How to Apply for Philippine Permanent Residency: Four Legal Routes, Four Different Document Sets

Classify yourself first: four legal sources, four separate front doors

Work out which law you qualify under before you collect anything. There is no green card in Philippine law. What Chinese-speaking clients call a green card, and what English-speaking expats usually call permanent residency, is an immigrant visa issued under Commonwealth Act No. 613, the Philippine Immigration Act of 1940. The Bureau of Immigration handles this family of work through its Legal Division. In the BI Citizen's Charter, 2026 first edition, these transactions are classified Highly Technical and the transaction type is G2C, government to client, meaning the applicant or a representative acting for the applicant is the one who files.

The charter lists conversions to Section 13(A), the spouse of a Filipino citizen; 13(B) and 13(C), the derivative and birth-related non-quota categories; 13(E), a returning resident who had previously been admitted for permanent residence, went abroad on a temporary visit and did not abandon residence in the Philippines; 13(G), a natural-born Filipino who naturalised elsewhere and returns to reside permanently; the quota immigrant visa under Section 13; and the Permanent Resident Visa issued under MCL-07-021. For how the routes compare against each other, see the four permanent residency routes; for what the label itself covers, see what a Philippine green card actually means; for the marriage route in detail, see the 13A spouse visa.

Three things sit outside this line entirely, and confusing them with it is the single most common opening mistake. The SRRV is administered on the retirement authority side by the Philippine Retirement Authority and implemented by immigration; the SIRV runs through the Board of Investments; and naturalisation is not immigration business at all — judicial naturalisation goes through the courts. People arrive with a 13(A) checklist and ask about retirement status, or assume that residency quietly turns into citizenship. Both misunderstandings cost real money to unwind, and both are routinely sold as if they were one product.

Spend ten minutes deciding which route is yours before you spend a week collecting documents. Ask for an itemised breakdown →

The requirements are facts about you, not a checklist you can shop for

There is no universal requirements list, because the requirements are four sets of facts about your own status. You do not choose a route and then assemble evidence to fit it. Answer four questions honestly and the answers will push you onto exactly one path.

One: do you have a Filipino citizen spouse? If the marriage is genuine and subsisting, the route is 13(A). There is a structural point here that catches almost everyone: the charter splits 13(A) into Probationary, which runs for one year, and Permanent, and these are two separate transactions — a Conversion and then an Amendment. It is not one filing that quietly matures. Chinese nationals married to Filipino citizens may fall instead under the Permanent Resident Visa issued pursuant to MCL-07-021; which of the two applies depends on nationality and where the marriage was registered, so confirm it before you build a file.

Two: were you a Filipino citizen who later naturalised abroad? Then your route is 13(G), and the charter attaches a hard condition to it: the applicant must be physically inside the Philippines at the time of filing. That is written into the requirements, not a local habit, and it dictates how you book travel.

Three: were you previously admitted for permanent residence? If you were, and you are returning from a temporary visit abroad without having abandoned your residence here, 13(E) is the returning resident line. Its difficulty is not building new documents; it is whether the old record can still be retrieved.

Four: none of the above. Then the remaining front door is the Section 13 quota immigrant visa, which does not depend on marriage or descent but is limited by reciprocity and an annual numerical quota. See the Section 13 quota immigrant visa for how the numbers work. Say the unflattering part out loud: the quota is a ceiling, and no amount of document quality raises it.

Three claims to reject flatly. Buying property does not come with residency — property ownership by itself confers no immigration status; see whether buying property gives you status. Residency does not automatically come with the right to work — employment rights depend on the visa category itself. And no investment or purchase converts directly into status. Any quote that bundles these together deserves a hard look before money moves.

The shared skeleton: CGAF, three passport pages, 20 days of stay, legal size folder

Whichever route you are on, four things are common: one main form, one set of passport copies, one compliant stay status, and one way of binding the file. The BI Citizen's Charter, 2026 first edition, is unusually specific about all four, which is exactly why they get skipped.

The main document is the CGAF, the Consolidated General Application Form. The charter requires it to be completed in English, in capital letters, and signed by hand by both the applicant and the petitioner. The petitioner signature block is where files stall most often. If your petitioner is out of the country, unwell, or suddenly reluctant, nothing behind page one matters.

Passport photocopies must include three things: the data page, the latest entry visa — particularly relevant if you hold a nationality that requires a visa — and the latest arrival and departure stamps. Miss one and the counter has a reason to send you back.

At the point where fees are assessed, your remaining authorised stay must be no fewer than 20 days. This is a hard gate and the most underestimated line in the whole exercise. It means you cannot let your stay run down to a handful of days and then file; you have to schedule backwards, fixing your stay status first. How to build that backward schedule is covered in where to file and how long it takes.

Documents must be arranged in the order the charter lists them, placed in a legal size folder — 8½ by 14 inches — and fastened securely. It sounds like housekeeping. It is not: this work is checked in sequence at the counter, and a file that is out of order, loose, or in the wrong folder size comes back to you while those 20 days keep counting down.

If an accredited liaison officer files on your behalf, the charter requires a photocopy of that officer's BI accreditation ID card or certificate, plus an original Special Power of Attorney with a photocopy of the attorney-in-fact's valid government-issued identification. In other words, the accreditation number is not a standard anybody invented — the charter itself requires it to be produced. A provider who cannot show one cannot legally make this filing for you; see how to vet a permanent residency provider yourself. If you want the skeleton laid out against your own facts, the Yixing visa and HR team can do that.

Where the routes diverge: relationship records, naturalisation chains, and old files

The route-specific part is a matter of categories, not line items. Line-item lists move with charter editions and with individual circumstances, so the honest version is to name the category and point you at the dedicated page. The centre of gravity differs sharply between routes.

The marriage line — 13(A), and the MCL-07-021 route — runs on relationship and civil registry records. Proof of the marriage itself, proof of the Filipino spouse's citizenship, identity and address documents for both parties, and the category of material that supports a genuine, subsisting, cohabiting marriage. Most of this can be obtained inside the Philippines, so the pace is relatively controllable. The difficulty here is usually not collection; it is remembering that probationary and permanent are two separate filings. See the 13A conversion and renewal timeline.

13(G) runs on a chain of nationality evidence. One link proving you were a Filipino citizen, another proving you subsequently acquired your present foreign nationality, and the two links have to connect — including on the name. If you changed your name at naturalisation, took a spouse's surname, or your birth record and passport spell things differently, you need an additional document bridging the two. That bridging step routinely takes longer than the main form. Combine it with the charter's requirement that the applicant be inside the Philippines when filing, and 13(G) is the most travel-sensitive of the four.

13(E), the returning resident line, runs on the old record. Your original immigrant visa, your alien registration history, and support for the proposition that you did not abandon residence here. The work is retrieval, not creation. If the file is old, was kept on paper, or sits under a superseded passport, settle the record question before anything else.

The Section 13 quota line puts the weight on evidence from your own side — qualifications or capital — layered on top of reciprocity and quota, two variables you do not control. See the Section 13 quota immigrant visa.

One warning common to all four: documents issued abroad have to go through translation and authentication, and that segment happens outside the Philippines, which is why it is the one people forget to budget for in either time or money. Do not obtain dated certificates too early; validity periods follow the current requirements of the issuing and receiving authorities. On how the money differs by route, see what permanent residency actually costs.

How the case moves: CRU to the Board, and the one step nobody can attend for you

The path is fixed: from the central receiving unit to the Board of Commissioners, with two steps in the middle that you cannot compress. The BI Citizen's Charter, 2026 first edition, sets out the stages for this class of Highly Technical case plainly enough to plan around.

Stage one: the Central Receiving Unit accepts the file. What is checked here is form — CGAF completion and signatures, the three passport copies, the order of documents, the folder specification, and whether at least 20 days of authorised stay remain. If the form fails, nothing downstream happens.

Stage two: the file is forwarded to the Legal Division's visa supervisor. The case moves from a receiving counter into substantive review. From this point on, chasing progress at the receiving counter is the wrong door.

Stage three: a hearing officer is assigned by raffle. Note the word raffle. Who gets your case, and when, is not decided by the person filing it, and nobody should be promising you a particular assignment.

Stage four: the applicant appears for the hearing at the time stated on the official receipt. This is the step nobody can do for you. A representative can file, can accompany you, can assemble the file properly — but the person in the hearing is the applicant. Treat this as the fixed anchor in your calendar and move everything else around it, not the other way round.

Stages five and six: the hearing officer evaluates and drafts the visa order, which is elevated through the Chief of the Legal Division. This is where requests for additional documents tend to surface — something raised at the hearing, something that does not reconcile in the records, a broken authentication chain on a foreign document. Obtaining the replacement almost always takes longer than submitting it.

Finally, the Board of Commissioners approves or denies, and only then does implementation and issuance follow. Because there is a hearing and a Board layer, the timeline does not start and end with the day you filed. Anyone quoting you a fixed number of days is quietly guaranteeing two stages they do not control.

Lock the step that requires you in person into the calendar first, then schedule documents backwards from it. Ask for an itemised breakdown →

Probationary versus permanent, and the upkeep that starts on approval

Getting the first visa is not the end of the matter. In the charter, 13(A) exists at two levels — Probationary, which runs one year, and Permanent — and they are two different transactions: a Conversion, then an Amendment. Treating the first as the finish line, and discovering after the one-year window that the process has to be reopened, is the most expensive misunderstanding on this route. The nodes and consequences are in the 13A conversion and renewal timeline.

Three obligations begin the day you are approved. First, the ACR I-Card. Alien registration is not a one-off; it carries its own reissuance and annual obligations. See what the ACR I-Card is. Second, long absences. Residency is not self-sustaining while you live elsewhere, and extended time outside the country raises re-entry permit questions; the boundaries are in how long a resident can be away. Third, leaving the country. Departing as a resident is procedurally different from departing as a tourist; see what a resident needs before travelling abroad.

Then the boundaries, once more. Residency is not citizenship. Judicial naturalisation runs through the courts, not the Bureau of Immigration, so anyone offering residency with citizenship attached is describing two separate things as one; for which office handles which, see where residency and naturalisation are each filed. The SRRV on the retirement authority side and the SIRV on the investment side are separate matters too — do not use this route's checklist against either. And to repeat the three rejections: buying property confers no status, investment does not convert directly into status, and long-term residence does not by itself carry the right to work. For individual disputes consult a practising lawyer; this article is not legal advice. If you want your own facts turned into a workable sequence, send them to the Yixing visa and HR team.