A running tracker of AIMA — case backlog, renewal deadlines, biometrics, golden visa and service changes. Updated whenever there is news.

If you are dealing with residence or nationality, this is the page to bookmark. Instead of one article per announcement, we gather the essentials of AIMA here: case backlog, renewal deadlines, biometrics, golden visa and service changes. For the citizenship rules, see the new nationality law. Official information is at AIMA. EU citizens and their family members can now open an account on AIMA's Renewal Portal and handle the renewal online: application,…

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AIMA's 2025 Migration and Asylum Report shows voluntary-departure notices jumping 52-fold in a single year, in the same report that shows foreign-population growth slowing to 2.7%.

In 2024, Portugal's immigration agency AIMA and the police issued 446 notices telling foreigners to leave the country voluntarily. In 2025, that number jumped to 23,133 — more than 50 times as many, according to AIMA's 2025 Migration and Asylum Report, which pulls together the year's full numbers for the first time. The jump sits in the same report we already used to show that Portugal's foreign resident population grew just 2.7% in 2025, down from 39%…

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Pedro Portugal Gaspar was called before Parliament this week for a seat on Portugal's Competition Authority board. He is the second AIMA president to leave since the agency replaced SEF in 2023, and the government has not said who comes next.

Pedro Portugal Gaspar is on his way out as president of AIMA, the agency that handles immigration and residency in Portugal. He was due before Parliament's Economy and Territorial Cohesion Committee on Tuesday, 22 September — the hearing that comes before a formal appointment to the board of the Competition Authority. Gaspar took over AIMA in July 2024 from Luís Goes Pinheiro, the agency's first president, who had led it since it replaced the old…

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AIMA's annual report closes 2025 with 1,585,854 foreign residents and 42,157 added over the year, against 238,864 in 2024. It is the slowest rate in the whole series the agency publishes, which starts in 2017, and the ranking shifted too: Angola has moved ahead of India.

There is a way of reading AIMA's annual report that skips the headline total and tells you far more. Put four years next to each other. In 2022, Portugal's foreign resident population grew by 39%. In 2023, by 31.4%. In 2024, by 18.3%. In 2025, by 2.7%. That is the slowest annual growth anywhere in the series the agency publishes, which begins in 2017. At the end of last year there were 1,585,854 foreign citizens legally resident in the country. Over the…

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Law 62/2026 was published in the official gazette on 10 September and applied from the next day. It resets removal deadlines, creates a border return procedure and closes the vocational-course route to a residence permit.

For seven weeks the text sat in the president's in-tray and then in the Constitutional Court, and nothing on the ground changed. That is over. Law 62/2026 was published in the Diário da República on 10 September, and because the law says it takes effect the day after publication, it has applied since Friday 11 September. Parliament passed the decree on 17 July, the president signed it on 31 August, the prime minister countersigned on 1 September, and…

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The PSP's foreigners and borders unit says irregular arrivals by road and rail into the Lisbon and Porto metropolitan areas are rising, coming in from other European cities. For travellers, the practical bit is simple: carry your residence permit.

The route has shifted, and that is what the PSP came out to say on Sunday. Chief superintendent João Ribeiro, deputy national director and head of the National Foreigners and Borders Unit, named road and rail flows into the Lisbon and Porto metropolitan areas from other European cities as an identified risk factor — people who are irregular in another Schengen country and who keep moving between countries inside it. They arrive, he said, at the big coach…

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The University of Évora and AIMA have opened a CLAIM office in the Santo Agostinho building, staffed by two people trained to file cases directly in the agency's system. Biometrics are still collected in Lisbon.

Studying in Évora on a non-EU passport used to mean solving the first step of your residence process 130 kilometres away. Not any more. On Wednesday the University of Évora and AIMA opened a CLAIM office — the local migrant integration support centre — in the Santo Agostinho building, and it began operating the same day. Two university staff run it, trained by AIMA to work directly inside the agency's case system. This is not an information desk. Cases…

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Law 47/2026 came into force on 1 September and hands AIMA the job of recognising stateless status. Opening a case gets you a provisional residence permit for six months, and the right to work, on day one.

Portugal has recognised stateless status since 2023. What it did not have was a route to it: no authority formally in charge, no deadline, no document to hand to someone left waiting. That changed on 1 September, when Law 47/2026 of 17 August came into force and set out the procedure across seven pages. We read all seven. A stateless person, for the purposes of the law, is anyone no state considers its national. The application goes to AIMA's head office…

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Live and Invest Overseas put the Algarve ahead of Crete, Gascony, Puerto Vallarta and Tarragona in its 2026 index — and puts the cost for a couple at around $3,085 a month.

There is an American list that comes out every year and quietly moves people between continents. It is the Overseas Retirement Index, published by Live and Invest Overseas, and in the 2026 edition the Algarve placed second among the best places in the world to retire. Only Boquete, a town in the Panamanian highlands, finished ahead of it. What the Algarve beat is more interesting than the placing. It finished above Puerto Vallarta in Mexico, Gascony in…

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President Seguro promulgated the decree overhauling reception, entry, removal and asylum rules three days after the Constitutional Court cleared it. The court also set out how the text must be read, and that reading now guides judges and officials.

It is signed. António José Seguro put his name to the decree on 31 August, the one that rewrites how foreign nationals and stateless people are received in temporary detention centres, how they enter, stay, leave or are removed from the country, and how asylum is granted. Three days passed between the Constitutional Court's ruling and the signature.

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The seven judges who signed the ruling were unanimous: not one of the eleven provisions is unconstitutional. The President had sent the decree up on 7 August, and every objection fell.

Portugal's Constitutional Court ruled on Friday that there is nothing unconstitutional in the law on asylum, detention and the return of foreign nationals. Not one of the eleven provisions put in front of it. The seven judges who signed ruling 736/2026 were unanimous. The answer is quick to state and slow to read: the ruling runs to more than 160 pages, according to the court's president, João Carlos Loureiro.

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The PSP has released first-year figures for the UNEF: 5,397 operations between 21 August 2025 and 31 July 2026, 831 notices to leave the country and 285 arrests. Here is what that 2.1% can and cannot tell you.

Portugal's police have totted up the first year of the National Unit for Foreigners and Borders. The figure worth pausing on is not the arrests. It is the ratio. Between 21 August 2025 and 31 July 2026, the unit's foreigners and border control teams ran 5,397 inspection operations and checked 52,421 foreign citizens. Of those, 1,117 turned out to be irregular. That is 2.1%. The same operations produced 831 notices to leave the country voluntarily, 285…

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Renting a room, or living in a flat leased by someone else, means the document AIMA wants has another person's name on it. There is a route for that: a sworn declaration carrying the land-registry number and the owner's NIF, plus a tax-domicile certificate issued in the last 30 days.

One detail catches people out at an AIMA appointment, and it is not the queue. It is proof of accommodation. If you own the flat, the whole thing takes a minute. If you rent a room in a shared house, live with a relative, or hold a tenancy signed by somebody else, you have a genuine problem: the document AIMA wants to see has another person's name across the top of it. The good news is that a route exists for precisely that situation. The bad news is that…

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A little-known condition on AIMA's Family Reunification of Minors platform catches a lot of families out: the child must be demonstrably on Portuguese territory on the date the application is submitted. If they are still abroad, the portal will not take it and the application has to be made in person.

If you are in Portugal and want to bring a child over through family reunification, there is a little-known condition that undoes a lot of people's planning: the child has to be demonstrably on Portuguese territory on the date the application is filed through the Family Reunification of Minors platform. It is set out in AIMA's own information note on family reunification and repeated on the Foreign Ministry's list of AIMA booking platforms, which spells…

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Organic Law 1/2026 gave the government 90 days to rewrite the Portuguese Nationality Regulation. We opened the Diário da República's consolidated register on 24 August: the most recent amendment is still dated July 2025.

The government gave itself 90 days to write the instruction manual for Portugal's new nationality law. That deadline ran out on 16 August. Eight days later, the manual is still the one from 2006. We checked it the simplest way there is. We opened the consolidated register for Decreto-Lei n.º 237-A/2006, the decree that approves the Portuguese Nationality Regulation, and read the full list of instruments that have amended it since 2006. There are seven.…

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Slots are allocated by availability rather than by where applicants live, so an Almada resident was booked into Carregal do Sal, near Viseu, for an appointment lasting minutes.

On paper it was sensible. The offices in Lisbon and Porto were overwhelmed, so spread the appointments across the country and the queues shrink. That is what AIMA did. What the plan left out was the geography of the people being seen. Slots are being handed out according to availability, not according to where the applicant lives. The result, reported by Jornal de Notícias, is people crossing half the country for procedures that take a few minutes. An…

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The 183-day rule decides whether Portugal taxes your worldwide earnings or only what you make here. What counts, what does not, and the traps in a first IRS filing.

Most people move to Portugal thinking about the lease, the school place and the NIF. The tax question surfaces the following May, when the filing window opens. By then it is too late to plan and too early to relax. Everything turns on one question: are you tax resident in Portugal? If you are, Portugal taxes your worldwide income. If you are not, it taxes only what you earned here. The main test sits in article 16 of the Portuguese Personal Income Tax…

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They started on 3 August and some were posted to the Central Registry Office in Lisbon and the Porto Central Archive, the two places where nationality applications are decided. Another 66 arrive in September. In 2025, more than 63% of registry staff were 55 or older.

If your nationality file is sitting in a Portuguese conservatória, staffing news is not usually the kind you get. This month it was. The registry and notary institute confirms that 47 new registrars started work on 3 August, the first intake into the career in more than twenty years. Twenty years is the number that matters. No conservador has been recruited in this country since before the citizen card existed, and over that period the IRN kept collecting…

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InterNations places Portugal eighth of 31 destinations in Expat Insider 2026. Some 94% of foreign residents feel safe and 75% say their income stretches far enough — but only 19% rate the job market well.

Every August a version of this survey lands and people forwarding it to a friend get about halfway through. InterNations has put Portugal eighth out of 31 destinations in its Expat Insider 2026 ranking, behind Singapore and ahead of Luxembourg, in a top ten built mostly from Latin America and Southeast Asia. The half most people stop reading before is the interesting one. Safety is the standout. Ninety-four per cent of foreign residents say they feel safe…

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Eleven provisions, a deadline of 31 August, and four judges who were not on the bench for the 2025 decision that struck down five out of seven.

Portugal's Constitutional Court has until 31 August to rule on the new foreigners law. It is the second summer running that the judges spend their recess on the same subject, and setting the two occasions side by side tells you more than any forecast would. Last August it was seven provisions, referred by the then president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa. The court struck down five of them. Ruling 785/2025 blocked, among other things, the two-year residence…

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Law 61/2025 suspended the old job-seeker visa and created a narrower one for skilled workers, conditional on a joint order from four ministries. That order has still not been published, so no applications can be filed.

On 23 October 2025, the day Portugal's new foreigners law took effect, consulates stopped accepting job-seeker visa applications. That category — the one that let you come to Portugal with 120 days to find work — ceased to exist in the form it had. In its place, Law 61/2025 created a different one: a job-seeker visa restricted to people with specialised technical skills or heading into highly qualified work. Valid only inside Portugal, granted for 120…

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Kauê Matos, 19, was stopped at Lisbon airport without a valid residence permit and flown to Brazil. His family reunification file had been sitting undecided at AIMA since 2024.

Kauê Matos is 19. He had been living in Portugal for about two years with his parents and brother, and he was on his way back from a school placement in Ireland when border officers at Lisbon's Humberto Delgado airport stopped him. He had no valid residence permit, because the family reunification application his family filed with AIMA was still, two years later, undecided. Days later he was on a flight to Brazil. On Friday the case turned. The Lisbon…

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Automatic extensions are gone and renewals are now entirely online, released in monthly waves. The window for permits expiring in November and December 2026 is already open.

For years, anyone holding a Portuguese residence permit about to run out had an informal safety net. Automatic extensions were rolled over by decree whenever AIMA's queue grew too long. That net has been taken away. Since late 2025 there is no general extension, and a card that expires now genuinely expires. What replaced it is a fully digital process at portal-renovacoes.aima.gov.pt, released in monthly waves so that half a million people are not…

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President Seguro asked for a preventive review of the decree rewriting entry, stay and removal of foreigners, plus the asylum regime. He flagged 11 rules, and the court has 25 days.

Portugal's new foreigners law is on hold. On the afternoon of Friday 7 August, President António José Seguro sent the parliamentary decree to the Constitutional Court — the one rewriting how foreigners enter, stay, leave and are removed from the country, and rewriting the asylum regime alongside it. Until the judges rule, nothing gets signed into law. The request runs to 34 pages and names 11 provisions whose constitutionality the President disputes. The…

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Filing costs 133 euros, granting or renewing temporary residence costs 307.20 euros and permanent residence costs 351.10 euros. AIMA calls the March change an annual indexation, not a rise.

Anyone dealing with AIMA learns quickly that a residence application has two costs, time and money. We have written plenty about the time. On the money, the fee table changed on 1 March 2026, and it is worth knowing exactly what you owe before you open the portal. Start with the three figures that cover most applications. Filing and assessment of the application costs 133 euros. It applies to the most common temporary residence routes, including work,…

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The 2026 nationality reform formally opened descent-based citizenship to great-grandchildren, provided they can prove a real connection to Portugal. It also scrapped the Sephardic route and ended automatic citizenship for children born here to foreign parents.

The short answer is yes, and it is one of the few openings in a package that tightened almost everything else. Portugal's 2026 nationality reform formally added great-grandchildren of Portuguese-born citizens to the descent route. Until now the third generation lived in a grey zone of interpretation and appeals; it is written into the law. The condition is not decorative: applicants must show an effective connection to Portugal, and certificates alone…

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Economy and Territorial Cohesion Minister Manuel Castro Almeida said Portugal remains open to anyone able to work, at a moment when the entry regime is tighter than it was two years ago.

The line came in Gavião, in the Portalegre district, on the sidelines of a contract signing under the Grow with Tourism programme. Manuel Castro Almeida, Minister for the Economy and Territorial Cohesion, said a wide-open-doors migration policy had not produced good results — and, in the same breath, that anyone able to work is still welcome. The exact phrasing matters, because it describes how the government sees the funnel. Every immigrant who wants to…

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The PSP has extended automated border gates to third-country nationals holding a valid Portuguese residence permit. It only works with the passport tied to that permit.

Anyone who lives in Portugal on a non-EU passport knows the moment. You land at Lisbon, you watch the e-gate queue move briskly, and then you join the other one, the manual booths, which does not move at all. That is being fixed. The PSP has widened access to the automated border gates to include third-country nationals who hold a valid Portuguese residence permit, a measure that started in April and has now been extended. The mechanism is biometric and…

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Regulation (EU) 2026/1047 created the EU Talent Pool, applicable since 1 June: a single portal matching third-country jobseekers with vacancies in shortage occupations. Member State participation is voluntary and the platform is only expected to be fully operational by the end of 2027.

There is a new piece in the puzzle for anyone hoping to work in Europe from outside it, and it has slipped by fairly quietly. It is called the EU Talent Pool, it was created by Regulation (EU) 2026/1047 of 29 April, published in the Official Journal on 12 May, and it has applied since 1 June. In practice it is a single IT platform. On one side, profiles of jobseekers from countries outside the Union; on the other, vacancies from employers and other…

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Since 1 June 2026, VFS visa appointments for a Portugal work visa only unlock after the consulate validates an email from the Portuguese employer. Step-by-step guide.

The step that stalls most Portugal work-visa applications is no longer the applicant's paperwork: it is an email that has to come from the company. Since 31 July 2026, booking an appointment at a VFS Global visa centre only unlocks after the consulate issues a pre-authorisation off the back of a request from the Portugal-based employer. Without that, there is no slot — however complete the rest of the file is. If you are preparing to move to Portugal for…

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