New rules for Kazakhstan's state housing queue took effect on 14 September 2026. Order No. 426, signed on 28 August by acting Minister of Industry and Construction Yersaiyn Nagaspayev, rewrote the registration rules completely, title included.
Two chapters appeared that had never been there before: one on removal from the queue, one on inventory. Inventory here means cross-checking an applicant and their household against state databases: whether they own property, whether the household has changed, whether the grounds for queuing still hold. It must now run at least once a quarter, with updated lists published on the Otbasy Bank website.
The clause that obliged the bank to obtain separate consent for collecting and processing personal data is gone from the rules. The bank and the responsible committee announced that the check now covers people who never gave that consent.
If you are on the list, the check covers you and every member of your household. Any mismatch and you are removed "proactively", meaning without filing anything and without visiting the bank. A written notice stating the reason arrives within ten days of the decision.
Nine grounds that did not exist before
The old version of the rules covered only how to join the queue. How someone could be taken off it was simply not written down. Now the grounds are listed:
- the reasons for being considered in need of housing no longer apply;
- permanent move to another settlement;
- end of employment at a state institution or state enterprise;
- receiving housing from the state housing stock;
- false data in the submitted documents;
- renouncing Kazakh citizenship or holding another country's residence permit;
- life imprisonment under a final court sentence;
- being declared missing by a court;
- death, or being declared dead by a court.
Two of those grounds, receiving state housing and submitting false data, extend to household members. If anyone queued alongside you receives state housing, everyone comes off the list.
Six groups are shielded separately: orphans, families raising children with disabilities, large families, single-parent families, widows and widowers, and kandas (ethnic Kazakhs who resettled in Kazakhstan). They do not lose their place because the feature that gave them the category fell away, such as children growing up or a disability being lifted. The nine general grounds still apply to them.
The 50 percent share cuts both ways
Headlines read like housing just got harder to obtain. The text of the order reads differently.
The old wording required that an applicant own no "dwelling" for the past five years. Whether a quarter share of a grandmother's flat counted as a dwelling, the rules never said. The new version sets the threshold openly: what disqualifies you is a dwelling, or a share of fifty percent or more in your only dwelling.
So a share below half now clearly does not block the queue. That removes an ambiguity rather than tightening anything.
The tightening sits next to it and gets less attention. Clause 8 extends the same requirement to the applicant's household members, and clause 15 turns a relative's qualifying share into direct grounds for refusal. Previously the requirement itself was written for the applicant alone. Long-term rent-to-own commitments were added to the refusal list as well.
Who counts as a household member is also defined for the first time: a permanently cohabiting spouse and children, including adopted ones and those in the applicant's care or under guardianship. Parents-in-law and the families of children join that circle only by mutual agreement.
Rooms are counted differently, but under a different order
From 14 September, housing is allocated by room count matched to household size. The rule is real, but it did not come from Order No. 426. It comes from Order No. 407 of 14 August, which amends a different set of rules, the ones on state support measures.
Order No. 407 mostly took effect back in August, ten calendar days after first official publication. But five paragraphs carrying the room formula were held back by a separate clause until exactly 14 September, so they would start alongside the new registration rules. Two different documents changed that day, and both matter.
Spouses get one room. Household members of the same sex get one room per two people. Members of different sexes, spouses aside, get separate rooms on the same ratio. If no matching apartment exists, a smaller one may be offered with the applicant's consent.
People with severe forms of chronic illness from a health ministry list, and families raising children with disabilities, are entitled to one extra room that is not treated as surplus space.
The same order rewrote the quotas, and those did start earlier, under the general rule. Priority groups used to be reserved at least 70 percent of the housing, including 20 percent for orphans. It is now 20 percent for orphans plus at least 50 percent for priority groups, with a new category added: households that include a person with a first or second group disability, or someone raising a child with a disability.
How many people the check reaches
64,894 people were removed from the queue over the past year. The figure came from Bakhytzhan Zhunisbekov, who chairs the Committee for Construction and Housing Affairs, at a Central Communications Service briefing on 15 September. Local administrations had handed Otbasy Bank the records of 642,000 applicants in total.
Zhansultan Matay, the bank's deputy chairman, said at the same briefing that regional checks found 30 to 40 percent of those reviewed were not genuinely in need. He separately noted that more than 29,000 people left the queue for a different reason, having received housing: over 10,000 mortgage apartments and over 19,000 rental units.
Last year's removals amount to roughly 10 percent of the queue. If the 30 to 40 percent rate holds across the whole database, somewhere between 193,000 and 257,000 people are potentially exposed. That is arithmetic on two briefing figures, not an official forecast.
Sources also disagree on how many applicants had consented to data processing before 14 September. The briefing put it at around half; earlier reports on the bank's work said 63 percent. Nobody explained the gap.
The trap that costs you your place
Once you leave the register, your original registration date is not preserved. Apply again and you join the back of the queue. That clause gets almost no coverage and costs more than the rest.
The queue runs by date. Someone who waited eight years, stepped out for reasons of their own and came back starts from zero, as though those eight years never happened.
If you were removed against your will, here is the route. A complaint goes to the authority overseeing the quality of public services, which has fifteen working days from registration to review it. The decision can then be challenged in court under the Administrative Procedural Code. The removal notice must state the grounds, so start by checking which of the nine clauses was applied to you.
A mechanism runs the other way too. If someone was registered without proper grounds but those grounds later appeared, because the household grew or income fell, they are recognised as in need from that day and their place is recalculated.
What to do today
Open your account on the Otbasy Bank site and check two things: household composition and property records. The cross-check runs automatically against state databases, and it usually trips over small stuff, a share you forgot about or a relative wrongly listed in your household. Five minutes now will save you a removal letter a quarter from now.
