a ruleSurrogacy law across borders

Where a surrogacy arrangement may lawfully be made, for whom, and on what terms. The legality rows below read one named instrument per jurisdiction, on one date. Three broad settlements recur: altruistic surrogacy permitted under a supervising body and a court, with a residence requirement that closes it to arrivals; an explicit or implicit prohibition; and no regulation at all, which is not permission but absence.

The residence requirement is the pattern. Every European Member State that has legislated for surrogacy — Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, Ireland — requires the intended parents, the surrogate, or both to live there. The European Parliamentary Research Service puts it plainly across the four: all of them require permanent or habitual residence in the country where the child is to be born, and Ireland asks for two years of it.

The states that permit it therefore permit it for their own residents. The states that arrivals actually travel to are, mostly, the states that have not legislated — and in those the arrangement is not protected, the contract may be unenforceable, and parenthood is established, if at all, after the fact.

The second question is recognition at home, and it is a different body of law. Since 2014 the European Court of Human Rights has issued a run of judgments on parenthood established abroad, the effect of which is that a state which refuses to recognise it must provide some means of regularising what the Court calls a limping legal relationship. The Hague Conference has run a project on parentage and surrogacy for years; the European Commission proposed a parenthood regulation in 2022 and the Council is still discussing it.

Italy is the outlier and worth naming for it: Article 12(6) of Legge 40/2004 was amended in November 2024 to reach Italian nationals who conclude a surrogacy agreement abroad. It is the only extraterritorial clause among the Member States the briefing surveys.

The two big Asian destinations closed within a year of each other and closed by nationality rather than by conduct. India's 2021 Act defines a couple as a legally married Indian man and woman. Thailand's 2015 Act, passed after a scandal over a child left behind by foreign intended parents, requires adult Thai citizenship. Inference — a nationality gate is a cleaner instrument than a conduct rule: it does not ask what was paid or who arranged it, and it cannot be satisfied by any amount of documentation.

Inference — the rows that say no-data are the other half of this table, and they are statements about this project rather than about those countries. Georgia, Ukraine and Mexico are among the places most often named in this trade, and no national instrument for any of them could be read on this pass.

Reading a row: status describes the position for an arrangement made in that jurisdiction, not the recognition of one made elsewhere. A prohibition in the country of origin can still block recognition on public-policy grounds, which is a separate question this table does not answer.

What a reader would have to establish, and what no table can answer: whose law governs the agreement, which court establishes parenthood and when, whether the child acquires a nationality at birth and which, what travel document the child needs to leave, and what the home state does on arrival.

As of 17 September 2026 the European rows rest on the European Parliamentary Research Service briefing of February 2025, which names the national instrument for each Member State it covers. The Indian and Thai rows are read off the statutes themselves. Every row carries the date it was read, and a row older than the law is a wrong row.