Becoming a Dominican Resident

Dominican residency is a very useful status to acquire for a variety of reasons: 1) It facilitates a number of business transactions in the D.R., including obtaining bank loans, buying real estate and applying for credit; 2) It makes one eligible for lower tuition at Dominican universities; 3) It permits one to work legally in the Dominican Republic; 4) One can take advantage of Law 14-93, Art. 13, and import most household goods duty free.

In order to obtain Dominican residency, it is first necessary to obtain a residence visa. Even if one is already in the Dominican Republic under another kind of visa, such as a tourist card or tourist visa or business visa, a residence visa must be applied for and obtained before obtaining a provisional residence card, which is the final document certifying that one has valid Dominican residency. While in practice it is not necessary to be a legal resident to live in the
Dominican Republic, the principal advantage is that you will be able to import your household goods, most tax exempt, under Law 14-93.

Residence Visa
In order to obtain a residency visa, a number of documents must be submitted to the Dominican consulate nearest the actual place of residency of the applicant, or if the applicant is already in the Dominican Republic, they may be submitted to the Secretariat of State for Foreign Relations of the Dominican Republic. The documents are the following:

1. Three 2" x 2" frontal photos of the applicant’s face.
2. A completed Visa application Form 509.
3. A certification of good behavior issued by the Police Department of the applicant’s original place of residence.
4. An employment agreement or, if a real estate investment has been made, a copy of the purchase agreement, or any other documentation proving the applicant’s financial solvency in the Dominican Republic. The employment agreement must be registered with the Dominican Secretariat of Labor which will send a labor inspector to the place of work to determine work conditions and ensure that the foreign applicant is filling a position that a Dominican national cannot at the moment fill. The process of certifying the employment agreement is separate from that of applying for residency, and may take some time, in most cases, up to one month after filing the agreement with the Labor Department before one can proceed to file any documentation with the Ministry of Foreign Relations.
5. A letter of guarantee from a Dominican citizen, or legal resident of the Dominican Republic.
6. If a real estate investment has been made, a copy of the Presidential authorization if one had been obtained.
7. The results of a medical examination certified by a Notary Public and authenticated by the Dominican consul.
8. An original birth certificate of the applicant, translated into Spanish.

Once the above documents are assembled, the file is complete and may be submitted to the Consular Section of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Avenida Independencia, some 300 meters east of the Santo Domingo Hotel. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is housed in a former residence of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, the former dictator.
The file eventually will be sent to the Intelligence Service of the Dominican Republic known by its acronym in Spanish, DNI. This department will schedule an interview with the applicant and his guarantor to determine the validity of the application. This is normally a routine matter which is to confirm the information already provided by the client to the government. Once this is done the file is then returned to the Secretariat of Foreign Affairs for further processing.
The entire process for obtaining the residence visa may take between two to three months, although some cases have been known to take as much as one year.