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

By Juliana Castilho

Image: GualdimG / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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%…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.

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.

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…

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…

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…

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.…