Tuesday, 1 September 2026, was the day the Amina app stopped being a pilot for labour migrants and became a condition of residence for every visa-free foreigner in Moscow and the Moscow region who stays longer than 90 days. Students, spouses and children joined the workers. Citizens of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan are on the list; so are those of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. Belarusians, minors and diplomats are exempt.
The app was introduced on 1 September 2025 for people who came to the capital to work. It takes the QR code from the migration card, a photograph, a home address and consent to geolocation, and it runs on one rule Kommersant printed at the launch: «Отсутствие данных о геолокации абонентского устройства в течение трех дней приведет к снятию с миграционного учета». Three days without a signal and the state stops counting you as present; after that come the register of controlled persons, the blocked bank card, the blocked SIM and possible deportation.
The rule has been used. In December 2025 the Moscow authorities removed more than 139,000 people from the migration register because their phones had gone quiet. Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said in August that 11 more regions would take the app, transport hubs first. The experiment runs to 1 September 2029.
Tajikistan's labour ministry, through its representation in Russia, told its citizens on Tuesday what the new day means in practice: registration of a place of residence now goes through the app, and the app needs the foreigner's card from a multifunctional centre. The ministry did not tell them what it costs. This piece is about that.
The bill
Start with the patent, the document that lets a citizen of a visa-free country work legally. In Moscow it costs 10,000 roubles a month from 1 January 2026, up from 8,900 in 2025, under the city's regional coefficient of 2.9323. Miss one monthly payment and the patent is annulled. No reinstatement exists. You apply again.
In roubles that is a rise of 12.4%. In dollars it is smaller, because the rouble has weakened: at the Bank of Russia's rate of 80.43 for 2 September 2025 the old patent cost about $111 a month, and at the 86.75 set for 2 September 2026 the new one costs about $115. The state raised its price in the currency the migrant earns; the currency did the rest.
The same arithmetic runs the other way on what he sends. A transfer of 30,000 roubles was worth about $373 a year ago and is worth about $346 today, 7.3% less, before any fee. A migrant who keeps his family's dollar income level has to send 7.3% more roubles, and he has to earn them after paying 12.4% more for the right to earn.
Then the annual bill. Twelve patent payments are 120,000 roubles, about $1,380 at today's rate, before the medical certificate, the biometrics, the insurance and the card. Against that, the income the state will start to require: from 1 January 2027 a patent can be refused where the holder's declared income falls below the regional subsistence minimum, with dependants counted. CAW carries the 2027 floor from the Russian legal press and has not yet opened the instrument itself; the number that matters, the regional minimum, is set region by region and is in the SOURCES block as a task, not a figure.
What the state gets for this is on record. Patents issued in Russia rose to 2.3 million in 2025, 9% more than in 2024, and the advance income tax migrants paid for them reached 172 billion roubles, 39% more than the year before, according to figures the State Duma speaker attributed to the Interior Ministry. The patent is a revenue line before it is a control.
The exit
The price of staying is one side of the ledger. Removal is the other. In the first half of 2026 the Federal Bailiff Service expelled 43,700 foreigners to 59 countries, against 26,400 in the first half of 2025: a rise of 65.5%, or 1.6 times. Moscow region alone processed about 33,500 expulsion decisions in the six months.
Two things explain the jump, and Vedomosti named both. The amnesty decree of 2025, under which a violation drew a fine instead of a removal, expired on 10 September last year. And on 24 July this year the Federation Council approved a law widening the grounds for expulsion from 22 categories of offence to 45, adding public-order violations, failure to comply with border authorities and online content the state finds degrading.
The register of controlled persons, in force since February 2025, held 685,000 names when the interior minister last put a figure on it in March that year. No newer count has been published that CAW could find, and the gap is printed as a gap. What is measurable is the flow through the door. Entries for work from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan combined fell from more than 2.3 million in the first half of 2025 to about 1.9 million in the first half of 2026, a drop of roughly 15%, in a figure the Russian regional press attributes to official statistics without naming the agency.
Uzbekistan's central bank counts its own. It put 1.34 million of its citizens working in Russia in the first quarter, 1.8% fewer than a year earlier, and it explained the decline with three reasons a central bank rarely lists about a partner: higher patent costs, a weak rouble in March, and more places to go. South Korea hosted 99,600 Uzbek citizens; Turkey issued nearly 70,000 permits, 14% more in a year.
The rails
The money has to get home, and for a quarter of Uzbekistan's inflow it went home over Zolotaya Korona. The central bank's Otabek Tojidinov gave the figure in July: $2.4 billion in the first half of 2026, about 26% of all transfers into the country.
On 23 July the European Union's 21st sanctions package listed the system's operator, RNKO Platezhny Tsentr, and Tsifra Bank, which handled its international legs. Transfers to Georgia, Armenia and Kazakhstan stopped the same day. The corridors to Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan and Turkey kept running, though Uzbekistan's Asaka Bank suspended the service for technical maintenance, without naming a reason.
Tashkent's answer was procedural. Tojidinov said the banks were negotiating to route transfers through a new, unsanctioned bank and expected the relaunch within a week; he called the effect insignificant. Five weeks later CAW cannot find a published confirmation that the new operator is live, and the SOURCES block records the query. A corridor that carries a quarter of a country's remittances and depends on one operator staying off one list is a single point of failure, whatever the central bank calls it.
The cost of the corridor is the number nobody now publishes. At the World Bank, the Remittance Prices Worldwide page for Russia to Kyrgyzstan stops in the fourth quarter of 2021, at 0.9%, and has not been updated since the war. The last independent price of sending money from Russia to Central Asia predates the sanctions on every system that carries it.
The total
Here is the part that does not fit the story so far. Every price in the machine has gone up, and the flows have gone up with them.
A corridor that carries a quarter of a country's remittances and depends on one operator staying off one list is a single point of failure, whatever the central bank calls it.
Uzbekistan received $9.28 billion in transfers in the first half of 2026, 13% more than a year earlier, and sent out $1.33 billion; the net came to about $8 billion, up 14%. Kyrgyzstan's 2025 gross inflow was $3.5 billion, 16.8% more than in 2024, and its net inflow $3.1 billion, up 22.6%, about 15% of GDP by the National Bank's estimate; the first half of 2026 brought $1,539.5 million in and $150.6 million out. Tajikistan, which does not publish comparable figures, had remittances worth 45.4% of GDP in 2024 by the World Bank's count, $5.8 billion, which Asia-Plus calls the highest ratio in the world; its 2025 number was still unpublished in January.
Three mechanisms reconcile the rising bill with the rising flow, and none of them is comfortable.
The first is that a worker who is leaving sends everything. Removal at 1.6 times last year's rate and an income floor announced for 2027 turn savings held in Russia into transfers home; a falling stock of migrants can produce a rising flow of money for exactly as long as the stock is falling.
The second is that the share is moving even where the sum is not. Russia's share of transfers into Uzbekistan fell from 77.6% to 72.4% in a year by the central bank's first-quarter count, while Kazakhstan and South Korea rose to 4.1% each, Europe to 3.3% and the rest of the world to 16.2%. Kyrgyzstan's June figure shows the other pole: $292.1 million in, $266.7 million of it from Russia, a 91% share that has not moved. Uzbekistan is diversifying its migrants; Kyrgyzstan, inside the Eurasian union and outside the patent regime, is not.
The third is the rouble, and it cuts against the other two. The statistics count dollars, and a rouble bought 7.3% fewer of them this September than last. For Uzbekistan's dollar count to rise 13% across a year in which the rouble lost ground, the rouble sum sent home had to rise by more than 13%, which is to say that part of the growth is the machine running harder to stand still.
What changes next
The next repricing has a date. On 1 January 2027 the income requirement takes effect, and a patent holder whose declared earnings fall short of the regional minimum, with dependants counted, can be refused renewal. That is a test the lowest-paid migrant fails by design, and the lowest-paid migrant is the one whose family lives on the transfer.
The receiving states have answered with instructions. Policy is absent. Dushanbe's ministry tells its citizens how to register in Amina. Bishkek's ministry told its citizens in August who must install it. Tashkent's central bank reports the falling Russian share as diversification and the sanctioned corridor as insignificant. None of the three has published what a year of legal status in Moscow costs its citizen, or what share of the transfer that cost consumes.
CAW's arithmetic gives one answer for one case. A Moscow patent holder sending 30,000 roubles a month pays 10,000 roubles a month to be allowed to earn it: a third of the transfer, before the fee, before the phone that must never go quiet for 3 days. The machine still delivers. Its price list is now written on the Russian side, in roubles, and it is revised every January.