Luxembourg Cityculture & etiquette

Third-country nationals apply to the Immigration Directorate of the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs from abroad, and must hold the temporary authorisation to stay when they arrive. It is valid for 90 days once granted. Turning up as a visitor and applying from inside Luxembourg is not the process, and it has cost people job offers. This ordering is unusual in the EU and it is the number one mistake here.

Three days, not three weeks. Take your passport, your authorisation to stay and proof of address to the commune where you are living. The copy of that declaration together with the authorisation is what constitutes your lawful right of residence until the permit card is issued. Then you have three months from entry to lodge the residence permit application itself, which costs €80.

Since 1 March 2020 all second-class bus, tram and train travel within Luxembourg is free for everyone: residents, commuters and visitors alike. No ticket, no pass, no registration. The only exceptions are first-class rail and the sections of cross-border journeys outside Luxembourg. It is the first nationwide scheme of its kind in the world and it is not a trial.

From the 2025 tax year the regime exempts 50% of gross annual remuneration, capped at €400,000, for the year of arrival plus eight years. You need a fixed annual salary of at least €75,000 and you must not have lived within 150 km of the Luxembourg border, or been taxed here, in the five preceding tax years. Luxembourg is small: Metz, Trier and Arlon are all inside that radius.

A one-bedroom apartment in Luxembourg City runs roughly €1,900–2,800 a month, and Kirchberg and Limpertsberg sit at the top of that. The salary offer that looks transformative from Lisbon or Warsaw is competing with a housing market that absorbs a great deal of it. Roughly half the workforce concludes the maths does not work and commutes in from across a border.

Luxembourgish is the national language, French is the language of legislation and most administration, and German dominates schooling and the press. English runs the finance and technology sectors. In practice: French gets you through daily life, German through the newspapers, English through the office, and Luxembourgish opens social doors nothing else does. Nationality requires a Luxembourgish language test.