Why This Site Exists
Moving to a new country is mostly a sequence of small administrative problems that nobody explains in the right order.
You need a bank account, but the bank wants a personal code. The personal code comes with your residence permit. The residence permit needs health insurance, and an address, and documents legalised in your home country โ which takes weeks you didn't budget for. Meanwhile you've landed, you have rent to pay, and none of the official websites explain what to do first.
The information exists. Lithuania's government sources are decent, and studyin.lt in particular is genuinely good. But official pages tell you what the rule is, not what it means, what it costs, what order to do things in, or what people routinely get wrong.
That's the gap this site fills.
What we try to be
The practical layer above the official sources. We link to the Migration Department, VMI, Sodra and studyin.lt constantly, because they're authoritative and we aren't. What we add is sequence, context, honest cost, and the mistakes worth avoiding.
Who Writes It
How We Approach This
Four commitments, covered in full in our editorial guidelines:
We verify against primary sources
- โ Migration Department for immigration
- โ VMI for tax, Sodra for contributions
- โ Providers' own published terms
- โ If we can't verify it, we don't publish it
We disclose how we're funded
- โ Affiliate links marked on every page
- โ Never costs you more
- โ Rankings decided before commercials
- โ No paid reviews or placements
We list the downsides
- โ Every recommendation names its drawbacks
- โ We say when the free option is better
- โ We tell you when you can stop paying
- โ A comparison with no criticism is an advert
We correct errors visibly
- โ Report anything that looks wrong
- โ We check it against the source
- โ We fix it and update the date
- โ We don't quietly delete mistakes
Who This Site Is For
Broadly, four groups:
- People moving to Lithuania for work, particularly into the tech and fintech sector in Vilnius โ where the English-language jobs actually are.
- International students, including the large cohort studying medicine in Kaunas, who face a specific set of permit, insurance and banking problems on arrival.
- Russian-speaking arrivals from across the region, for whom Lithuania is unusually accessible linguistically and who are underserved by English-only guides. Russian-language versions of these guides are planned.
- People with Lithuanian ancestry exploring citizenship by descent โ a distinct and much easier route than general immigration.
Languages
The site is being built in English first, with Russian versions to follow. That reflects the audience: Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian citizens are the largest groups of foreign residents in Lithuania, and Russian remains widely spoken here.
Where the two versions differ, it won't only be translation โ the practical questions differ by audience, and the Russian guides will reflect that.
What We're Not
We are not lawyers, tax advisers or immigration consultants. This is general information, not advice about your circumstances. For anything consequential, get professional advice and confirm current requirements with the relevant Lithuanian authority. Where an official source disagrees with us, the official source is right.
Get In Touch
Corrections, questions, partnership enquiries, or a topic you can't find covered โ all welcome via the contact page. Reader corrections in particular are genuinely useful; the people going through these processes right now often know things before we do.