Portugal’s immigration agency AIMA had processed 6,000 of approximately 46,000 pending Golden Visa applications by October 7, 2026, António Leitão Amaro, the minister of the Presidency, told Parliament. That is about 13%.
The agency had also scheduled roughly 30,000 appointments. Scheduling is not completion. About 40,000 cases remained either awaiting processing or at another stage of the procedure.
The count covers pending applications tied to Portugal’s investor-residence program. It does not mean that every applicant whose case has been processed has received a residence card. Those are separate steps.
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The figures put the investor queue alongside a much larger regularization backlog that the government says has nearly been cleared. The minister described a shift in agency priorities. The queues are moving at different speeds.
Appointments do not mean the files are complete
An appointment marks progress in a case, but it does not establish that the applicant has completed every required step or received residence documentation. The reported 6,000 figure counts processed cases, while the 30,000 appointments refer to applicants scheduled to attend.
That leaves about 40,000 cases still in the system, though not all at the same point. The agency’s pending total is approximately 46,000, and industry estimates have placed the stock between 45,000 and 50,000. Those totals can vary according to whether they include family members and renewals.
The agency inherited unresolved cases when it replaced Portugal’s former immigration service, SEF, in late 2023. Applicants have encountered delays at more than one stage, including appointment scheduling and biometrics. Specialist reporting describes waits of 12 months or more in some cases.
Older regularization cases absorbed much of the agency’s effort
The minister told the parliamentary Committee on Constitutional Affairs that the regularization queue had fallen from 445,000 pending applications to about 5,000 unresolved cases. Many of those applications came through the former “expressions of interest” route.
That route allowed some foreign nationals already in Portugal, including people who entered as tourists, to seek regularization. A separate temporary mission structure had resolved 98% of 940,000 notifications, the minister said. The notification figure measures a different administrative workload from the pending investor applications.
He attributed the accumulation to an agency dealing with inherited cases and new arrivals while short of staff and adequate technology. The transition from SEF to the new agency also coincided with a move away from older paper-based processing toward digital systems. The transition left work at several stages.
Family reunification now draws on the agency’s capacity
The minister said progress on the regularization backlog had allowed the agency to redirect resources toward family reunification and ARI applications. ARI is short for Autorização de Residência para Atividade de Investimento, the formal name for Portugal’s investor-residence route.
During 2026, the agency made 55,000 family-reunification appointments and granted 26,000 residence permits through that process. The permits exceeded the historical annual average of fewer than 20,000. Appointment totals and permits granted measure different stages, as they do in the investor queue.
The minister also addressed renewals involving Belarusian nationals. He said cases could be assessed individually when applicants had expired passports. Each case would be considered on its circumstances.
Permit grants rose even as the pending queue remained
AIMA’s annual figures show Portugal granted 2,685 investor residence permits in 2025, a record. That total surpassed the 2,081 permits issued in 2024 and the 2,091 issued in 2023.
The agency also recorded 3,967 permits for family members in 2025. Together, investor and dependent permits reached 6,652. Those issuance figures show completed permits, not the number of cases waiting in the processing queue.
The agency stopped publishing the amount of foreign investment associated with the approvals, limiting comparisons with earlier years. The permit totals therefore track approvals, while offering less detail about the investment behind them. The backlog remains a separate measure.
The government says immigration policy is entering a second phase
Leitão Amaro said the next period of immigration policy would focus on integration and stronger action against illegal immigration. He called it a “second phase.”
