Settling into Nigeria: The Order Things Have to Happen In

Most settling-in guides for Nigeria are built as a calendar: do this in your first fortnight, that by week four, the rest by week twelve. This one is not, and the reason matters more than the layout. We could not find a single published deadline that such a calendar could be built on — and on the one step everybody puts at the start, the Nigeria Immigration Service says something that turns the whole schedule around.

Why this article has no day numbers

A timeline is a series of deadlines. Each one has to come from somewhere, and if it does not, a reader plans a move around a number that an author made up. So we checked the authority that would publish them. The Nigeria Immigration Service's CERPAC pages state no deadline after arrival, in days or weeks or months, read on 24 October 2026. What they state instead is the opposite kind of condition: Foreigners who wish to reside in Nigeria for a period not less than one (1) year may be eligible for a CERPAC. That is a floor on how long you intend to stay, not a clock that starts when you land.

So in place of day numbers this article gives you an order of dependencies — what cannot start until something else is finished — and, for every term we could not source, the office to ask. A sequence you can verify is worth more than a schedule you cannot.

Your residence permit is issued before you arrive, not in your first ninety days

This is the finding that should change how a family plans. On its e-CERPAC pages the Immigration Service writes that the permit is processed and issued before the expatriate enters the country, and that this eliminates the need for post-arrival regularization. If that applies to your permit class, the residence card is not an errand for your first weeks in Lagos or Abuja. It is a condition of boarding.

The published fees, from the Service itself rather than from an agent:

• USD 2,000 for employed foreigners
• USD 600 for students
• Gratis for foreigners married to Nigerian citizens — nothing is owed, and that is the published rate rather than a figure we could not find

Those are the amounts in the Service's own sentence about paying the applicable fees online, held in our reference data with a reading date of 21 October 2026 and re-read on the live page on 24 October 2026. Treat any other number with suspicion: the figures circulating elsewhere for the same card run from about USD 140 up to USD 2,000, which is a range wide enough to tell you that most of them are guesses. One caveat the Service creates itself: its e-CERPAC portal lists a different amount for the student class than its CERPAC page does. If you are a student, confirm your own permit class on the portal before you pay anything.

The validity is given loosely — the page describes CERPAC as being for stays of one year and above, subject to renewal, and names no renewal interval. It lists twelve permit subtypes, from R4A through N5B. Which subtype you hold decides nearly everything else, so get it in writing from your employer before you accept the posting.

Rent is paid by the year, and that is the first real obstacle

Here is the thing a week-by-week plan hides. Nigerian rent is quoted and paid annually, in advance. Hutbay, which publishes Nigerian market data, normalizes its rents to one year for exactly that reason. So the question is not when in your first month you go house hunting. It is whether a year's rent is available as cash before you fly, and whether your employer is paying it or you are.

Published medians of asking rents from Hutbay's ninety-day reporting window, measured on 6 October 2026:

• Yaba, Lagos: NGN 2,500,000 at the lower quartile, NGN 4,500,000 median, NGN 7,000,000 upper quartile, from 362 priced advertisements
• Lekki, Lagos: NGN 7,000,000, NGN 12,000,000, NGN 20,000,000, from 9,707 priced advertisements
• Ikoyi, Lagos: NGN 35,000,000, NGN 45,000,000, NGN 70,000,000, from 2,250 priced advertisements
• Garki, Abuja: NGN 5,800,000, NGN 10,000,000, NGN 20,000,000, from 335 priced advertisements
• Asokoro, Abuja: NGN 13,000,000, NGN 25,000,000, NGN 50,000,000, from 285 priced advertisements

Read all of that carefully, because the numbers are weaker than they look. They are asking prices and not rent anyone was shown to pay; the publisher writes that prices remain asking prices, not verified completion values, and in this dataset no listing at all is marked rented or leased. The three tiers are our own labeling of the lower quartile, the median and the upper quartile of the same advertisements — they are not market segments, and the publisher does not grade homes by standard. And they are per year, with nothing divided by twelve. We give no naira-to-dollar conversion, because no exchange rate sits in our reference data with a date on it and we are not going to invent one.

What we will not tell you about neighborhoods

The version of this article we are replacing recommended serviced apartments in neighborhoods picked out for being safe. We have taken that out and we are not putting a replacement in. There is no published source that grades Lagos or Abuja neighborhoods as safe or unsafe, those are real places where people live, and a sentence like that in a guide becomes a verdict on their residents.

What a family can actually work with is a list of questions, answered for the specific street and the specific building rather than for a district:

• Which electricity service band is this address on, and what does the distributor guarantee for it in writing?
• Is there a borehole or a mains water connection, and who maintains it?
• What is the generator or inverter arrangement, who owns it, and who pays for fuel?
• How long is the commute to the school you have actually been offered a place at, at the hour you would do it?
• What exactly does the annual rent cover, what is charged on top as service charge, and what is refundable?
• Who holds the title or the lease, and has your own lawyer seen it?

Schools and electricity: the figures that are published

Tuition

Very few Nigerian international schools publish fees at all. These do, and they are the top of the market rather than an average:

• American International School of Lagos: USD 21,700 a year for one child at elementary level and USD 32,200 at high school, from the fact sheet the U.S. Office of Overseas Schools publishes for the school, current as of 1 April 2026.
• American International School of Abuja: USD 9,338 a year for one child at elementary level, same source and date. The gap between the two cities is large and real; averaging them would invent a city that does not exist.
• St Saviour's School Ikoyi, Lagos: NGN 4,076,277 per term and NGN 12,228,831 for the full year for one child, for the 2026/2027 academic year, from the school's own fee page, read on 6 October 2026. Note the unit: this school bills by the term, not monthly.

Two warnings that belong with those figures. First, a British-curriculum primary school in Ikoyi answers the top tier and says nothing about the average — public education costs a fraction of this. Second, the same fee page carries a one-off application fee, a one-off acceptance fee and a refundable deposit that is exactly the size of one term's tuition. That deposit is the item most easily mistaken for the fee itself. On enrolment paperwork we have nothing published: we found no official document list for school admission, so ask the school in writing which records and certificates it requires, and how long it needs them before the term starts. That is one of the real deadlines in a move, and only the school can give it to you.

Electricity

This is the utility fact that a generic paragraph about unreliable power misses completely. Nigeria has no single electricity price. Since the 2024 reform the household rate follows the hours of supply your address is guaranteed, not the units you consume. Eko Electricity Distribution Company, which serves southern Lagos, publishes these household rates, read on 6 October 2026:

• Band A — minimum 20 hours a day: NGN 209.50 per kWh
• Band B — minimum 16 hours: NGN 61.00
• Band C — minimum 12 hours: NGN 48.53
• Band D — minimum 8 hours: NGN 32.48
• Band E — minimum 4 hours: NGN 32.44

The same kilowatt-hour costs more than six times as much in band A as in band E, because you are buying availability. So asking which service band an address sits on is a housing question, not a utilities question, and it belongs in the viewing rather than in week two. Two limits on these amounts: this is one distributor of eleven, so it is a Lagos figure rather than a Nigerian one, and the page carries no effective date, which is why the date above is the day it was read.

The order of dependencies, with no dates attached

Each step below cannot start until the one before it is finished. Where a term exists, it is set by the party named — not by us.

1. Your permit class and quota position. From your employer, in writing. Everything downstream is shaped by it.
2. The permit itself. On the Service's own account of e-CERPAC, this happens before entry. Ask the Immigration Service, through your employer's immigration adviser, whether your class is issued before travel or after, and get the answer in writing.
3. A school place. Not a shortlist — an offer. It fixes where you can live, and the school's own admission dates are the only hard calendar in the whole move.
4. A year's rent, available as cash. Who pays it, and when it leaves which account.
5. The house, chosen against the questions above, including its electricity band and its water arrangement.
6. Utilities and connectivity in your own name, which generally needs the tenancy agreement first.
7. Driving. Settle this with the Federal Road Safety Corps and your employer before you get behind a wheel. We are not printing a claim about which side of the road Nigeria drives on, because we could not find it published by the Corps, and the version of this article we are replacing had it as the left. Do not take a guide's word for it, ours included — read the Nigeria Highway Code and ask the Corps which foreign or international permit it accepts and for how long.

Notice what is missing from that list: culture, friendships, a support network. Those are real, but they are not tasks with terms, and putting them in week five of a plan is how a guide starts inventing. Nothing published tells anyone when they will feel settled.

What expats should know

• No post-arrival deadline is published by the Immigration Service. Any day-numbered settling-in schedule is somebody's invention.
• e-CERPAC is issued before entry on the Service's own account, and it says this removes the need for post-arrival regularization.
• CERPAC asks for an intended stay of not less than one year — a floor on your plans, not a clock.
• USD 2,000 employed, USD 600 student, gratis if married to a Nigerian citizen. Confirm the student figure on the portal; the Service's own pages differ.
• Rent is annual and paid up front. Published medians run from about NGN 4,500,000 in Yaba to NGN 45,000,000 in Ikoyi, and they are asking prices.
• Your electricity band is a property of the address and it changes the unit rate more than sixfold. Ask at the viewing.
• Published school fees are top-of-market and the refundable deposit is the item most often mistaken for tuition.
• Get the driving rules from the Federal Road Safety Corps, not from a relocation guide.

Where to check

The eligibility wording, the fees and the permit subtypes are from the Nigeria Immigration Service's CERPAC page, and the before-entry wording from its e-CERPAC page, both read on 24 October 2026. The rent medians and sample sizes are Hutbay's published market data, measured 6 October 2026. The electricity bands are Eko Electricity Distribution Company's published tariff plans. Tuition is from the U.S. Office of Overseas Schools fact sheets for Lagos and Abuja and from St Saviour's School Ikoyi. Road rules and permits: the Federal Road Safety Corps.

AI-Generated Content: This article was created with AI assistance and may contain inaccuracies. Please verify important information with official sources.