Portugal Has Processed 13 Percent of Its 46,000 Golden Visa Backlog

Portugal has processed 6,000 of the 46,000 golden visa applications sitting in its backlog, about 13 percent, Minister of the Presidency António Leitão Amaro told parliament on 8 October. Roughly 30,000 biometric appointments have been scheduled, a figure that measures diary slots rather than decisions.

What it means for a foreign buyer

This is not directly a property story, because buying Portuguese real estate no longer qualifies anyone for the residence permit. The route closed, and what remains are the fund and business options covered in our guide to what actually qualifies now. It still changes what you do, in three ways. If you have a file in the queue, you now have a denominator: 13 percent cleared against an average wait that IMI's second-quarter survey put at 50.4 months, up from 43.9 months in the first quarter, with the fastest file in that sample taking 36.3 months. Plan for a four-year horizon on the permit and do not make a property purchase, a school enrolment or a tax-residency decision contingent on a card arriving sooner.

If you are choosing between jurisdictions, the queue is now the deciding variable rather than the threshold. Greece still attaches residence rights to qualifying property purchases and Portugal does not, so a buyer who wants both a home and a permit is comparing a closed route against an open one. And if you are buying Portuguese property purely as property, with no residency intent, AIMA's capacity still reaches you through family reunification and permit renewals, which run through the same agency: it scheduled 55,000 reunification appointments this year and granted 26,000 permits.

Treat the permit and the purchase as two separate projects with separate timelines.

What changed

The numbers are the change. Against 46,000 pending applications, 6,000 have been processed. About 30,000 biometric appointments are on the calendar, and the minister's own framing distinguishes scheduling from adjudication. AIMA has grown its headcount from 723 to 850 staff. On the wider immigration caseload, the agency inherited 445,000 regularisation cases and says 5,000 remain unresolved.

Set that against the agency's own service standard. When AIMA overhauled the procedure in early 2025 it promised decisions in 30 to 90 days. Practitioners now quote 14 to 18 months for newly filed applications, with one firm reporting 8 to 9 months from submission to a biometric invitation. The published standard and the observed timeline are an order of magnitude apart.

The government committed to clearing the golden visa backlog during 2026. Leitão Amaro made that pledge on 29 October 2025, in parliamentary hearings on the 2026 state budget, and attached a revenue figure of 85 million euros to resolving the outstanding files. At 13 percent processed with under three months of the year left, the pledge now depends entirely on converting those 30,000 scheduled appointments into decisions.

The mechanism

There is no decree or regulation behind these figures. They were disclosed in oral testimony to a parliamentary committee by the Minister of the Presidency, not released as a statistical bulletin, which matters for two reasons. The first is verifiability: there is no published dataset to check the 46,000 against, no breakdown by investment route, filing year or nationality, and no definition of what counts as processed. The second is warning time. Because the processing framework is administrative and sits inside AIMA rather than in statute, the agency can reprioritise its queue, reschedule biometrics or redefine its targets without a legislative step and without notice.

The 2025 overhaul that produced the 30 to 90 day standard was itself administrative, and it was missed without consequence. Applicants have no statutory remedy tied to a service level, which is why Portuguese firms have been litigating individual delays rather than relying on the published target.

Context

Portugal's residence by investment programme, known domestically as the ARI, was for most of its life a property programme. The real estate option was removed in a reform that redirected qualifying capital into funds, business creation and cultural donation. AIMA, the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum, took over the caseload from the disbanded SEF immigration service and inherited its arrears, which is the origin of the backlog now being counted down.

Separately, non-resident purchasing of Portuguese homes has been cooling, with non-resident purchases falling 10.3 percent to 1,890 in the second quarter, covered in our report on the Q2 figures. For the current qualifying routes and the thresholds attached to each, see Portugal golden visa alternatives after the reform.