The End of Tashkent's Propiska (October 2025)

On 12 October 2025 a 2011 law with a very long name stopped mattering. Its title was "On the list of categories of citizens of the Republic of Uzbekistan subject to permanent registration in the city of Tashkent and Tashkent region", and for fourteen years it decided which Uzbek citizens were allowed to call their own capital home.

The list had twelve entries. If you weren't on it, you could visit Tashkent, work there informally, even rent a flat there. You just couldn't legally live there.

What a propiska actually did

A propiska is a residence registration stamped into your passport. In Uzbekistan it wasn't a formality you filed and forgot. Writing in The Diplomat in 2018, Umida Hashimova described it as a compulsory domicile: you were expected to live and work where your propiska said, children could get a state education only where their parents were registered, and failing to show the right registration could mean a fine.

Every Uzbek town had the system. Tashkent and the surrounding region enforced it hardest.

The 2011 law's twelve categories covered people with an obvious family or official claim: property owners, close relatives, dependents, adopted children, minor siblings left without parents, and officials appointed or approved by parliament, the president or the Cabinet of Ministers, plus their families. Employers were a second door. Hashimova counted 70 government agencies able to sponsor staff for a Tashkent registration in 2018; the Uzbek Forum for Human Rights puts the figure at 65. Either way, it was a short list for a country of over 30 million.

The Uzbek Forum's account of the practical effects is blunt. Unregistered workers in the capital were exposed to extortion and exploitation, lived with the fear of random police document checks, and paying off police and officials became, in the group's words, an inexorable part of the system. It also documented rules that seem designed to close loopholes: a spouse who gained registration through marriage faced restrictions on property transfers for three years.

A rule written in 1932

None of this was invented in Tashkent. The Soviet internal passport and the compulsory propiska were introduced together by a USSR Central Executive Committee resolution in 1932, a tool for deciding who could settle in the cities and who couldn't.

That argument outlived the USSR almost word for word. In late 2018 a Legislative Chamber deputy, Akmal Umrzakov, defended the Tashkent restrictions on the grounds that they curbed crime and kept urban growth under control, and denied they limited freedom of movement. Hashimova pointed out that his justification was the same one given in the 1932 resolution. The government's more practical defence came from Deputy Justice Minister Akbar Toshkulov, who said the delays were about capacity: Tashkent didn't yet have the schools or housing for a wave of new arrivals.

Is that a fair worry? Partly. Capitals across the world struggle with migration from poorer regions. But most of them handle it with housing policy, not by making residence itself a permit, and the costs of the Uzbek approach landed on the people least able to pay the bribe.

Seven years of taking it apart

The repeal didn't arrive in one go. It came in slices, and the first deadline was missed by years.

Date	Step
2017	Non-residents allowed a Tashkent propiska if they bought a new-build flat costing at least about $94,000 (average salary that year: an estimated $166 a month, per The Diplomat). The rule was later widened to buildings at least three years old, regardless of price.
Early 2018	Step 56 of the year's 231-step reform programme promises to cancel the propiska by 20 March 2018. The deadline passes.
January 2019	Presidential decree lifts the ban on hiring people without a Tashkent registration (Uzbek Forum).
1 April 2020	A Tashkent registration is no longer needed to buy property in the city or region.
8 May 2023	Presidential decree orders the 2011 law repealed.
15 October 2024	Legislative Chamber adopts the new registration law.
24 January 2025	Senate approves it.
11 July 2025	President Shavkat Mirziyoyev signs it.
12 October 2025	Law in force; the 2011 list of twelve categories falls away.

The most quoted verdict on the old system came from Sodiq Safoyev, then First Deputy Chairman of the Senate and a Tashkent native. In a January 2021 interview with the Uzbekistan 24 channel he called it shameful, and said citizens couldn't live in Tashkent as they wished, couldn't find jobs and were denied legal residency. That was after the 2020 changes but more than four years before the law behind it was finally struck off.

Our view: the 2020 steps did most of the practical work, since jobs and property were where the propiska bit hardest. The 2025 law matters for a different reason. It removed the category list from the statute book, which means a future government can't quietly tighten it again without passing a new law.

What replaced it

Registration still exists. What changed is who needs permission.

The new law, "On the registration of citizens of the Republic of Uzbekistan, foreign citizens and stateless persons at their place of residence and place of stay", sets up what Gazeta.uz describes as a notification-based system. Any citizen can now register permanently in Tashkent. You tell the state where you live rather than asking it whether you may. Applications for place-of-stay registration go through the my.gov.uz public services portal, public service centres or the migration departments of the Interior Ministry.

A few details from the text, as reported by Kun.uz and Qalampir.uz:

Whoever provides the housing, landlord or family member, is responsible for making sure the people living there are registered on time.
Uzbek citizens who live permanently abroad must register within 10 working days of entering the country.
Permanent registration needs the owner's passport or ID, the applicant's, and the owner's written consent (notarised where required). The legal norms for social housing still have to be met.
Hotels and other accommodation register guests through the E-mehmon system, and a separate notification tool, E-xabar berish, handles registration of foreigners and stateless people.

That third point is worth pausing on. Owner consent is still required, so a tenant whose landlord won't cooperate can still end up unregistered. The wall came down; the landlord kept a key.

The same family as your hotel slip

If you've travelled in Uzbekistan, you've already met the propiska's cousin. The small printed slip a hotel hands you at check-out, the rule that a foreigner must be registered after three days, the E-mehmon portal for private stays: all of it is tourist registration, and it comes from the same Soviet instinct that the state should know where everyone sleeps.

The October 2025 law covers both. One statute now handles citizens and foreigners, residence and short stays, which is why the reform shows up in travel advice as well as in Uzbek domestic news. For a visitor the practical position hasn't changed much: stay in hotels and it's done for you; stay with friends and your host (or you) registers the stay online.

There was a second half to Soviet movement control, and Uzbekistan kept that one until 2019. The propiska governed where a citizen could live inside the country. The exit visa governed whether they could leave it, and its abolition came almost seven years before the propiska's.

What's left is ordinary bureaucracy: an address on file, a portal, a landlord's signature. The capital that's grown up without the old barrier, with its Soviet-era blocks and new towers alike, is now open to anyone with a passport and a place to stay.

Sources

This article is for general information and is not legal advice.