US Citizenship: How to Become an American Citizen (2026)

Citizenship cannot be bought. No investment or gift program gives US citizenship directly; the Gold Card leads to a green card, not a passport.

To file Form N-400 you generally must:

1. Be at least 18 and a lawful permanent resident.
2. Have held a green card for 5 years, or 3 years if you have been married to and living with the same US citizen spouse during that time.
3. Show continuous residence. Trips abroad of more than 6 months can break it; trips of 1 year or more usually do.
4. Show physical presence in the US for at least half of the period: 30 months of the 5 years, or 18 months of the 3 years.
5. Live for 3 months in the state or USCIS district where you apply.
6. Show good moral character, meaning no disqualifying crimes, honest tax filing, and truthful answers.
7. Pass the English and civics tests.
8. Support the Constitution and take the Oath of Allegiance.

You can file up to 90 days before you meet the residence requirement. Find your earliest date with the naturalization date calculator, and read the step-by-step naturalization guide.

At your interview, a USCIS officer tests:

• English speaking, through the interview itself
• English reading and writing, by asking you to read and write a sentence
• Civics, oral questions about US history and government

For applications filed on or after October 20, 2025, USCIS uses the 2025 civics test: the officer asks up to 20 questions from a published list of 128, and you must answer 12 correctly. Applicants aged 50 or older with 20 years as a permanent resident, or 55 or older with 15 years, can skip the English test and take the civics test in their own language with an interpreter. People with qualifying medical disabilities can ask for an exception on Form N-648.

If you fail a part, you get one retest, usually within 60 to 90 days. Prepare with our citizenship test guide.

An executive order signed on January 20, 2025 (Executive Order 14160) tried to deny citizenship to some US-born children whose parents were undocumented or in the US temporarily. Courts blocked it, and on June 30, 2026 the Supreme Court struck it down in Trump v. Barbara, 6 to 3. The Court held that children born in the US to parents who are unlawfully or temporarily present are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment.

In practice, a child born in the US is a citizen, and parents can get a birth certificate and a US passport as before. The ruling does not give the parents any immigration status.

If you were born outside the US and at least one parent was a US citizen at the time, you may already be a citizen, without ever applying. The rules depend on the year you were born, whether your parents were married, and how long the citizen parent lived in the US before your birth. For children born today to one citizen parent and one non-citizen parent, the citizen parent must usually have lived in the US for 5 years, at least 2 of them after age 14.

Parents abroad register the birth at a US consulate with a Consular Report of Birth Abroad (CRBA). Adults can prove citizenship with Form N-600 or a US passport application. See citizenship by descent.

US law does not require you to give up your other citizenship when you naturalize, even though the oath includes renouncing other allegiances. Whether you keep your original citizenship depends on your other country's law. Some countries end your citizenship automatically when you naturalize elsewhere. Read dual citizenship before you apply.

• Birthright citizenship confirmed by the Supreme Court on June 30, 2026.
• New civics test in use for applications filed since October 20, 2025.
• Holds for travel-ban nationals. USCIS has been holding many pending applications from nationals of the travel ban countries for extra review. If this applies to you, talk to a licensed immigration lawyer.
• Stricter review of character. USCIS has said it weighs good moral character more broadly. Be fully honest on your N-400, including about arrests that did not lead to charges.

Canada and Mexico have their own rules; see Canadian citizenship and Mexican citizenship.