What happened to Portugal's promised nationality regulation? Eight days past the deadline, still nothing
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. The most recent is dated 23 July 2025, a Constitutional Court ruling. There is not a single 2026 entry.
What was supposed to land by 16 August
Organic Law 1/2026 was published on 18 May, and its clause on regulation is one sentence long: the government shall make the necessary amendments to the Portuguese Nationality Regulation within 90 days of publication. Count 90 days from 18 May and you land on 16 August. We flagged that date back in July, when it was still three weeks away.
The regulation is not housekeeping. The law says who is entitled to be Portuguese. The regulation says how you prove it: which forms, which certificates count, how residence is demonstrated, who decides what at the registry counter. Without it, the new requirements exist on paper with no procedure underneath them.
Where the gap already shows
The clearest case is the language requirement. The Direção-Geral da Educação page on the Portuguese language test for nationality still points readers at Portaria n.º 176/2014 and at Decreto-Lei n.º 237-A/2006 as amended in 2013. Every piece of machinery published there predates the law that took effect on 19 May.
This does not stop applications. It stops the new part of them. Anyone proving Portuguese still does it the old ways, because those are the ones with an ordinance behind them: a school certificate covering two academic years of Portuguese, a test at a state school, a CIPLE certificate from a recognised centre, or an A2 certificate issued through the IEFP. The tougher integration and knowledge tests introduced in May are waiting for someone to write the procedure. On what the law changed beyond the waiting years, we already went through the requirements.
Does missing the deadline cost anything?
Not automatically. The 90 days are an instruction from parliament to the government, and the law attached no penalty and no expiry to it. In practice, registry offices carry on applying the 2006 regulation wherever it does not collide with the new law, and fill the gaps by analogy. That is the outcome we described in July as the likeliest one. It is the one that happened.
If you have an application in progress, the practical point has not changed: the filing date fixes which regime applies to you. Anything submitted up to 18 May runs under the old rules. Anything from 19 May onwards runs under the new ones. Keep the submission receipt somewhere safe.
When the regulation does appear, it appears in the Diário da República first, ahead of any summary, ours included. We will come back to this page the day the amendment list for Decreto-Lei 237-A/2006 finally carries a 2026 line.
Image: Rakoon / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)
