Your permit paperwork needs an address it can accept and a landlord willing to help prove it. That usually means a signed lease with your name exactly as your passport spells it, and a domicile letter, which the local office issues using your landlord's own ID and family card. Agree both before you sign.
This is not a visa guide. We run a rental marketplace, not an immigration practice, and the internet already has more Bali visa articles written by property companies than anyone needs.
What we can tell you about is the half that touches the rental: what a long-stay application tends to want from your lease and your landlord, and which of those things are much harder to arrange after you have signed than before. Everything about which permit you should apply for, what it costs, how long it takes and whether you qualify belongs with a visa agent or the immigration office. Those rules also change, and they have changed twice in recent years.
Read this as a list of questions to put to a landlord while you still have leverage, not as a description of the law.
Rental listings in Bali - ours included - do not carry street addresses, and that surprises people who are about to fill in a form that wants one.
What our own 76 long-term rentals actually state
Not one listing gives a street and number. That is normal for the market and it is partly deliberate - owners do not publish the exact address of an occupied villa - but it means the address you will write on paperwork comes from the lease, not from the advert. Plenty of Bali addresses are genuinely vague to begin with: a road name, a banjar, and no number at all.
So when you get to the contract, read the address line as a document you may have to use rather than a formality. If it says little more than a road and a village, ask whether the owner can put something more specific on it, and how they normally describe the property on official paperwork.
Four things about the contract matter later, and all four are trivial to fix before signing and awkward afterwards.
Our checklist for what to read before signing a villa lease covers the rest of the contract - deposit, utilities, notice and the terms that decide how the tenancy actually goes.
A domicile letter - surat domisili, sometimes surat keterangan domisili - is a letter from your local village or district office certifying where you live. It comes up repeatedly in long-stay administration, and it is the one piece of the process that depends entirely on your landlord's goodwill.
Why it depends on them
The office issuing it generally wants to see the rental agreement and the landlord's own identity documents - their KTP, and often the family card, the kartu keluarga. Those are personal documents belonging to someone else. A landlord who is happy to rent to you is not automatically happy to hand over a copy of their family card, and you have no way to compel it once the lease is signed and the year is paid.
So ask before you sign
An owner who has done it before will answer in a sentence. One who hesitates is telling you something useful while it is still cheap to learn it. Some landlords will write a letter confirming your stay on their own letterhead as an interim step; whether that is sufficient depends on the office and on what you are applying for, which is exactly the sort of question to put to an agent.
Bali yearly leases are normally paid six to twelve months in advance, so almost all of your leverage exists before the transfer and almost none of it after. Use it on this short list.
For what a year upfront actually costs, see the cost of living in Bali per month - a three-bedroom in the Canggu area at our September 2026 median means finding roughly $36,000 before you get the keys. If you are not certain yet, renting monthly first costs more per month and far less upfront.
From a visa agent, or from immigration directly. Not from a rental platform, and not from a Facebook group.
We are deliberately not listing permit types, fees or processing times here. Those change, they differ by nationality and circumstance, and a confident-sounding table on a rental site is exactly the kind of thing that is right when it is written and quietly wrong eighteen months later. Every figure you read about Indonesian visas should carry a date, and most do not.
What we would say is this: choose your permit path first, then rent against it. It is much easier to find a villa whose lease suits your application than to make an existing lease fit a permit you decided on afterwards.
When you are ready, browse long-term villas - and take the questions in this guide to the owner before you agree anything.