Immigration Office Larnaca: the District Aliens and Immigration Unit

The Larnaca District Aliens and Immigration Unit is the Cyprus Police office that handles residence permit applications, renewals and EU registrations for people living in the Larnaca district. It sits under the police rather than the Migration Department, and it is one of four district units serving the island outside Nicosia.

The naming confusion is not the reader's fault. People search for the migration department in Larnaca because that is the department deciding their case. But the building they can walk into belongs to the police. The Migration Department itself sits under the Deputy Ministry of Migration and International Protection, established by Law 23(I)/2024, which is why older guides still name the Ministry of Interior. Police.gov.cy sets the structure out plainly: the Aliens and Immigration Unit has its headquarters in Nicosia, and the district units are its branches.

You will see the same office written several ways. None of them means you have the wrong place: Larnaca, Larnaka, Λάρνακα or the unaccented λαρνακα; Aliens and Immigration Unit; DAIU; and "Migrant and immigration Office", which is the label Google attaches to it.

Your district of residence decides your office. The next section is how to book it.

One month is the published minimum, not a target. I would send the request the day that window opens.

The protocol comes straight from the appointment sheet published on gov.cy, a scanned one page document reachable from a single sentence on the appointments page. Here is what it asks for.

1. 1
   Email at least one month before expiry. The deadline runs from the expiry date of your current residence permit or entry visa, not from the date you would like to be seen.
2. 2
   Send one request per family. Not one per person. A second request for the same household slows everyone down.
3. 3
   Write the personal details in capital letters. The sheet says so explicitly. Odd, but free to comply with.
4. 4
   Include all ten fields. Name and surname, date of birth, nationality, passport number, date of last arrival, Alien Registration Card (ARC) number, expiry date of the residence permit, File Number (MP), how many people are applying, and a local telephone number.
5. 5
   Wait five working days. The reply carries the details, and you can amend or cancel afterwards. The sheet asks you not to resend.

No online booking portal is published today. What gov.cy does state is the date email arrived: from 23 May 2023 an appointment could be arranged over the internet in addition to the call centre. Older guides point at a booking site, crmd.simplybook.pro, that is not the route the police publish now, but no government page says when, or whether, it was switched off, so treat any shut-off date you read for it as unconfirmed. Treat any page offering you a booking link as out of date either way.

If you would rather phone, gov.cy publishes the Larnaca appointment telephone centre as 24804223 and 24804236, verified on 1 September 2026. Read the next section before you dial. Its police branch directory publishes three further numbers for the same unit, and its English and Greek editions do not list the same ones.

Several widely cited guides give 08:00 to 14:30 instead. That is the Migration Department's range, not a police unit's, and the two get copied into each other constantly. Gov.cy publishes both on one page: the Migration Department at 08:00 to 14:30 with last entry at 14:00, and the Police Aliens' and Immigration Units at 07:30 to 14:30. Google's own listing shows a 13:30 close. I would treat none of the later times as safe and arrive at opening on a weekday morning.

That table is the part of this page I would ask you to read twice, because gov.cy does not tell one story here. The English edition of the police branch directory, last modified 31 December 2025, lists 24-804233, 24-804223 and 24-804231. The Greek edition of the same directory, last modified 30 March 2026, lists only 24-804223 and 24-804226. Both give the fax as 24-304216 and the hours as 07:30 to 14:30. So the Greek page is three months newer, drops one number the English page carries and adds one the English page does not.

The last two rows may well ring the right desk, and I am not telling you they are wrong. I am telling you that no government page carries them, which is a different claim and a more useful one. The Migration Department's contact page lists no Larnaca number at all, so the appointment sheet and the branch directory are the only official sources for this office. 24804223 is the one number all three of those records agree on, which is why it is the number I would dial first.

The address turns out to be the settled part, once you go to the source. Every source agrees on the quarter, which appears as Piale Pasa, Piyale Paşa or Πιαλέ Πασά depending on where you read it. All three point at the same Republic of Cyprus neighbourhood in Larnaca.

The street number looked contested until I read both gov.cy editions against each other. The English edition of the police branch directory gives 34 Tasou Mitsopoulou, 6027 Larnaca, and the Greek edition gives Τάσου Μητσόπουλου 34, 6027 ΛΑΡΝΑΚΑ. The two agree, and I checked both on 1 September 2026, so 34 Tasou Mitsopoulou is the number to write on a form.

The competing versions all come from listings rather than from the government. Tasou Mitsopoulou at Piale Pashia 142 and Piale Pasa 75 both circulate, and Google's own listing gives a plus code with no street number whatsoever. If a source hedges this address, including an earlier version of this page, it was working from listings and had not read the police directory.

Some applications are examined only at the Migration Department headquarters in Nicosia, whatever district you live in. If yours is one of these eleven, the Larnaca unit cannot take it:

1. Immigration Permits (Categories A to F)
2. Long-Term Resident Status
3. Educational Institutions
4. Research Centres
5. Foreign Interest Companies
6. EU Blue Card
7. Shipping Companies
8. Intra-Corporate Transfers
9. Digital Nomad Visa
10. Start-up Visa
11. Visitors attending programmes

The rule runs both ways. Gov.cy warns that applications outside those categories will not be accepted at headquarters and will be referred back to the district unit, so turning up in Nicosia with an ordinary renewal wastes a day.

If several of those categories describe your situation, the practical route is usually the permit itself rather than the office: working or studying here sets out what each permit needs.

The confusion is reasonable rather than careless, because both desks genuinely belong to the same organisation. Police.gov.cy states that the branches of the Aliens and Immigration Unit are the divisional units and the Passport Control Departments at Larnaca and Paphos airports. Same unit, different job.

One practical detail seals it. Both sets of numbers begin 24804, so a single mistyped digit lands you at a real desk that cannot help you. Hermes Airports publishes the airport numbers if you need to check them.

So the routing rule is short. Arriving or departing, that is the airport. A residence permit, that is Piale Pasa. Customs is a separate authority again.

There is no registration and no public lookup by passport number. The service is set out on gov.cy.

If the SMS route does not help, the question becomes who is holding your file. A third country national's file assembled in Larnaca travels to the Migration Department in Nicosia for the decision. So a file still in progress is a Larnaca question, and a decision is a Nicosia question. The Migration Department's contact page asks you to have your file number or ARC to hand before you call, which is worth doing whichever office you ring.

I will be straight about this, because pretending otherwise sets people up for a bad morning. As of 1 September 2026 the Larnaca unit holds 2.4 out of 5 from 80 Google reviews. The equivalent Nicosia office is rated much the same.

I raise that as a planning fact, not a complaint. It is a busy public counter with a queue. Plan for the wait and the rating stops mattering much.

In my practice, the wasted visits are rarely lost at the queue. They are lost in the file: one document missing, and nothing else in the appointment can move.

• Arrive at opening rather than mid morning. The queue builds early, and the counter often stops taking new arrivals before the posted closing time.
• Bring the complete document set. A missing certified lease or insurance certificate is a routine reason to be sent home.
• Write your ARC and file number on paper. You may be asked to put your phone away.
• Allow the whole morning. Do not book anything else before 15:00.

That last row is the surprising one. Nicosia is absent from the appointment sheet entirely, so Nicosia district residents are served at the Migration Department's central offices instead of booking by email. If that is you, the Nicosia office works differently and the answer there is to turn up early rather than to write. The same email protocol runs at the Famagusta district unit in Paralimni, and you can compare all five districts in the district by district directory.

This guide covers the Republic of Cyprus only. Offices in the Turkish occupied north operate under a separate administration and do not handle Republic of Cyprus residence matters.

If you are still working through your first year here, the first year admin checklist covers the order to do things in, including how the 90 day rule interacts with a residence application.

The details the appointment email asks for are the details the counter asks for, so if you followed the booking section you already have most of this written down.

• Passport
• Alien Registration Card (ARC)
• File Number (MP)
• Your current residence permit, with its expiry date
• Date of last arrival in Cyprus

Then the supporting documents people most often forget. Proof of address is usually a certified rental agreement, and a health insurance certificate is commonly requested alongside it. Neither appears in the government sources I can point you to. So treat both as commonly required rather than as a statutory list, and check what your own permit type needs. If you are shopping for cover to satisfy the requirement, there is a plain explanation of the medical cover expected for a permit on DigiCare, the insurance company that owns this site.

If you are an EU, EEA or Swiss citizen, the paperwork is different and lighter. Registering as an EU citizen sets out what the MEU1 route needs.

For anything you need to put in writing afterwards, the Migration Department asks that correspondence be addressed to the Director of the Migration Department, and that it carries the date, your name and surname, your signature and a return address.