Portugal’s Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum (AIMA) opened its online renewal portal for golden visa (Autorização de Residência para Atividade de Investimento, or ARI) holders on February 16.
The Portal das Renovações will become the sole channel for processing golden visa renewals, eliminating in-person submissions entirely.
Under the new system, golden visa holders and their regrouped family members must submit renewal requests and pay applicable fees through the portal.
Physical appointments at immigration offices survive only for one purpose: Collecting biometric data when existing records are invalid.
How the Portal Works
AIMA will process renewal applications digitally from submission through decision. When an applicant’s biometric data requires updating, the agency will schedule an appointment automatically and notify the permit holder of the date, time, and location.
Once biometrics are collected, the remainder of the procedure returns to the digital platform. Approval itself, however, remains conditional on biometric collection; a renewal cannot be finalized without it.
Applicants who already hold scheduled in-person appointments for biometric collection must keep them. AIMA’s announcement specifies that these previously arranged appointments, flagged in earlier notifications, remain binding.
Technical Problems Persist
Madalena Monteiro, founder of Liberty Legal, cautions that the portal is not yet fully functional. “Unfortunately, this portal is not fully operational yet,” she told IMI. “There are informatics issues that do not allow applicants to submit their renewal requests, and AIMA is working on solving the bugs in the system.”
She remains optimistic about the platform’s potential once the technical difficulties are resolved, believing that “as soon as it is properly implemented, it will be a great platform because we will be able to make the renewal request without the need to actually present ourselves at the immigration office, since the submission and upload of documents will be fully online.”
A Familiar Pattern
The portal launch fits a recurring pattern in AIMA’s approach to golden visa administration: announce digitization, then work through implementation problems after going live. In early 2025, AIMA overhauled its procedures to address a backlog of approximately 55,000 golden visa applications (initial and renewal), promising 30-to-90-day processing after document submission. Those deadlines went largely unmet.
Minister of the Presidency António Leitão Amaro pledged in October 2025 that AIMA would resolve all outstanding golden visa applications in 2026, generating €85 million in revenue.
That promise came one day after parliament voted to extend naturalization timelines to ten years for most applicants, a move that immigration lawyers described as “shameless.”
More than 20,000 investors were still awaiting AIMA appointments extending into 2026, some having waited since 2021 for decisions that Portuguese law requires within 90 days.
A functioning renewal portal may help, but AIMA’s track record of missed deadlines gives practitioners little basis for confidence.
