Tugadaily chart: length of the UK Graduate visa, 24 months today, 18 months from January 2027 and 24 months in the Budget for high-compliance universities

Immigration 29 October 2026

Britain's Budget brings back the two-year Graduate visa, but only for some universities

The UK Budget of 28 October restores a two-year Graduate visa for graduates of high-compliance universities with strong job outcomes, just as the standard route drops to 18 months in January 2027. It also promises up to six months for laid-off highly skilled workers to find a new sponsor and new salary thresholds from spring 2027.

Anyone planning a degree in the UK had a cut pencilled in for January: the Graduate visa, which lets new graduates stay on and work, was due to shrink from two years to 18 months. The Budget that Chancellor John Healey delivered on 28 October walks part of that back. Two years return for graduates of high-compliance universities with strong labour market outcomes. Everyone else stays on 18 months.

So for a Portuguese student weighing offers, the choice of university now also decides how long you get to land a job afterwards. Since Brexit, anyone without UK settled status arrives on a student visa like any other foreign national, and the Graduate route is the bridge into a work contract.

The Budget does not yet say which universities qualify, or when the change starts.

More breathing room if you lose your job

The second change matters to people already working there. The most highly skilled sponsored workers who lose their job will get up to six months to find a new employer, instead of the 60 days they have now before their visa is cut short. The government says it will “work towards” this, with no firm date.

Salary thresholds

From spring 2027, London will apply the Migration Advisory Committee’s recommendations:

occupation-specific thresholds drop from the median to the 25th percentile of wages;
the general threshold is uprated with 2026 pay data and then updated every year;
the new-entrant discounts for students and recent graduates merge into one;
the PhD discount goes.

The High Potential Individual visa, for recent graduates of the world’s top universities, widens to the top 150 institutions, with its cap rising in proportion. The Budget calls the package “the most pro-business migration system in Europe for high-skill workers”.

It is the same government that, a week ago, asked every household to keep three days of supplies in the cupboard. This time the shopping list is for people who want to go and work there.

By Juliana Castilho

Chart: Tugadaily, with UK Government data

Graphic showing the genuine senders of AIMA appointment emails, aima.gov.pt and sef.pt, and the fake address noreplyportalsef@saf-aima.pt flagged by the agency

Immigration 28 October 2026

Before you pay anyone for an AIMA appointment, check who sent the email

A group of Brazilians says it paid an alleged lawyer for AIMA appointments that never existed, and at least two have gone home. AIMA only sends bookings from @aima.gov.pt, or @sef.pt on systems still being migrated. How to check before paying, and where to report it.

A group of Brazilians says it paid an alleged lawyer around 30,000 euros in total for appointments at AIMA, Portugal's immigration agency, that never existed. On a list the group shared, 21 people account for almost 18,500 euros in fees, and at least two of them have given up and gone back to Brazil. Anyone who has dealt with AIMA will recognise the pattern. People arrive on a tourist visa, can't get a slot on their own, and end up paying a middleman who…

Tugadaily chart: first year of the PSP border unit, with 1,732 voluntary returns, 831 orders to leave, 285 arrests and 221 forced returns

Immigration 27 October 2026

Portugal's police expect a record year for removals (and most people are leaving voluntarily)

PSP says more than 1,000 migrants will be removed by the end of 2026, possibly an all-time high. In its border unit's first year, 1,732 returns were voluntary and 221 forced, against 23,133 orders to leave issued in 2025.

Portugal's public security police, the PSP, expects to remove "well over a thousand" migrants from the country by the end of 2026, and says this could turn out to be the year with the most removals on record. The estimate came from the force itself, in a response published on Tuesday. Since August last year it has been the body in charge of checking foreigners' status and carrying out returns. The headline number needs one piece of context. In most cases,…

Immigration 26 October 2026

AIMA tracker: deadlines, backlog and updates

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 finally has a successor to Pedro Portugal Gaspar: on 7 October the minister for the Presidency, António Leitão Amaro, told…

Tugadaily bar chart of 690,480 pending Portuguese nationality applications by route: residence 26%, Sephardic 23%, marriage 13%, grandchildren 11%, children 10%, other routes 17%

Immigration 25 October 2026

Around 180,000 immigrants are waiting for Portuguese citizenship. Portugal naturalised 12,829 last year

Portugal's registry office had 690,480 nationality applications pending on 30 June, up 38% in a year, and 26% come from people who live here and applied on residence grounds. At 2025's pace, that queue alone is roughly 14 years long.

Portugal's registry office, the IRN, was sitting on 690,480 undecided nationality applications on 30 June. The figures come from the Ministry of Justice and show a 38% rise on the same point in 2025, when the pile stood at roughly half a million. That headline number blurs who is actually in the queue. Only 26% of the files belong to immigrants living in Portugal who applied on the strength of their years of legal residence. Most of the rest are…

Tugadaily chart: notices for foreigners to leave voluntarily, 446 in 2024 versus 23,133 in 2025

Immigration 25 September 2026

Portugal told 23,133 foreigners to leave last year. In 2024, that number was 446

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%…

Immigration 23 September 2026

AIMA is losing its president again, and no successor has been named

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…

Bar chart of annual growth in Portugal's foreign resident population: 39.0% in 2022, 31.4% in 2023, 18.3% in 2024 and 2.7% in 2025

Immigration 22 September 2026

Portugal's foreign population grew 2.7% last year. In 2022 it grew 39%

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…

Bar chart of the deadlines in Portugal's Law 62/2026, in days: leave Portugal up to 30, in a period set between 20 and 30, decision 90, if extended 120

Immigration 15 September 2026

Portugal's new foreigners and asylum law took effect on 11 September

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…

Immigration 14 September 2026

Arriving in Lisbon by coach or train? Portuguese police are running border checks at the terminals

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…

Immigration 12 September 2026

Where do Évora's 650 international students file their residence papers now? On campus

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…

Bar chart of the deadlines in Law 47/2026, in months: a six-month provisional permit, six months to decide, nine in complex cases and a 24-month residence permit if the status is recognised

Immigration 6 September 2026

No country claims you as a citizen? Since 1 September there is a procedure, and it is free

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…

Immigration 4 September 2026

The Algarve came second in the world's retirement rankings (and the winner is in Panama)

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…

Immigration 3 September 2026

Portugal's return law was signed on 31 August. What happens next turns on a 160-page ruling

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.

Immigration 30 August 2026

Portugal's return law clears the Constitutional Court, all eleven questions rejected

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.