Portugal Changed Its Immigration System. Two Years On, It’s Still Complicated.
For a long time, Portugal carried a reputation as one of the more accessible entry points into Europe for Indians. The climate was appealing, the cost of living was lower than Western Europe, the universities were internationally recognised, and — critically — the immigration system offered a pathway that many took advantage of: arrive on a tourist visa, find work, contribute to social security, and regularise your status from within the country. It was informal, slightly improvised, and widely used.
That system no longer exists.
Since late 2023, Portugal has been rebuilding its immigration architecture almost entirely. The agency that handled all of it was dissolved. A new one took over with hundreds of thousands of pending cases. A sweeping new immigration law came into force in late 2025. And the path to Portuguese citizenship — once one of the more achievable in Europe for long-term residents — is now considerably longer.
If you are an Indian student, graduate, or professional considering Portugal, or if someone in your family has been waiting on a Portuguese permit for months, this article is worth reading carefully.
From SEF to AIMA: A Transition That Went Poorly, Then Slowly Recovered
In October 2023, Portugal abolished its longtime immigration authority, the SEF (Serviço de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras — the Foreigners and Borders Service). The decision had been building for years, accelerated in part by a 2020 scandal involving the death of a Ukrainian national in SEF custody. The government wanted a clean break: a new agency with a broader mandate for integration, not just border enforcement.
The replacement was AIMA — the Agency for Integration, Migration, and Asylum (Agência para a Integração, Migrações e Asilo). On paper, it was a modernisation. In practice, it inherited a system that was already straining.
AIMA took over with an estimated backlog of over 400,000 pending immigration cases — approximately 350,000 inherited directly from SEF. The agency initially expected to resolve these by the first quarter of 2024. That deadline was missed. Then the end of 2024. Also missed. As reported by immigration practitioners and platforms tracking AIMA processing, 93% of those legacy cases had reportedly been addressed by late 2025 — but the institutional damage, in terms of trust and timeline predictability, was already done.
For applicants caught in that window — including many Indians who had submitted residence applications and were waiting for appointments, biometric slots, or permit cards — the period from late 2023 to mid-2025 was genuinely difficult. Cases sat without movement. Appointments were unavailable for months. Some people were in legal limbo: their previous status had expired, and the new permit hadn’t arrived.
AIMA has since expanded, hiring over 1,200 more staff than it had in 2023 and opening new service centres. A digital renewal portal for certain visa categories launched in July 2025. Appointment wait times for new applicants in 2026 are generally in the range of three to six months for standard cases — far from ideal, but better than the paralysis of 2024.
The lesson, if there is one, is that institutional transitions in immigration carry a human cost that rarely appears in official announcements.
The New Immigration Law: October 2025
Beyond the administrative upheaval, Portugal also passed a sweeping new immigration law in 2025 — Law 61/2025 of October 22 — which fundamentally restructured how foreign nationals can enter, stay, and build a life in Portugal.
The most significant changes, explained plainly:
The Manifestação de Interesse pathway is gone. This was the route that allowed people already in Portugal — often on short-stay or tourist visas — to regularise their status by proving employment and social security contributions. It was closed permanently on December 31, 2025. Those who qualified under the transitional provisions had to submit applications before that date. For anyone who missed it, the pathway no longer exists.
This change is particularly significant for the Indian community. According to data cited in immigration reports, workers from India, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Pakistan had relied heavily on this route. The decline in foreign labour contribution from South Asian nationals dropped sharply in 2025 as a result — from 0.9 percentage points in 2024 to 0.3 percentage points in 2025, as noted by Jobbatical’s immigration analysis.
The job-seeker visa has been restructured. The old visa that allowed professionals to come to Portugal and look for work — relatively openly — has been replaced with a Visto para Procura de Trabalho Qualificado (Qualified Job-Seeker Visa). This is now limited to applicants with specialised, highly skilled professional backgrounds, with eligible occupations to be defined by ministerial order. If no job is secured before the visa expires, the applicant must leave Portugal and wait one year before reapplying.
Family reunification now requires two years of prior residence. Previously, qualifying family members could join a resident after one year. Under the new law, the general rule is two years of legal residence before a family reunification application can be submitted. There are exceptions — for couples with minor children, or where the couple lived together prior to migration — but the baseline waiting period has doubled.
Document completeness is now a hard requirement. As of April 2025, AIMA will reject any residence permit application that is missing even one legally required document at the time of submission. There is no grace period, no opportunity to submit missing items later. The application must be complete.
What This Means for Indian Students
Portugal remains a legitimate destination for Indian students. Its public universities are internationally accredited, and tuition fees are notably lower than in countries like Ireland, the Netherlands, or Germany’s private institutions. Cities like Porto and Lisbon have growing student populations, and Portugal’s universities have English-taught programmes at postgraduate level.
The student visa route — the D4 visa — continues to function independently of the new immigration law changes described above. The D4 visa is issued for stays of more than one year and typically takes 30 to 60 calendar days to process at the Portuguese consulate. Once in Portugal, students have 120 days to register with AIMA and apply for a residence permit, which currently takes two to twelve weeks to issue.
The financial requirement for the D4 in 2026 is proof of €920 per month (approximately ₹1,03,000 at current exchange rates of roughly ₹112 per euro). Students are permitted to work up to 20 hours per week during term time, and full-time during official academic breaks.
The change to be aware of: once in Portugal, the broader administrative environment is slower than it was. If a D4 student needs to interact with AIMA for any reason — a change of institution, renewal of a permit, or resolution of a complication — the appointment timelines are not fast. Build buffer time into your planning.
Total monthly living costs for a student in Lisbon run to approximately €1,000–€1,300 per month (₹1,12,000–₹1,45,600), including accommodation, food, transport, and utilities. Porto is somewhat cheaper. These figures are meaningfully lower than equivalent costs in western European cities like Munich or Amsterdam.
The Citizenship Picture Has Changed Too
For many Indian families, part of the interest in Portugal was its relatively accessible path to citizenship. Under previous law, five years of legal residency qualified a non-EU national to apply for Portuguese nationality.
That framework is now in flux. A revised nationality law — passed in Parliament in April 2026 and promulgated by the President on May 3, 2026 — proposes extending the minimum residency requirement for non-EU nationals from five years to ten years. EU and CPLP (Community of Portuguese Language Countries) nationals would face a shorter timeline of seven years.
There is one important clarification from Portugal’s Constitutional Court: residency time is counted from the date the permit application is submitted, not from the date the permit card is actually issued. Given AIMA’s delays, this distinction matters enormously. Applicants who have been waiting for their permit card cannot be penalised for administrative delays that are beyond their control.
The nationality law is still being published in full form as of this writing, and there may be further adjustments. For long-term planning purposes, the working assumption should be a ten-year residency requirement for Indians considering citizenship as an eventual goal.
A Realistic Assessment
Portugal is not a country that has closed its doors. It is a country that has recalibrated who it wants to admit and on what terms — and that recalibration happened in a compressed period, with institutional turbulence, and with insufficient communication to the people most affected.
For Indian students applying through the D4 visa with a confirmed university admission, Portugal remains a viable and genuinely affordable option within Europe. The process works, but patience with administrative timelines is essential.
For Indian workers and graduates who had hoped to arrive on a short-stay visa and convert to a work permit from within the country, that route is definitively closed. Anyone considering working in Portugal needs to secure the appropriate visa category before travelling — whether through a job offer from a Portuguese employer, or through the new Qualified Job-Seeker Visa if their profile qualifies.
For families with members already in Portugal: the two-year family reunification requirement is now law, with limited exceptions. Plan timelines accordingly.
From a Kerala household perspective, Portugal had the appeal of being a lower-cost European destination with a manageable immigration route. The cost appeal remains — but the manageability of the route has diminished. A family financing a child’s education in Portugal needs to factor in not just tuition and living costs, but also longer administrative timelines, the possibility of delayed permit processing, and a more demanding document environment from the start.
Conclusion
Portugal is still European, still affordable relative to its western neighbours, and still open to Indian students and qualified professionals through legitimate channels. What has changed is the informal generosity that made it appealing for a different kind of applicant — those who arrived with flexibility and hoped to regularise along the way.
The new Portugal is more structured, more demanding, and administratively still finding its feet. That is not necessarily a reason to avoid it. But it is a reason to go in with clear information, realistic timelines, and the right visa in hand before you board the flight.
Thinking About Europe Beyond Portugal?
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