Bulgaria

Bulgarian citizenship law rests on descent (jus sanguinis). Under Article 25(1) of the 1991 Constitution and Article 8 of the Citizenship Act (Zakon za balgarskoto grazhdanstvo, promulgated in State Gazette No. 136 of 18 November 1998, in force since 20 February 1999, last amended by SG No. 55 of 16 June 2026), every person with at least one parent who was a Bulgarian citizen at the time of the person's birth is a Bulgarian citizen by origin, automatically and regardless of place of birth. No application for a grant of citizenship is needed in such cases: the person already is a citizen and only has the status documented, either by registering the birth in the Bulgarian civil registers or by obtaining a certificate of citizenship from the Ministry of Justice under Article 39. Article 9 extends citizenship by origin to persons acknowledged by a Bulgarian citizen or whose parentage from a Bulgarian citizen is established by court judgment.

For those who are not already citizens, three descent-related routes exist. First, facilitated naturalisation for persons of Bulgarian origin under Article 15(1)(1): an applicant who documents a kinship link to at least one ascendant up to the third degree inclusive (parent, grandparent or great-grandparent) who is of Bulgarian origin is exempt from the residence, income, language and renunciation conditions — Article 15(1) disapplies only items 2, 4, 5 and 6 of Article 12(1), so the applicant must still be of full age and free of conviction for an intentional offence of a general nature before a Bulgarian court. Second, Article 15(1)(3) provides the same facilitated naturalisation for a person one of whose parents is a Bulgarian citizen or died as a Bulgarian citizen — used where the parent acquired citizenship after the applicant's birth, so Article 8 does not apply. Third, re-acquisition under Articles 26 and 27 is open to former citizens; under Article 26(2) persons of Bulgarian origin are restored without the three-year residence condition that applies to others.

Children under 14 with one Bulgarian-citizen parent can acquire citizenship on the written consent of both parents alone under Article 18(1); children aged 14 to 18 must additionally request it themselves. The naturalisation and restoration routes require a clean criminal record and are subject to a public-order, public-morals, public-health and national-security assessment (Articles 19 and 26); recognition of existing citizenship is declaratory and carries no such conditions.

Two mechanisms must be distinguished. Where the chain of citizenship is unbroken, Article 8 operates generation by generation without limit: a child born to a Bulgarian citizen is a citizen, that child's own children are citizens in turn, and so on indefinitely, wherever the family lives. A grandchild or great-grandchild of an emigrant who never lost Bulgarian citizenship may therefore already be a Bulgarian citizen and can have this established through the Article 39 certificate procedure rather than applying for naturalisation. Whether the chain is intact depends on the law in force at each birth — Article 2 refers every question to the Constitution, statute and treaties in force when the relevant facts occurred — and on whether any intervening ancestor lost citizenship before the next generation was born.

Where the chain is broken, or was never established under the older and less generous transmission rules, the naturalisation-by-origin route under Article 15 applies. Since the amendment promulgated in SG No. 21 of 12 March 2021, Article 15(2) requires official documents, issued by Bulgarian or foreign authorities, showing the applicant's kinship with at least one ascendant up to the third degree inclusive who is of Bulgarian origin; the documents must state the ascendant's names and the family relationship to the applicant. If they are not filed, the proceedings are terminated (Article 29(5)). An unbroken chain of citizenship transmission is not required — what matters is the documented family link to a qualifying ascendant.

The reach of that limit is contested. The statutory definition of "person of Bulgarian origin" (§ 2, item 1 of the additional provisions) — a person at least one of whose ascendants is a Bulgarian — contains no generational limit, and Supreme Court of Cassation Decision No. 495 of 12 August 2025 (civil case No. 3192/2024) read Articles 15(1), 15(2) and § 2 together as reaching ascendants up to the fourth degree, that is as far as great-great-grandparents. The Ministry of Justice and its published document lists apply the third-degree documentary rule of Article 15(2), which in practice caps the route at great-grandparents; the 2025 decision was given in civil proceedings, whereas refusals of citizenship are challenged before the administrative courts, so its weight in Ministry practice is limited.

Whether an ancestor was a Bulgarian citizen is judged under the law in force at the relevant time. The succession of statutes runs: early subjecthood laws of 1880 and 1883; the Law on Bulgarian Subjecthood adopted in 1903 and promulgated in SG No. 3 of 5 January 1904; the Law on Bulgarian Subjecthood of 20 December 1940 (SG No. 288); the Citizenship Act of 26 March 1948 (SG No. 70); the Citizenship Act of 11 October 1968 (SG No. 79, amended by SG No. 36 of 1979, SG No. 64 of 15 August 1986 and SG No. 38 of 19 May 1989); and the current Act of 1998. Each statute carried over the persons who held citizenship under its predecessor (Article 28 of the 1948 Act; § 30 of the 1968 Act). Transmission was essentially patrilineal until 1948: under the 1904 law a Bulgarian subject by birth was anyone born, in Bulgaria or abroad, to a Bulgarian man, though a child born out of wedlock followed the subjecthood of whichever parent's parentage was proved first and could therefore follow the mother; under the 1940 law the father's subjecthood governed regardless of birthplace, the mother transmitting only where the father was stateless or of unknown subjecthood. The 1904 law also had jus soli limbs that can rescue an apparently foreign line — a person born in the Kingdom to unknown parents or parents of unknown subjecthood was a subject, as was one born in the Kingdom to a foreigner who was domiciled there at majority and did not renounce within the following year, and Articles 6 and 7 gave a declaration route up to age 22 to those born in Bulgaria but living abroad and to children of a parent who had lost Bulgarian subjecthood. On marriage, a foreign woman marrying a Bulgarian subject acquired his subjecthood automatically under Article 15 of the 1904 law but, from 20 December 1940, only on proof that her own law had not left her with her former subjecthood (Article 13 of the 1940 law); conversely, under the 1904 law a Bulgarian woman marrying a foreigner passed into her husband's nationality if his law conferred it, while under the 1940 law she kept Bulgarian subjecthood unless she declared for her husband's within three months of the marriage (Article 17).

The 1948 Act made transmission gender-neutral but restricted births abroad: a child of a mixed marriage was Bulgarian if born in Bulgaria, whereas a child born abroad became Bulgarian only if neither the foreign parent's national law nor the law of the place of birth treated it as their citizen (Article 1). The original Article 6 of the 1968 Act kept a narrower version — a child born abroad to one Bulgarian parent was a citizen unless born in the foreign parent's country and recognised as its citizen. The amendment of 15 August 1986 made a child born abroad to one Bulgarian-citizen parent a citizen unconditionally, and the amendment of 19 May 1989 adopted the simple formula, retained in Article 8 of the 1998 Act, that any person with at least one Bulgarian-citizen parent is a citizen by origin. Births abroad into mixed marriages between 1948 and 1986 are the most common historical gap in transmission chains, but the gap was curable at the time and many families cured it: Article 5, paragraph 2 of the 1948 Act made such children under 14 citizens by right on the written consent of both parents or on taking up permanent residence in Bulgaria, and Article 15 of the 1968 Act carried the mechanism over, extending it to children aged 14 to 18 on their own request. Consular and municipal consent files are therefore worth checking before treating a chain as broken.

State succession also matters for families from territories that changed hands. Article 62 of the 1940 law deemed to be Bulgarian subjects those foreigners permanently resident in the Kingdom on 9 August 1920 who were still living there and who held no other subjecthood on that date. Under the Treaty of Craiova of 7 September 1940 Romania ceded Southern Dobruja, and the remaining population acquired Bulgarian subjecthood; the treaty's population-exchange articles compulsorily transferred the Romanians and Aromanians of Southern Dobruja to Romania and the Bulgarians of Northern Dobruja to Bulgaria, so a Dobrujan ancestor's status turns on which side of that exchange the family fell. Ancestors from communities outside the modern borders — North Macedonia, the Bessarabian and Taurian Bulgarians of Moldova and Ukraine, the Banat Bulgarians and others — were frequently never Bulgarian citizens at all; such families rely on the ethnic-origin limb of Article 15 rather than on an ancestor's citizenship.

Historical loss events are the main reason descent chains break.

• 1940 law. Article 14 made subjecthood lost automatically on renunciation, on acquiring a foreign subjecthood on any ground, on unauthorised foreign state service or enlistment in a foreign army, on failing to report for mobilisation and remaining abroad, and by force of emigration treaties; under Article 15 a subject of non-Bulgarian ethnic origin lost subjecthood by the very fact of emigrating. An amendment of 27 November 1944, revised on 25 July 1945 — both post-dating the coup of 9 September 1944 — allowed Bulgarian Jews who had emigrated after 1 January 1940 and lost subjecthood on emigration to be readmitted if they returned within six months of the peace treaty.
• 1948 Act. In the wording in force from the amendment of 25 October 1963, Article 6 provided that citizenship was lost only by taking a foreign citizenship with the prior permission of the Minister of Justice. The amendment of 18 November 1950 had added a second paragraph under which a citizen of non-Bulgarian ethnicity who emigrated lost citizenship by the very fact of emigration — the provision behind the Turkish exodus of 1950–1951 and much of the post-war Jewish emigration to Israel. Article 8 allowed deprivation of citizens who left the country illegally, failed to return when summoned, took foreign state or military service without permission, or acted abroad against the state; the grounds were used extensively against political émigrés. Article 29 added a narrow but real chain-breaker for White Russian and Armenian refugee families: former Nansen-passport holders lost Bulgarian citizenship by operation of law on acquiring Soviet citizenship.
• 1968 Act. In its original form, Article 16 provided that all Bulgarian citizens of non-Bulgarian ethnicity who had permanently left the country lost their citizenship automatically, by the fact of resettlement and without any act of the authorities. That rule, not any bilateral instrument, is what stripped the Turkish-minority emigrants of the 1968–1978 wave; it applied to any citizen of non-Bulgarian ethnicity who resettled abroad. Article 16 was replaced by the amendments of 1986 and 1989 with the rule usually quoted for the whole period — that a Bulgarian citizen may acquire a foreign citizenship only after release from Bulgarian citizenship. Deprivation ran on a separate track under Article 20, whose broad political grounds (illegal departure, failure to return after leave expired, conduct abroad denigrating the state) were narrowed by the amendment of 19 May 1989 to a grave crime against the state committed by a person who is abroad; in that narrowed form deprivation remained available until the 1968 Act was repealed on 20 February 1999.

The 1998 Act reversed part of the politically driven losses, but only prospectively. § 3 of its transitional provisions restores Bulgarian citizenship "upon the entry into force of this Act" to persons deprived of it under the 1940 and 1948 laws: the restoration operates from 20 February 1999 on persons then living, not retroactively from the date of the deprivation, and deprivations decreed under Article 20 of the 1968 Act are outside § 3 altogether. § 4 allowed persons released from citizenship without having requested it who had emigrated to countries with which Bulgaria had concluded no emigration agreement to recover citizenship by a formal request to the Minister of Justice within one year of entry into force, a window that expired on 20 February 2000; the exclusion of emigrants to agreement countries is what makes the classification of a family's departure decisive. Persons not covered — those voluntarily released, those who left under an emigration agreement, and those who lost citizenship under Article 16 of the 1968 Act — must use restoration under Article 26, which requires a clean record and, except for persons of Bulgarian origin, three years' permanent or long-term residence in Bulgaria; persons deprived of citizenship apply under Article 27, on the ground that there was no basis for the deprivation or that the basis has lost its significance.

Today citizenship is not lost automatically on any ground. A Bulgarian citizen by birth cannot be deprived of citizenship (Article 25(3) of the Constitution); acquiring a foreign citizenship has no effect. Loss occurs only by voluntary release (Article 20: open to citizens permanently resident abroad who have acquired a foreign citizenship or have an open procedure for one), by revocation of a naturalisation under Article 22(1) — where the person used data judicially established to be false, concealed data that would have grounded a refusal, or failed to give the notification required by Article 32a, revocation being possible only within ten years of acquisition except in terrorism cases and never so as to cause statelessness — or by deprivation under Article 24 of a naturalised citizen convicted by a final sentence of a grave crime against the Republic, provided the person is abroad and would not be left stateless. For present-day chains, the decisive question remains whether an emigrant ancestor still held Bulgarian citizenship when the next generation was born.

The restitution measures for victims of persecution are those of § 3 and § 4 of the 1998 Act. Their effect is narrower than it looks. § 3 undid the Nazi-era and communist-era denaturalisations effected under the 1940 and 1948 laws, but it did so by restoring citizenship as from 20 February 1999. It does not validate transmissions that failed while the deprivation stood, so a descendant born between the deprivation and that date did not become a citizen at birth, and a person who died before 20 February 1999 did not die a citizen. Where the ancestor was alive on 20 February 1999, children born to that ancestor after that date are citizens under Article 8, and the ancestor's own restored status can support an application under Article 15(1)(3); descendants born earlier must fall back on the ethnic-origin route. There is no separate compensation-style citizenship scheme beyond §§ 3 and 4.

The ethnic-origin route under Article 15(1)(1) is itself the principal exception to ordinary naturalisation and is heavily used by the historical Bulgarian communities of North Macedonia, Moldova, Ukraine, Serbia and Albania. Until 2021, applicants proved origin with a certificate from the State Agency for Bulgarians Abroad; the amendment promulgated on 12 March 2021 recast Article 15(2), repealed Article 15(3) and, with effect from 16 March 2021, removed that certificate from the list of citizenship-application documents, leaving the documentary standard of Article 15(2) in its place. The agency — named in the Act as the State Agency for Bulgarians Abroad and operating today as the Executive Agency for Bulgarians Abroad under the Minister of Foreign Affairs — still issues Bulgarian-origin certificates, but only for residence and visa proceedings under the Foreigners Act. Where the filed documents leave doubt, the Minister of Justice may demand additional documents within 14 days or refer the case to the Consultative Council at that agency, which must give a reasoned opinion within two months, weighing whether the applicant uses the Bulgarian language and self-identifies as a person of Bulgarian origin, and whether at least one of three further circumstances applies: membership of a Bulgarian community or minority abroad, descent from a settlement that was part of the Bulgarian state or the Bulgarian Exarchate in the past, or ascendants bearing the traditional Bulgarian family naming system (Article 29(4) and (6)).

No registration deadline conditions citizenship for children born abroad: citizenship under Article 8 arises at birth by operation of law. Under Article 70(1) of the Civil Registration Act a Bulgarian citizen who has had a foreign civil-status act drawn up must obtain a certified copy and deliver it to the Bulgarian consulate within six months of the act being drawn up, notifying a permanent address in Bulgaria; Article 70(2) allows the copy to be filed directly with the municipality of permanent address, with a legalised and certified Bulgarian translation, only where the consular route was not possible. Article 116(2) provides a fine of 200 to 500 leva (about €102 to €256) for a citizen's breach of the Act, but the time limit does not affect citizenship and late transcription remains possible at any age. Persons fully adopted by a Bulgarian citizen do not acquire citizenship through the adoption as such (Article 6); an adopted child can be naturalised under Article 15(1)(2) or, more usually while a minor, on the lighter parental-consent track of Article 18(2). The investor-citizenship provisions (former Articles 12a and 14a) were repealed with effect from 1 April 2022, with pending proceedings terminated, and are closed.

Bulgaria accepts multiple citizenship for everyone acquiring or holding citizenship by descent. Citizens by origin are subject to no renunciation requirement whatever, and Article 3 treats a person who is both a Bulgarian citizen and a citizen of another state as a Bulgarian citizen only when Bulgarian legislation is applied, unless a statute provides otherwise. Applicants under Article 15 — Bulgarian origin, full adoption, Bulgarian-citizen parent — are expressly exempted from the release-from-previous-citizenship condition, and the restoration procedure in Articles 26 and 27 contains no such condition at all, so no applicant on a descent-based route is ever asked to give up an existing nationality.

The renunciation condition survives only in ordinary naturalisation under Article 12(1)(6), and even there it does not apply to spouses of Bulgarian citizens, to nationals of EU and EEA states and Switzerland, or to nationals of states with which Bulgaria has reciprocity treaties (Article 12(2)). Two qualifications are worth stating. A person naturalised under Article 15 is not a citizen by birth: the constitutional bar in Article 25(3) does not protect them, and they remain within reach of Articles 22 and 24 for as long as those provisions allow. And dual nationality has political consequences — under Article 93(2) of the Constitution only a Bulgarian citizen by birth without another citizenship may be elected President, while under Article 65(1), as amended in 2023, a dual national may be elected to the National Assembly only after living in the country for the preceding eighteen months.

For an Article 15 origin application the core of the file is the proof of origin: official documents issued by Bulgarian or foreign authorities establishing the applicant's kinship with an ascendant up to the third degree who is of Bulgarian origin, stating the ascendant's names and the relationship to the applicant. In practice this means a complete civil-status chain — birth and marriage certificates for every intervening generation — together with documents in which the ancestor appears as Bulgarian: Bulgarian birth or municipal register entries, old subjecthood records and passports, military service records, church and Exarchate registers, or foreign civil records recording the ancestor's Bulgarian nationality. Name changes across generations and alphabets must themselves be documented. What qualifies an ascendant as "Bulgarian" is genuinely unsettled: the Supreme Administrative Court read the term as satisfied by the ancestor's Bulgarian citizenship in Decision No. 14535 of 3 December 2014, then departed from that line in Decision No. 3444 of 5 March 2020, holding that "Bulgarian" and "Bulgarian citizen" are not equivalent; the Supreme Court of Cassation, in Decision No. 495 of 12 August 2025, treated awareness of belonging to the Bulgarian nation as decisive and the ancestor's citizenship or subjecthood as irrelevant. Documenting both the citizenship and the Bulgarian ethnicity of the ancestor, where the records allow it, is the safe course.

The remaining application documents are a Bulgarian-language application on the model form in Annex 1 to Ordinance No. 1 of 19 February 1999, the applicant's birth certificate, criminal-record certificates from the country of nationality and of long-term residence issued expressly for the citizenship procedure, a medical certificate from a medical advisory board, declarations under Annexes 4 and 4a, a CV, a passport-format photograph, a copy of an identity document and proof of the paid state fee. Foreign documents must be legalised or bear an apostille under the Hague Convention of 5 October 1961, unless a bilateral treaty dispenses with this, and must carry a certified Bulgarian translation. Multilingual civil-status extracts under the Vienna Convention of 8 September 1976 are exempt from that regime entirely, including the translation requirement; public documents of EU member states within Regulation (EU) 2016/1191 are exempt except that a Bulgarian translation is still required for documents issued in the official language of the issuing state. Two traps recur: a criminal-record certificate issued by an EU member state needs no legalisation for that state's own nationals but must be legalised where the holder is a national of another member state, and medical certificates fall outside the Regulation and must be legalised even when issued in the EU.

For the Article 39 certificate procedure the file is different: a copy of the birth act or a duplicate birth certificate issued by the competent Bulgarian or foreign authority, a document showing the date and manner of leaving the country, a document evidencing any foreign citizenship acquired, name-change and identity-of-person documents, two passport-format photographs, a photocopy of the applicant's identity document, proof of the state fee, and — where the subject is deceased — a copy of the death certificate. Heirs may request information about a deceased person's citizenship under Article 40(1)(1), which makes the procedure a practical tool for proving an emigrant ancestor's status when building a chain. Bulgarian archives — municipal civil registers, the State Agency "Archives", military records — are in practice searchable on request and are commonly used to reconstruct pre-war records.

The competent authority for all citizenship procedures is the Ministry of Justice, Bulgarian Citizenship Directorate, in Sofia; naturalisation and restoration are granted by decree of the President of the Republic. An Article 15 application is filed in person, in Bulgarian, at the Ministry of Justice or at a Bulgarian embassy or consulate, which must forward it with a reasoned opinion (Article 29(1)); filing in Sofia requires a date and time booked in advance through the Directorate's information system, except for Bulgarian citizens, nationals of EU and EEA states and Switzerland, and foreigners holding Bulgarian residence status (Article 13 of Ordinance No. 1). An interview is conducted at filing (Article 29(3)); under Article 13(4) and (6) of the Ordinance it is held in Bulgarian, on a questionnaire approved by the Minister of Justice, and at the mission where the file is lodged abroad. The descent-based routes carry no language examination — Article 15(1) disapplies the language condition in Article 12(1)(5) — and Bulgarian law knows no citizenship oath at any stage; but the application and its annexes must be in Bulgarian, the interview is conducted in Bulgarian, and an applicant who does not speak it arranges and pays for an interpreter. Origin referred to the Consultative Council is separately assessed for use of the Bulgarian language.

Within 14 days of registration the Directorate reviews the file for completeness; defects must be cured within two months of notice published in its information system, failing which the Citizenship Council terminates the proceedings, and an uncured file goes to the Council without the security opinions (Article 13a of the Ordinance). The file otherwise passes through written opinions of the Ministry of the Interior and the State Agency "National Security", any referral to the Consultative Council on origin, and the opinion of the Citizenship Council, an inter-ministerial body chaired by a Deputy Minister of Justice (Article 33). On that basis the Minister of Justice proposes to the President the issuance of, or refusal of, a decree (Article 34). The decree takes effect on the day of issue (Article 36); the Ministry then issues a certificate of the change of citizenship, notifies the municipalities holding the birth act and of permanent address for entry in the civil and population registers, and notifies the Interior and Foreign Ministries for the issuance of Bulgarian identity documents (Article 37). The certificate is collected in person against signature at the Ministry or at a mission, on production of proof of the state fee, a current photograph and — as a precondition of release — a declared address for registration in Bulgaria (Article 14 of the Ordinance). Registration produces a unified civil number (EGN), after which the new citizen may apply for a Bulgarian identity card and passport. If the Minister fails to act within the statutory period, or terminates the proceedings, the matter can be taken to the Administrative Court – Sofia Province, which reviews only the movement of the proceedings and rules by a final order (Article 35(5)).

Persons who are already citizens by origin follow recognition tracks instead. A child born abroad to a Bulgarian-citizen parent is registered by transcription of the foreign birth certificate, submitted through a consulate or, where that was not possible, directly to the municipality of permanent address; the birth act is drawn up in the municipality of the mother's permanent address, or the father's if the mother is not a Bulgarian citizen (Article 72(2)(1) of the Civil Registration Act). The municipality draws up a Bulgarian birth act and assigns an EGN, after which the child can receive Bulgarian documents. An adult whose status is undocumented or doubtful applies for a certificate of the existence of Bulgarian citizenship under Article 39, filed through the municipality of permanent address or of residence before leaving the country and, per the Ministry's published list, through a consulate from abroad; the Ministry checks its registers and the civil-status records and must issue the certificate within 30 days of receiving the file, the certificate being valid for one year. Where parentage itself is undocumented, descent from a Bulgarian citizen may be established by acknowledgment or court judgment (Article 9), but citizenship as such cannot be established by a court (Article 4).

The Minister of Justice must submit the proposal for a presidential decree within nine months for applications of persons of Bulgarian origin, twelve months for other naturalisation applications, and six months for restoration and for release (Article 35(1)). Those periods run from the arrival of the application at the Ministry of Justice or, where the file was defective, from the date the defects were cured (Article 35(2)), and they are suspended for up to three months while the Citizenship Council obtains additional documents or orders a verification (Article 33(4)); a consular filing also loses time in transit to Sofia. The Article 39 citizenship certificate is due within 30 days. Practice is slower than the statute: origin cases are reported to run about 12 to 24 months from filing to decree in typical files, with complex great-grandparent cases and consular filings longer, and the decree and document-issuance stages adding further months; complete projects, including gathering and legalising foreign and archival documents, are commonly reported at two years or more. Inaction beyond the statutory deadline can be challenged, but the court's review extends only to the progress of the file.

Governmental fees only. Bulgaria adopted the euro on 1 January 2026 at the fixed rate of 1.95583 leva per euro; Tariff No. 1 still carries un-redenominated lev nominals, which the Ministry of Justice publishes alongside the operative euro amounts, while Tariffs No. 3 and No. 4 are denominated in euro. The state fees under Tariff No. 1 for Ministry of Justice services were increased roughly tenfold by the amendment promulgated in SG No. 52 of 2025, which affected items 55 to 57 and items 59(a) and (b) but not item 59(c).

• Application for acquisition or restoration of citizenship by a person with a Bulgarian-citizen parent or of Bulgarian ethnicity: €153.39 (300 leva); the same application by persons under 18 and by students up to 26: €51.13 (100 leva); other applicants: €511.29 (1,000 leva).
• Application for release from citizenship, and application for an Article 39 certificate of citizenship: €127.82 each (250 leva).
• Certificate issued in execution of a decree: €51.13 (100 leva) for the origin and parent categories, €20.45 (40 leva) for persons under 18 and students, €127.82 (250 leva) for others.
• Consular fees under Tariff No. 3, payable in addition to the Tariff No. 1 fee: €50 for accepting an application for acquisition, restoration, release or establishment of citizenship; €20 for establishing an EGN; €10 for a criminal-record certificate; €20 per document for accepting a passport or identity-card application; €10 per page for a consular translation into Bulgarian from a common foreign language and €20 from a rare one, each covering up to three copies; €15 or €20 for certifying a signature and seal on a Bulgarian-issued or foreign-issued document. Consular fees rise by 50 per cent for service within eight working hours and by 100 per cent within four.
• Tariff No. 3 lists no fee for accepting a foreign birth certificate for transcription into the Bulgarian registers, and exempts certifying documents for civil-status acts drawn up by the missions themselves where these are intended for primary registration, together with Foreign Ministry translations of those documents; apostille, certified translation and municipal charges still arise, so registering a child born abroad is inexpensive rather than free.
• Identity documents under Tariff No. 4: a five-year passport costs €27 for ages 14 to 70, a ten-year passport €29 for ages 18 to 70 — under-18s are limited to five-year validity — and €7 for persons over 70; a first passport for a child under 14 costs €7 and a subsequent one €14; an identity card for ages 18 to 70 costs €15.34. Fast service (three working days) is charged at double the ordinary fee and express service (eight working hours) at five times it, so the same passports cost €54 or €135, and €58 or €145.

Genealogist and private translator charges are excluded from all figures above.

This page is not updated regularly, and it may not reflect the current position. It is a general account of Bulgarian citizenship law: statutes are amended, time limits expire, and the practice of the competent authorities moves without the legislation moving with it. Nothing here is legal advice, and nothing here is an assessment of your own family’s position.

Whether there is a claim in your case turns on names, dates and documents that no general page can take into account. The questionnaire is where we ask about them, and a lawyer in our citizenship team reads the answers.