El Salvador made global headlines in 2021 as the first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender. That status quietly ended in 2025, and a surprising number of visa and relocation guides have not caught up — so we re-verified the whole picture and corrected our El Salvador pages.
What actually changed in 2025
As a prior condition of a roughly US$1.4 billion financing arrangement with the International Monetary Fund, El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly amended the Ley Bitcoin on 29 January 2025 (the changes took effect on 1 May 2025). The amendments made private-sector acceptance of Bitcoin voluntary, repealed the obligation for businesses to accept it, ended the ability to pay taxes in Bitcoin, and removed the characterisation of Bitcoin as “currency.” In practical terms, the country is no longer a place where Bitcoin functions as compulsory legal tender — even though it remains crypto-friendly and Bitcoin is still widely used in communities like El Zonte (“Bitcoin Beach”).
Why this matters for visa research
A claim like “the only country where Bitcoin is legal tender” is exactly the kind of dated fact that gets copied from guide to guide long after it stops being true. We found it baked into the name and description of one of our own El Salvador programs and removed it. If a 2026 guide still states it in the present tense, treat the rest of that page with caution.
The Freedom Visa: a flat US$1 million, not a tiered menu
El Salvador’s investor route is the Freedom Visa. The real terms are simpler than many sites suggest: a single qualifying contribution of US$1,000,000 in Bitcoin or USDT (Tether), capped at up to 1,000 participants per year, applied for online through the government portal and processed remotely in around six weeks. Successful applicants receive lifelong (permanent) residence and become eligible to apply for Salvadoran citizenship, with dependants added for an administrative fee. There is no tiered “invest in a registered crypto company / infrastructure business / hold a threshold of coins” menu — that framing is an embellishment we stripped out.
Tourists and workers: what didn’t change
For ordinary visitors, El Salvador remains part of the CA-4 agreement with Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua: most nationalities enter on a US$12 tourist card bought on arrival, and the 90-day allowance is shared across all four countries combined — not 90 days in each. The employer-sponsored work permit still runs through the Ministry of Labour (MTPS) labour-market test and a 12-month residence tied to the sponsoring employer. We softened the Bitcoin references on both pages so they read as history, not current policy.
How we verify this
We corrected the investor program’s name and description, realigned its document checklist, added refusal reasons to all three El Salvador programs, and dated every change. Sources include the IMF country report, contemporaneous reporting on the law change, and a specialist immigration-law brief on the Freedom Visa. Our process is in our Editorial & Data Standards; start from the El Salvador destination hub. If you are comparing investor and golden-visa routes generally, see our longest visa-free stays and digital nomad visas by income data sets.