit, art. 13, Non-Citizens (Employment Regulation) Act, 2015) — five classes: Class A for a foreign self-employed investor ($1,000 — Fifth Schedule); Class B for a person in a 'prescribed profession' — medical and health workers, oil-and-gas specialists, teachers and lecturers of mathematics and the sciences ($500); Class C for other professions ($1,000); Class D for those engaged in registered religious or charitable activity ($500); Class E for refugees (free of charge) · The work permit is issued for 24 months and is renewable; the total term of the initial issue plus renewals must not exceed 8 years (art. 12(4)); for an investor with a large contribution to the economy, the term may exceed 10 years (art. 12(5)); for a refugee, the permit remains valid for as long as refugee status is retained (art. 12(6), 2025 amendment) · Holders of a Tanzania Investment Centre investment-incentive certificate receive an automatic immigrant quota of up to 5 people at project start-up (art. 18(4), Immigration Act, 1995); for applications submitted through TIC, the Director must issue the permit or state reasons for refusal within 14 days of receiving the application (art. 18(5)) — this is the only officially found statutory processing deadline for residence permits · Zanzibar is an autonomous part of Tanzania with its own immigration administration: the Immigration Act, 1995 (a Union law) explicitly provides that the Minister may — only with the consent of the President of Zanzibar — set additional entry and exit rules for visitors to Zanzibar (art. 15(8)), and a residence permit issued under this Act to a person heading to Zanzibar is subject to these additional conditions (art. 22(3)); the Act also separately mentions the Revolutionary Government of Zanzibar as a distinct employer of civil servants (art. 15(5)(d)) — meaning mainland residence rules do not apply in full on Zanzibar. The dedicated site zanzibarimmigration.go.tz does not resolve (NXDOMAIN), the zanzibarlii.org legislation database returns "No documents found" for immigration, and the investment portal zipa.go.tz is a JS application without server-side rendering: it was not possible in this session to confirm the details of the Zanzibar procedure (its own permit classes, property-ownership rules) with a separate document from the Zanzibar side

The residence permit (who may live in the country) and the work permit (who may work) are issued separately, by two different authorities: the Immigration Service (immigration.go.tz) falls under the Ministry of Home Affairs and operates under the Immigration Act, 1995 (Cap. 54); work permits are issued by the Labour Commissioner under the ministry responsible for labour and employment (kazi.go.tz — the domain's certificate does not match the hostname, access failed by every method tried), under the Non-Citizens (Employment Regulation) Act, 2015 (Cap. 436). Full texts of both acts and the Tanzania Citizenship Act, 1995 (Cap. 357) were obtained from tanzlii.org via Wayback Machine archive copies (the tanzlii.org site returns an interactive Cloudflare check for all direct requests to document texts — only its list and search pages worked, not the documents themselves). The required level of English and any specific diploma requirement are not explicitly stated anywhere in the texts of either act: Swahili and English are official languages, and knowledge of one of them is required only for NATURALISATION (see residency.languageRequired), not for obtaining permits. **Supplemented on 24 August 2026: 28 grounds collected.** The earlier caveat about a “JS site unavailable for collection” has been removed — it was true of the markup and false of the content. The site is indeed a React application and serves curl 806 bytes of empty shell, but all of its text lies in an open CMS-API on the same domain: `POST /websiteportal/cms/info/by-category` with the body `{"CategoryId": N}` — category 8 returns 49 reference sections, category 9 the four PDFs of the e-library, category 4 the service cards. No key and no authorisation are required; a GET to the same addresses answers “HTTP method not allowed”. The residence permit guidelines and the client service charter are PDFs with a readable text layer. **How the status is arranged.** The country has two long-term channels: the residence permit (21 categories) and the pass, of several kinds. The residence permit splits into the three classes of the Immigration Act, 1995 — A for self-employed investors, B for employed specialists, C for everyone else — and within those classes the department keeps its OWN matrix of twenty-one codes: A-1…A-4, B-1…B-4, C-1…C-13. The matrix is published both in the site's reference section and in the residence permit guidelines; the Act says nothing of it — the codes are the agency's own administrative division. **The term is set as a ceiling, not as a length.** Article 18(2) of the Act: a permit is issued for a period of no more than THREE years, renewed for no more than two years at a time, and one permit with its renewals may not in total run longer than FIVE years. The term field carries the ceiling of 36 months — what the norm prints; the particular length within it is set by the Commissioner General and the agency does not publish it. There is one exception: class B-3 is defined by the department itself as employment “for a period of not more than six months”, and there 6 stands. Passes have their own published ceiling: “the maximum validity for all types of passes shall not exceed two years”. **There is no permanent residence in the country.** The Immigration Act knows no separate indefinite status between the fixed-term permit and citizenship, so the field “does the time count towards permanent residence” is empty on every ground: there is nothing for it to count towards. The nearest thing is article 19(4): a person resident for ten years or more whose contribution to the economy through trade, manufacture, agriculture or mineral prospecting is “immense or of great value” may be granted a further class A permit by the Director for a period of the Director's choosing. That is still a fixed-term permit, not a residence status. **The fee depends on nationality, and that is printed as a separate column.** The tariff keeps up to four price columns: the ordinary one, one for citizens of the East African Community (usually half), one for the diaspora, and a separate re-entry pass line — 50 dollars for the applicant and for each dependant on top of the main fee. The numeric field carries the ordinary price; the reduced ones are named in the basis of the fee. The only line free in all four columns is C-12, refugees. **The pass prices cannot be verified at their address.** The pass tariff (dependant pass 550, business pass 200, interim pass 600, student pass I 200, student pass II 100, migrant pass 10,000 shillings) is published ONLY as a CMS-API response to a POST request: there is no separate pass PDF in the e-library, and the site's page serves an empty shell. On those five grounds the fee address points at the services page, and the machine check says honestly “the page is empty” — the figure comes from the same agency's API, but does not stand at the address. The residence permit prices need no such caveat: they are in the PDF guidelines. **What is not among the grounds.** The Business Pass (short assignments such as auditing, fixing a machine, feasibility studies), the Special Pass for EAC citizens (no more than ninety days), the Seasonal Migrant Pass (seasonal work), the Interim Pass (a bridge while a permit application is determined), the Landing Pass, Visitor Pass, Re-Entry Pass, In Transit Pass and KaribuPass — all are either shorter than three months or ancillary. Of the entry visas only one is among the grounds: the student visa for programmes longer than 90 days. The rest are capped at three consecutive months, the annual multiple-entry visa included — there the year is the validity, not the stay.

Permanent residence after

no permanent status exists

Citizenship after

8 years

Language

Adequate knowledge of Swahili or English is a naturalisation requirement (Second Schedule, para. 1(c) to the Tanzania Citizenship Act, 1995). No language requirement was found in the text of the Immigration Act, 1995 for obtaining residence permits (Class A/B/C).

Dual citizenship

not allowed

Dual citizenship: Dual citizenship is not permitted. Section 7 of the Tanzania Citizenship Act, 1995 is explicitly titled 'Cessation of dual citizenship': a Tanzanian citizen who acquires the citizenship of another country is deemed to have lost citizenship of the Union Republic as of a set date, unless they had already renounced the other citizenship, taken an oath of allegiance, and (for citizens by birth) filed a declaration of intent to reside in the country (art. 7, 240–248). Symmetrically for naturalisation: a person who is a citizen of another country may not be naturalised as a citizen of Tanzania unless they renounce the other citizenship and take an oath of allegiance (art. 9(3), 248); if renunciation is not possible under the other country's laws, a statutory declaration is made instead (art. 250).

Absence limits: The Immigration Act, 1995 sets no numeric limit on absence. Two rules of a different kind apply. The first is article 28(6): if the holder of a class A, B or C permit leaves Tanzania FOR GOOD, the permit is cancelled by an immigration officer and the holder must surrender it for cancellation. What counts as leaving for good the Act does not define — that is an officer's judgement, not a term in days. The second is the re-entry pass: to travel abroad and return, a resident takes out a separate pass for coming back, and it is paid for — 50 dollars for the resident and for each dependant, and 250 on the short-term class B-3 permit. The charge is on top of the fee for the permit itself.

No separate "permanent residence" status between the fixed-term residence permit and citizenship is found in the Immigration Act, 1995 (Cap. 54): all three classes of residence permit (A/B/C) are issued for up to 3 years and extended for up to 2 more, but for no more than 5 years in total on one permit (s. 18(2)) — once it runs out the holder must apply afresh rather than passing automatically to an open-ended status. The only exception found officially is that a Class A holder (investors and the self-employed), after 10 or more years of residence and with an "immeasurable" contribution to the economy, may at the Director's discretion receive a new permit free of the general 5-year ceiling (s. 19(4)); that is not a separate permanent-residence category but a discretionary extension for a narrow group of holders, so residency.prYears is left empty rather than filled with 10 by analogy. The Immigration (Rights and Privileges) Regulations, 2022 (GN 138 of 2022) — the one instrument that could in principle have introduced a separate permanent-residence category — still could not be read, but on 8 August 2026 the obstacle was pinned down more precisely. The tanzlii.org domain answers and serves the legislation listings: the instrument was found in them and identified at /en/akn/tz/act/gn/2022/138/eng@2022-03-18. What the Cloudflare check closes off is the document pages specifically — the HTML, /source.pdf and /source alike. Meanwhile the media host media.tanzlii.org is open and serves PDFs directly with no check at all (verified on immigration-visa-amendment-regulations-2025.pdf, 223 KB). The trouble is that its addresses, of the form /media/legislation/<id>/source_file/<hash>/<name>.pdf, contain an id and a hash printed only by the closed document page, and this file is not in the Wayback archive. Hence: the empty prYears reflects the inaccessibility of that particular instrument, whereas the prAbsent flag rests not on it but on sections 18(2) and 19(4) of the Act as read. Naturalisation follows the Tanzania Citizenship Act, 1995 (Cap. 357), Second Schedule (s. 9(1)): the applicant must have lived in Tanzania continuously for the whole year (12 months) immediately preceding the application, and for at least 7 years in aggregate out of the 10 years preceding that year — roughly 8 years of residence by the time of filing; adequate knowledge of Swahili or English, good repute, a contribution to the national economy, science or culture, and the intention to reside permanently in Tanzania after naturalisation are also required.

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

Antibody titre test

not needed

The authority, mifugouvuvi.go.tz (Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries), does not publish a dedicated page or document on importing pets; only the tariff for importing/exporting dogs and cats is officially confirmed — 50,000 Tanzanian shillings per animal (Thirteenth Schedule, item 7) and a fee for holding at a quarantine ground/entry point — 500 shillings per day for a dog/cat (Fifteenth Schedule, item 3) — both under the Animal Diseases (Animals and Animal Products Movement Control) Regulations (made under art. 65 of the Animal Diseases Act, Cap. 156; the tariff schedules in force are from the GN 478C of 2022 and GN 489A of 2020 amendments, mifugouvuvi.go.tz/publications/regulations). The existence of a fee for a quarantine ground confirms that such facilities for dogs/cats are provided for, but this document does not state a mandatory quarantine PERIOD for an ordinary pet import — only a daily charge for actual use, so quarantineDays is left empty rather than filled in with an arbitrary period. Detailed veterinary requirements were reconstructed from the receiving country's rules as seen by the sending side: UK APHA, "Export of Cats and Dogs from the United Kingdom to Tanzania — Notes for Guidance" (form 3129NFG, first approved 1 August 1996, revision of 5 September 2024, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/66d9ada4561701fa1c214e7a/3129NFG.pdf) — an official document of the British veterinary authority, mandatory for export certification to Tanzania, reproducing the requirements Tanzania officially communicated to the UK; this is not a primary source from the Tanzanian 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 Livestock Division, Ministry of Agriculture, Dar es Salaam (the address and ministry name in the document have not been updated since 1996 — veterinary functions have since moved to the Ministry of Livestock and Fisheries, but the permit requirement itself is still current); dogs must be fully vaccinated against parvovirus enteritis and canine distemper, cats against panleukopenia, BEFORE export; animals must be examined by an official veterinarian no more than 10 days before export. Rabies vaccination is separately listed in section 1, "Summary of requirements", with the wording "may be required on arrival in Tanzania" — meaning rabies vaccination (if needed) is done AFTER arrival in Tanzania, not as a condition of entry; antibody titre testing (FAVN/RNATT) is not mentioned anywhere in the document — hence rabiesTiterRequired=false. The document does not state a minimum waiting period after vaccination before export (only the examination deadline of 10 days before export), so prepTimeMonths is left null. The document does not name any banned breeds.

Bread, 500 g

$ 0,69

Milk, 1 l

$ 0,99

Eggs, 12

$ 1,98

Chicken breast, 1 kg

$ 4,77

Cheese, 1 kg

$ 9,20

Rice, 1 kg

$ 1,00

Potatoes, 1 kg

$ 0,88

Apples, 1 kg

$ 2,32

Coca-Cola / Pepsi, 2 l

$ 1,14

Total

$ 23,0

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

Rent, 1 bedroom

$ 434 a month

Rent, 3 bedrooms

$ 929 a month

Utility bills

$ 61,0 a month

Home internet

$ 36,6 a month

Monthly transport pass

$ 14,5 a month

Single transport ticket

$ 0,28

Petrol, litre

$ 1,12

Cold medicine

$ 4,06 for a week

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

Life expectancy

67,2 years2024

Homicides

3,3 per 100k2024

Road deaths

15,8 per 100k2021

Unemployment

1,6 %2025

Unemployment, ages 15–24

2,4 %2025

Inequality (Gini)

40,52018 · data lags behind

Health spending per person

$ 36,3 a year

Air pollution, PM2.5

20,2 µg/m³2023

Access to clean water

64,6 %2024

Internet, fixed line

37,4 Mbit/s2026

Governance

Political stability

below average · -0,4

Control of corruption

below average · -0,3

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

4,4 out of 10

River floods

4,2 out of 10

Coastal floods

3,3 out of 10

Tropical cyclones

0,7 out of 10

Droughts

4,7 out of 10

Tsunamis

3,1 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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