After you graduate
Rules read 19 Aug 2026
What Pakistan's own immigration authority currently publishes. Not a ranking, not a guarantee, and not the same as what any agent or forum will tell you. Whether someone actually obtains residence depends on occupation, points, funds and policy that can change between application and graduation.
Route to permanent residence
Pakistan's Ministry of Interior does not publish a distinct 'permanent residency' status for a foreign national separate from full citizenship. Its own visa-categories page describes Study and Work as two separate, mutually exclusive visa categories — a Study Visa (see workDuringStudy/postStudyWork: this dataset found no published work-while-studying or post-study work-search rights attached to it) carries no work rights, and someone who wants to work instead needs sponsorship from a Pakistani employer for a Work Visa, requiring an employment agreement, a company undertaking, and the employer's SECP registration. A Work Visa is granted for an initial 3 months and can then be extended, subject to security-agency clearance and a Board of Investment recommendation letter, up to 2 years at a time with multiple entries — a status that is renewed rather than one that converts automatically into any more settled status after a stated number of years. The only route this dataset found published toward a permanent status is naturalisation as a citizen outright (see citizenshipRoute) — Pakistan does not appear to publish an intermediate 'settled' or permanent-resident status of the kind several other countries in this dataset describe.
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Route to citizenship
Pakistani citizenship by naturalisation is governed by Section 9 of the Pakistan Citizenship Act, 1951, published on the Ministry of Law and Justice's own Pakistan Code portal. The Act's own text is unusually thin on stated criteria compared with the other countries in this dataset: Section 9 lets the Federal Government register a person as a citizen of Pakistan by naturalisation upon their application, if they have already been granted a certificate of naturalisation under the (colonial-era) Naturalisation Act, 1926 — but its own proviso then goes further, stating that 'the Federal Government may register any person as a citizen of Pakistan without his having obtained a certificate of naturalisation as aforesaid,' i.e. the Act itself does not set out a numbered list of residence-year, language or character requirements the way most other countries in this dataset publish; a commonly-cited 5-year-residence-plus-language figure is understood to come from subordinate Pakistan Citizenship Rules rather than the Act itself, and this dataset could not locate the current text of those Rules on an official Pakistani government domain this pass (see notes). On dual nationality, the Act is direct: Section 14(1) states that a citizen of Pakistan who is 'at the same time a citizen or national of any other country' must renounce that other nationality or 'cease to be a citizen of Pakistan' — the default is no dual nationality. Pakistan carves out a large, named exception to this default, however (Section 14(3)): the renunciation requirement does not apply to a Pakistani citizen who also holds citizenship of the United Kingdom and Colonies, or of 'such other country as the Federal Government may, by notification in the official Gazette, specify' — Pakistan has named a growing list of such countries by Gazette notification over time (reported elsewhere as including, among others, the United States, Canada, Australia, most of the EU and several Gulf and Middle Eastern states), so whether an applicant can keep their original nationality in practice depends on whether their specific country is on that notified list at the time.
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New entry added 19 August 2026. Two Pakistani government domains added to IMMIGRATION_DOMAINS in scripts/verify.mjs: dgip.gov.pk (Directorate General of Immigration & Passports, which together with interior.gov.pk administers visas) and pakistancode.gov.pk (the Ministry of Law and Justice's own official legal-code portal, hosting the actual current text of the Pakistan Citizenship Act 1951). interior.gov.pk (Ministry of Interior) was tried directly for its own work-visa policy page but returned HTTP 404 on the URL found by search; dgip.gov.pk's own visa-categories page independently states materially the same work-visa mechanics and was used instead. workDuringStudy and postStudyWork are both left null: neither dgip.gov.pk nor any other Pakistani government page found this pass states a specific work-while-studying entitlement attached to the Study Visa, or a distinct post-study/graduate job-search status separate from the ordinary employer-sponsored Work Visa — the visa-category structure (Study and Work kept as separate, non-overlapping categories) suggests none is published, but this dataset records that as an absence of evidence rather than asserting a confirmed 'no' either way. Collection note: the Pakistan Citizenship Act PDF (pakistancode.gov.pk) returned raw binary bytes to this project's default fetcher; it was downloaded and converted with pdftotext (poppler-utils, -enc UTF-8 -layout) and archived via fetch-source.mjs --save, the pattern already used elsewhere in this dataset for PDF-only government sources. The Act's own Schedule contains only the oath of allegiance, not a naturalisation-qualifications schedule — the residence-length and language criteria commonly quoted in secondary sources appear to live in the separate Pakistan Citizenship Rules, 1952 (subordinate legislation), which this dataset could not locate hosted on an official .gov.pk domain this pass; a future collector should retry finding those Rules on pakistancode.gov.pk or a provincial law portal before asserting a specific residence-year figure for Pakistan. naturalisationStatus set to 'published-route': Section 9 and its proviso, however thin, are real statutory text a foreign resident could in principle be registered under — per the doc comment on ResidencyPathway.naturalisationStatus this field records only whether something is published, not how detailed or predictable the criteria are, and Pakistan's own Act is genuinely unusual in this dataset for leaving naturalisation almost entirely to government discretion rather than spelling out a numbered qualifying test. citizenshipTerms records minimumResidenceYears null because Section 9 of the Pakistan Citizenship Act 1951 sets no residence-year figure, and the subordinate Pakistan Citizenship Rules that are commonly cited for a 5-year figure could not be located on an official Pakistani government domain this pass. dualCitizenshipAllowed is false because that is the Act’s own default, stated in Section 14’s heading and Section 14(1); Section 14(3) exempts citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies and of any other country the Federal Government notifies in the official Gazette, so for an applicant whose country is on that notified list the answer is the opposite — see citizenshipRoute.
Open the immigration authority's own page ↗