Portugal’s Agency for Integration, Migration, and Asylum (AIMA) has processed 6,000 of the 46,000 golden visa applications pending before it and scheduled appointments for around 30,000, Minister of the Presidency António Leitão Amaro told parliament’s Constitutional Affairs committee this week.
The update came one week after IMI’s second-quarter Processing Time Survey put the program’s average wait at a record 50.4 months.
The golden visa figures were a footnote in a hearing devoted mostly to the agency’s wider backlog. Of the 445,000 regularization cases inherited from the former “expressions of interest” system, which let people who had entered Portugal without a residence visa apply to legalize their stay, only 5,000 remain unresolved.
Clearing that queue has freed AIMA to devote more resources to family reunification and golden visas, two other areas where applicants have faced long delays, Leitão Amaro said.
He told the committee the agency’s workforce has grown from 723 to 850. AIMA has made 55,000 family reunification appointments this year and granted 26,000 permits in that category, against a historical annual average he put below 20,000.
Appointments Are Not Decisions
The 30,000 figure measures scheduling, not outcomes. Werner Gruner of Get Golden Visa reads the gap between it and the 6,000 processed cases as evidence that “scheduling biometrics is ceasing to be a bottleneck in the process” and that “the constraint has moved to the stage between biometrics and the decision itself.”
Waits “have shortened and will shorten further for applicants who already have an appointment,” he said, “provided AIMA allocates enough analysts to match the volume it has scheduled.”
Whether the government meets its commitment to clear the backlog in 2026 “will depend on how quickly the appointments already scheduled are converted into decisions.”
João Pedro Oliveira Cunha of MFG Consultants draws the same distinction. “Scheduling appointments and completing applications are two different stages of the process,” he cautions, and “it is still too early to conclude that processing times will shorten consistently for all new applicants.”
Two Queues Inside the Queue
Madalena Monteiro of Liberty, who has “been attending appointments of golden visa applicants almost daily” since the start of the year, describes two separate timelines running inside the golden visa backlog.
Applicants who submitted biometrics before 2025 followed a paper procedure and are “the delayed cases from 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024,” with their files “analyzed with slower timelines.”
Those who filed from January 2025 onward “follow a fully digital procedure and have their applications processed a bit faster.”
Her firm received around 500 biometric appointment notifications in October 2025, all for dates in 2026, “after years of inactivity.”
The notifications arrived, in her account, “after the extensive criticism from the industry” that followed the minister’s admission that investor files had been left for the “end of the queue.”
The split explains why practitioners’ current timelines bear little resemblance to the survey averages. Oliveira Cunha’s firm had worked through all of its longstanding backlog cases by the end of May.
For its more recent files that have received biometric invitations, it observes “approximately eight to nine months from submission to invitation,” with AIMA dispatching first residence cards “approximately one month after payment of the relevant issuance fee.”
Eight to nine months remain well outside the 30 to 90 days AIMA promised when it overhauled the procedure in early 2025.
Oliveira Cunha nonetheless declines to put a single number on the full journey from filing to card. “Several stages remain involved, including biometric scheduling and the administrative steps leading to card issuance,” and his figures “reflect actual client experience, not guaranteed processing times.”
Monteiro, on the other hand, says her firm is now receiving residence permits for clients whose biometrics were collected on January 28, 2026, roughly eight months ago. “Even though the pace is still slow, the timelines have become more encouraging than in the last three years.”
The months-long gap between submission and the biometric notification “doesn’t exist anymore,” she adds. An applicant filing today receives an appointment for May 2027 and could hold a card by the end of that year, “which means an approximate 14-month deadline.”
Gruner’s planning figure is longer. For applications filed now, his firm tells clients “to plan for approximately 18 months from submission to the first residence card being issued,” an assumption that “presupposes that AIMA sustains its current focus on investor files.”
His practical advice is to get the file complete before the appointment, because “each request for additional documents adds time at precisely the stage where the backlog now sits.”
Why the Average Will Keep Rising Before It Falls
The survey measures completed files from filing to permit, so AIMA’s progress on the oldest cases pushes the published average up rather than down. Portugal’s quickest reported file in the second quarter took 36.3 months, up from 14.3 in the first, and the average rose from 43.9 months to 50.4.
The two readings do not conflict. The survey describes what has just been concluded, mostly files from 2021 to 2023, while the practitioners describe files opened since the digital procedure began.
If AIMA converts its 30,000 scheduled appointments into decisions over the coming quarters, the average should climb further before newer files begin to pull it down.
Timing matters because of the nationality law in force since May 19. The residence clock for citizenship now starts when AIMA issues the first permit, and investors from outside the EU and the Portuguese-speaking world need ten years from that point.
On the 14 to 18 months the two firms quote for new filings, a file opened today reaches citizenship eligibility between 11 and 11.5 years after filing.
What Has Changed Since October
Leitão Amaro pledged to resolve the golden visa backlog in 2026 on October 29, 2025, at a budget hearing, where he said investor files had been left until last “for reasons of social equity” because they “pay the most.”
Lawyers called the remark shameless at the time. Monteiro, one of them, said applicants found it “hard to believe in any promises.”
Gruner points to two concrete changes since. Renewals have been handled entirely online through AIMA’s portal since February 16, which “removes one source of in-person congestion,” and applicants can now follow the progress of their applications online, “which brings a degree of transparency that was missing until now.” His firm has “been seeing a material increase in appointments,” and “approvals are arriving steadily.”
Oliveira Cunha confirms the pattern: “applications are progressing, biometric invitations are being issued, and residence cards are being dispatched.”
None of the three calls the problem solved. Room remains for improvement on “consistency and predictability,” in Oliveira Cunha’s words, while Gruner locates the remaining delays “principally with the Government and AIMA.”
Investors who chose Portugal “have, for their part, made every effort to make their applications as straightforward and swift to process as possible,” Gruner adds. “They are entitled to expect the same commitment in return.”
