Every article on this site is built on one fact: I went through the Paraguay residency process myself, not as a sponsored trip, but as a paying customer who picked an agency the same way you're about to: with too little information. This is what it actually looked like.
Why I did it
Like a lot of people running an online business, I wanted a legal, boring, sustainable setup: a real residency in a country with territorial taxation, low bureaucracy-per-dollar, and a path that didn't require living there full-time. Paraguay kept coming up: cheap, fast by international standards, and genuinely welcoming to immigrants. What didn't come up was reliable information about who to hire.
Choosing an agency (the hard part)
The research phase was the worst part of the entire process. Prices weren't published anywhere. The YouTube reviews were all affiliate-sponsored. Telegram groups contradicted each other daily. I ended up making a spreadsheet, emailing agencies, and comparing the answers, which is, not coincidentally, the spreadsheet this website grew out of.
What I learned in that phase:
- Agencies that answered concrete questions with concrete numbers were better at every later step too.
- "All included" means nothing until you ask exactly what's bundled: the cédula, the police certificate, the bank account, whether government fees are inside the price, and whether it's a one-trip option.
- The price difference between "cheap" and "mid-range" is small compared to the cost of a botched document doing it cheap.
The timeline, week by week
- Before the trip: documents from abroad. Criminal record check, long-form birth certificate, fingerprints, apostilles, international shipping. The criminal record was the bottleneck. I did all of this while nomadic in Mexico and Brazil, which made it more involved than doing it at home would have been. Start it before anything else.
- The trip: one visit to Asunción. The process needs only about 5 days on the ground. I stayed roughly 6 weeks, but that was personal preference, I like Paraguay, not a requirement. Airport pickup a couple of days after I landed, then the filing.
- Filing day: a single morning. Around 3 hours, started at about 9am and done by noon. I went through alongside a French client and a Spanish client, fast-tracked through the office. Photo, fingerprints, documents, all handled for me.
- About 2.5 months later: it arrived by mail. Cédula, temporary residency card and police card mailed to me, around week 10–11 after the trip. One trip total. I chose the one-trip option, so power of attorney handled everything that would otherwise need a second visit.
What it cost (all in)
| Item | Cost (USD, approx) |
|---|---|
| Agency package (Paraguay Pathways Gold, one trip — residency, cédula, police certificate, bank account) | ~$2,600 |
| Document prep (criminal record check, birth certificate, fingerprints, international shipping) | ~$365 |
| Travel | varies — see below |
| Known total (agency + documents) | ~$2,965 |
Government and cédula fees were bundled into the agency package, so there's no separate government line. Travel isn't a clean line item for me: I was already living in Latin America and flew about $250 one-way from Uruguay, then continued on to Colombia, so I've left it out of the total rather than invent a number. If you're planning your own trip, budget your flights plus roughly $800–900 a month for a one-bedroom Airbnb in Asunción. I paid in Canadian dollars; the USD figures here are approximate conversions at May 2025 rates.
Compare that with the real price ranges across the market. I paid roughly mid-range, and in hindsight paying for the one-trip option was the right call: not flying back for a second visit was easily worth it.
What I'd do differently
- Start the criminal record first. It gates everything, and doing it from outside your home country adds time.
- Ask every agency the same five questions in writing. The quality of the answers told me more than any review.
- Confirm exactly what's bundled before you pay. Government fees, the police certificate, the bank account, and whether it's genuinely one trip: get it in writing, because that's where the real price difference hides.
Why this site exists
When friends started asking "who did you use, and was it worth it?", the spreadsheet became a directory and the directory became ParaguayAgencies. Every agency listed here gets the same treatment: real prices, real services, and a rating no one can buy. If my experience saves you the three weeks of Telegram archaeology I went through, it worked.
The package also opened my RUC (Paraguay tax ID), which arrived a few months after the cédula, around November, after I sent a reminder, and I file through it now. I'm still a Paraguay Pathways customer today: they handle my address service for proof of tax residency and my monthly accounting (around $25–30 a month). I'm not writing this from the outside looking in; I'm still in it.
Start where I wish I could have: take the quiz or compare every agency side by side.