Portugal created a qualified job-seeker visa in October. Almost ten months on, nobody can apply for it
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 days, extendable by 60 more. On paper a narrower door, but still a door.
That was 295 days ago. Nobody has walked through it. The scheme only starts once a joint order is published by the ministries responsible for foreign affairs, migration, education and labour, and that order has not appeared. Until it does there is no form, no fee, no appointment. There is a legal category existing in a vacuum.
What that means in practice
If you are outside Portugal looking in, the consequence is blunt: right now there is no route into the country for the purpose of looking for a job. Anyone who wants to work here has to arrive with a signed contract or promise of one, which pushes the entire burden onto the employer — which is why the work visa process now begins with an email from the company.
For employers, the effect runs against what the law says it wants. The qualified visa was designed to pull in engineers, doctors and technology staff. While the order stays unpublished, the country is chasing exactly that profile with exactly the tools it already had, minus the new piece.
The timetable nobody has published
No date has been announced. This is the gap between a law being in force and a law being usable, and it is a distinction that costs months to the person standing on the other side of the counter. When we checked where this visa stood in July, the answer was the same: awaiting regulation. Five weeks on it is still awaiting regulation, and the count is now 295 days.
One practical note, for anyone reading agency promises: until the order is published in the Diário da República, any service offering to handle this visa is selling something that cannot yet be applied for.
Chart: Tugadaily · data Law 61/2025
