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.

By Juliana Castilho

Photo: Rakoon / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Rome reintroduced border checks on flights and ferries arriving from Spain for the whole of August. Here is who it applies to and what to carry.

If you are flying from Spain to Italy this month and you do not hold an EU passport, budget for an extra stop: Italy reintroduced border checks on Thursday for air and sea arrivals from Spain, and interior minister Matteo Piantedosi has said the measure stays in place for all of August. The decision was announced by Giorgia Meloni alongside deputy prime ministers Antonio Tajani and Matteo Salvini, and it is Italy's answer to the Ceuta crisis, where tens…