What Does an Immigration Lawyer Cost?
Fixed fees from a few thousand crowns for an application check to tens of thousands for appeals — plus the state fees nobody warns you about.
Immigration is the field where paying a lawyer is most obviously optional — thousands of people file employee-card renewals themselves every month — and where a mistake costs the most time. Pricing follows that logic: routine filings are cheap to get help with, and rescue operations are not.
How immigration lawyers price
Most work is fixed-fee, because the products repeat. Market practice in Prague and Brno looks roughly like this: a consultation mapping your options, 1 500–3 500 Kč; document review before you file yourself, 2 000–5 000 Kč; full preparation and filing of a long-term visa or employee-card application, 10 000–25 000 Kč; permanent-residence applications with their timeline arithmetic, 15 000–30 000 Kč; citizenship files, often 20 000–40 000 Kč. Corporate relocation packages (an employer moving several hires) are quoted per case but per-person prices drop quickly.
Hourly billing (commonly 2 000–4 000 Kč) takes over where the path is unclear — mixed purposes, expired statuses, inspections — and in appeals and litigation.
The rescue tier is its own category: an appeal against a refusal or a lawsuit against ministry inaction typically runs 15 000–40 000 Kč per instance. Compare that to the cost of the underlying problem — months of lost work authorisation, a broken five-year residence count — and the economics of doing the original application carefully explain themselves.
The state fees on top
Administrative fees are separate and non-negotiable, set by the Administrative Fees Act (Act No. 634/2004 Sb.) and consular tariffs: employee-card and long-term-residence applications at embassies and ministry offices generally cost in the low thousands of crowns per filing (commonly around 1 500–5 000 Kč depending on the permit and where it is filed — check the current schedule for your specific permit, as amounts differ between embassy and in-country filings and change with amendments). Add certified translations of foreign documents (typically 300–600 Kč per page), apostilles from your home country, nostrification of diplomas where required, and the A2/B1 language exams for permanent residence and citizenship (first attempts are state-funded in defined cases; repeats are paid).
What drives the price up or down
Three drivers dominate. Document geography: a Canadian criminal-record extract with an apostille and certified translation is a different project than a Slovak one. Status cleanliness: continuous legal residence with tidy filings is cheap to extend; a missed deadline converts a 2 000 Kč renewal into an appeal-tier problem. Deadlines: immigration work compresses badly — the 60-day window after losing a job, the last-day renewal, the 15-day appeal all price accordingly.
Keeping costs down is mostly calendar discipline: diary the renewal window when the permit is issued, not when it expires; keep every filing confirmation; scan every document you ever submit. And use lawyers where they add leverage — a document review before filing costs a tenth of an appeal after a refusal.
A note on "visa agencies"
The market has agencies pricing below lawyers. Some are excellent administrators; none can represent you in appeal proceedings, and the Advocacy Act reserves legal representation to attorneys. The practical test: who signs the power of attorney, and who answers when the ministry sends a defect notice? For clean, standard filings an agency or a careful applicant is often enough. For anything touching refusals, gaps, or the five-year count, you want someone who can litigate the file they built.
On CasePilot, immigration specialists list languages — including English, Ukrainian, Vietnamese and Russian — alongside rates and reviews, and the fixed-fee question ("what exactly does the price include, and what costs extra if the ministry asks for more?") is precisely the one to ask in a first consultation.