Position dated 4 September 2026. Status: In force. Instrument: Zakon o izmjenama i dopuni Zakona o posredovanju u prometu i zakupu nepokretnosti (Law amending and supplementing the Law on Brokerage in the Sale and Lease of Real Estate), Official Gazette of Montenegro 114/2026, published 3 August 2026, in force 11 August 2026. Base statute: Gazette 89/2025, in force 13 August 2025.
If you are buying on the coast, the person showing you the apartment is now a regulated profession with a public list attached, and until recently we could not tell you which articles governed it — the adopted text of the 2025 statute was not available in any source we trusted, so we declined to cite article numbers. That is no longer the case. Both the base statute and this amendment have been read from the promulgation decrees filed with the Assembly, so what follows carries article numbers.
What the base statute set up
Article 3(1) makes entry in the Registar posrednika (the broker register) a condition of doing the work at all, and Article 10 closes the loop: a broker "may begin performing brokerage activity" upon entry in the register, not upon company formation. The Ministry decides on an application within fifteen days and the entry follows within three days of the decision; a refusal opens an administrative dispute. Article 11 makes the register public and electronic, which is the part that matters to a buyer: you can look your agent up.
Article 9(1) sets the physical condition. The broker must have premises with appropriate equipment, "fully separated from premises of other purposes", meeting minimum technical conditions that the Ministry prescribes. Article 36 carries the headline penalties for working without registration: a legal entity is fined 4,000 to 20,000 euros, an entrepreneur 2,000 to 6,000, and alongside the fine the court may impose a ban on performing the activity for thirty days to six months and order the decision published.
Article 41 gave existing agencies twelve months from the statute's entry into force to align and apply. That clock started on 13 August 2025.
What the amendment changed
Four articles, and the third is the one to diarise.
| Article | Change |
|---|---|
| 1 | Article 36(3): fine for a natural person and the responsible person in a legal entity rises from 1,000–2,000 to 2,000–4,000 euros |
| 2 | New Article 37a: premises offences, separately fined |
| 3 | Article 41: "12 months" becomes "24 months" |
| 4 | In force on the eighth day after publication — 11 August 2026 |
The timing of Article 3 is worth pausing on. The original twelve months ran out on 13 August 2026. This amendment entered into force on 11 August 2026 — two days before that. The extension to twenty-four months therefore lands on 13 August 2027, and it reached the statute book with barely a weekend to spare.
New Article 37a is the substantive addition. A legal entity is fined 1,500 to 5,000 euros for conducting brokerage in premises not fully separated from premises of other purposes or from residential space, contrary to Article 9(1); 500 to 2,000 euros where the premises lack the equipment and minimum technical conditions. An entrepreneur faces 300 to 1,500 euros for either, and the responsible person in a legal entity 500 to 1,000.
Read Article 37a against Article 9(1) and you find something the base text does not say in terms. Article 9(1) requires separation from "premises of other purposes"; the penalty article spells out "or residential space". The agency run from the owner's flat — common enough in Budva and Kotor — is now named in the fining provision.
What the text does not say
It does not say the register is a quality mark. Registration under Article 10 turns on meeting the statutory conditions, not on any assessment of competence or of client money handling, and we would not read an entry as a recommendation.
Nor does it resolve one deferred question. Article 42 of the base statute provides that Article 3(2) applies only from the day Montenegro accedes to the European Union. What that paragraph does, and therefore what changes on accession, is not something we can set out from the text we have read; we have the adopted statute but have not yet worked through that provision against the register regime. We will not guess at it.
Our reading
For a buyer the practical value is Article 11: the register is public and electronic, so ask for the agency's registration and check it rather than take the shopfront as evidence. Until 13 August 2027 an unregistered agency is not necessarily in breach — it may still be inside the Article 41 window — so the honest question is not "are you registered" but "are you registered, and if not, when did you apply". After that date the Article 36 exposure is real, and the ban on activity for up to six months is the part that would strand a transaction mid-flight.
For anyone operating an agency, Article 37a changes the economics of a home office. The separation requirement was always in Article 9(1); what was missing was a price. It now has one, and it applies from 11 August 2026 — not from the 2027 deadline, which governs registration, not premises. Those are two different clocks and it would be easy to assume the later one covers both. Our Montenegro real estate practice page sets out how we work through a purchase file.
What did not change
Article 36(1) and (2) are untouched: 4,000 to 20,000 euros for an unregistered legal entity, 2,000 to 6,000 for an entrepreneur, plus the protective measures. The registration mechanics in Article 10 — fifteen days to decide, three to enter, administrative dispute on refusal — are unchanged, as is the public character of the register in Article 11. Article 9(1)'s substantive requirement is unchanged; only the penalty for breaching it is new. And the amendment does not touch Article 42, so the accession-dependent provision stays where it was.
How to verify
Both texts sit in the Assembly's archive as promulgation decrees. The amendment is in the file for EPA 1023 XXVIII: zakoni.skupstina.me/zakoni/web/app.php/akt/4194 — open the last document, numbered 16-2/26-2/9 and dated 29 July 2026, and you will find four articles, with the twelve-to-twenty-four-month substitution in Article 3. The base statute is in the file for EPA 420 XXVIII: zakoni.skupstina.me/zakoni/web/app.php/akt/3583, where Article 9 sets the premises rule, Article 10 the registration mechanics, Article 36 the fines and Article 41 the transition period.
The gazette entries record the base statute as published on 5 August 2025 and in force on 13 August 2025, and the amendment as published on 3 August 2026 and in force on 11 August 2026. Those two dates are what the 2027 deadline is built from. We follow this file under Legal Updates.
