Portugal's D2 visa is the route for entrepreneurs and freelancers who want to live in Portugal. Business plan, around €11,000 in personal funds and a consulate application: the numbers and steps for 2026.

By Juliana Castilho

Illustrative · Photo: Kampus Production / Pexels

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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. AIMA's renewals portal is taking applications for residence permits expiring in November and December 2026, in a window that opened…

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…

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…