D7 Visa Statistics: No Official Count, a 33,292-Permit "Other" Bucket and Retirees at About 5% of Foreign Residents

What the D7 rule says, and what it does not

The official name is the residence visa for retirees, religious workers and people living on their own income, consular code VR D7. The gov.pt service page says it is open to non-EU, non-EEA and non-Swiss nationals, costs €90 and is decided within 60 days. The legal basis it lists is Lei 23/2007, Portaria 1563/2007 on means of subsistence, Portaria 760/2009 and Decreto Regulamentar 9/2018. We could not read the Diário da República text, so we print no article number for the D7 provisions.

The consular checklist is the best official statement of the test. The US consulate's checklist, on a form dated 10 July 2025, names four kinds of qualifying income: pensions, property income, intellectual property income and financial investment income. It asks for savings equal to 12 minimum wages for one adult, 50% more for each extra adult and 30% more for each child under 18. It allows the amount to be halved if accommodation is secured and cut by up to 90% if food is also secured. We found no monthly income threshold in any official checklist we read.

Three numbers get attached to the D7 wrongly. The €920 monthly income figure is the minimum wage, which advisers use to restate the savings rule. The €3,680 figure is the D8's four-times test. The €9,000 to €10,000 balance is out of date, because €9,120 was 12 times the 2023 wage. Consulates also add their own requests. The Macau and Hong Kong consulate asks for a Portuguese bank account or an affidavit to open one, a one-year lease or a notarised statement from a host, insurance valid for a year and a criminal record issued within 90 days. Whether the account must be Portuguese is disputed between that consulate and one adviser.

Several practical rules rest on adviser pages only. The four-month window to enter after the visa, the two-year first permit followed by three-year renewals and the minimum-stay limits (advisers say six months consecutive or eight months interrupted) were not found in official text. Process changes since 2024 mostly bear on the queue. Decree-Law 37-A/2024 of 3 June 2024 ended the "manifestação de interesse" route, and Lei 61/2025 forced old requests to be refiled by 31 December 2025. Neither touches a D7 visa issued by a consulate. Lei 62/2026 of 10 September 2026 is the latest amendment to Lei 23/2007 in the consolidated index, and the excerpt we read did not change the D7 provisions. The backlog behind all of this is in our AIMA backlog tracker.

No count: what the official sources contain

AIMA's 2024 migration report, published on 16 October 2025, lists 218,332 new titles, down 34% from 2023. The main grounds reported in press summaries were professional activity with 63,527 titles and the CPLP route with 59,372, followed by family reunification with 2,909 and investment activity with 2,081. There is no D7, reformados or own-income line. A claim that the D7 is Portugal's most popular visa therefore has nothing under it. Two other routes had more than 59,000 titles in one year, and the D7's own number is unknown.

Later figures are no more specific. AIMA's president said 386,463 new authorisations had been issued by 22 October 2025, against 236,030 a year earlier, with most of them conversions of old manifestação cases and no breakdown by purpose. On 11 February 2026 the minister Leitão Amaro put consular visas at about 70,000 for 2025 and gave no D7 figure (RTP/Lusa). The last state report we could read with purposes by year is SEF's 2019 report: 129,155 first permits, of which family reunification took 38,204, work 31,511 and study 13,356 (Diário de Notícias, 23 June 2020). The summary shows no D7 line either.

Eurostat is the nearest source. Its first-permit table puts every permit that is not for family, study or paid work into "other reasons". The sources we read say this includes the D7, D8, golden visa and humanitarian grants, and do not document where the CPLP route falls. The D7 cannot be pulled out of it.

The shape tells part of the story. The bucket fell 46.3% in 2020 and has grown every year since. The D8 cannot account for the climb, because the ministry's monthly D8 count peaked at 381 in March 2023 and was 18 in May 2024, while the bucket rose 67.3% in 2024. The golden visa, at 2,081 grants in 2024, is also too small. The remainder is some mix of the D7, humanitarian grants and routes the sources do not document, and no published source splits it.

Three requests would close most of the gap. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs holds visa issuance by type and consulate, and the D7 has its own code, VR D7. AIMA holds first and renewed permits by legal basis. Eurostat could be asked which route Portugal reports under "other reasons". Until one of them publishes, any D7 number is a guess. The D8 shows how quickly an official series can stop: the ministry's monthly count ends around June 2024 and nothing has followed.

By nationality: Brazil first, the United States second

Eurostat publishes the bucket by citizenship, and the table below carries the eleven citizenships we pulled. Together they account for 13,201 of the 33,292 permits in 2025, or 39.7% (derived). The other 20,091 belong to citizenships we did not extract, so the table is a sample of the bucket, not a ranking of it.

The United States ranked above Brazil in 2021, 2022 and 2023, then fell behind it in 2024 when Brazilian permits jumped from 2,191 to 6,148. American permits rose from 457 in 2019 to 2,845 in 2024, a factor of 6.2, then fell 8.6% to 2,600 in 2025. British permits peaked at 1,714 in 2024 and fell 21.6% in 2025. Russian permits rose from 29 to 1,113 and then fell 21.5%. Türkiye is the one large riser in 2025, from 150 to 430. None of this is the D7. A Brazilian in this bucket may be on a D7, a D8 or a humanitarian route, and the same holds for an American. Our American tourists analysis covers the same market from the tourism side.

Two cross-checks help. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs told Jornal de Notícias that it issued residence visas of all types to 835 US citizens in 2019, 4,265 in 2023 and 2,859 in 2024, though December 2024 was largely missing (via AICEP Portugal Global). Those are visas, not first permits, and cover every route, so they cannot be set against Eurostat's 457, 2,426 and 2,845. The US Social Security Administration reports 2,505 beneficiaries for Portugal in December 2025 in its Table 5.M1, against 2,498 in December 2023. The table's scope is the totalisation-agreement series, and we read only a summary of it. If it does cover American retirees, it suggests they are not what drove the rise in US permits. That is an inference.

How many foreign residents are old enough to be retirees

SEF's 2019 report counted a stock of 590,348 foreign residents, 9.5% of them aged 65 or over, which is about 56,000 people (derived). A presentation by the demographer Pedro Góis in June 2026, using AIMA data, gives the 65-plus share as 7.7% in 2021, 8.0% in 2022, 9.8% in 2023 and 6.3% in 2024. The fall in 2024 comes from AIMA restating its 2023 stock from 1,044,606 to 1,304,833. For the end of 2025, INE's estimate of 1,597,539 foreign residents comes with a statement that about 5% are over 65, which implies roughly 80,000 people (derived from a rounded share, so indicative only).

Retirees have not left. They have been outgrown. INE counts 849,384 more foreign residents at the end of 2025 than in 2021, when the figure was 748,155, and much of that is working-age: Brazil alone is 574,195 on INE's count and India 93,683. By nationality, AIMA counted 48,238 British residents at the end of 2024 and 47,726 at the end of 2025, the ninth largest group, and 19,258 Americans at the end of 2024. No source we found publishes age by nationality. That is why a retiree table by nationality cannot be built from public data. The stock and its disputed totals are in our foreign residents analysis.

Pension-side data is no better. The UK Department for Work and Pensions pays the State Pension to about 1.1 million people overseas (quarter to August 2025), and a parliamentary answer on 4 March 2026 gave no figure for Portugal. The country table sits in Stat-Xplore, which we could not open. The only pension-side count we obtained for Portugal is the US Social Security table above. Foreign pension income received in Portugal and the number of foreign pensioners in the 2021 census were also not found.

The tax regime that used to define the retiree story has also gone. The non-habitual resident regime was revoked from 1 January 2024 by Lei 82/2023. People who held a visa or permit valid to 31 December 2023, or had a procedure started by then, could still register for 2024, and a 2024 registration ends in 2033. The Tribunal de Contas counted 57,887 beneficiaries in 2021, 74,258 in 2022 and 114,645 in 2023, a rise of 54.4% with an average benefit of €11,313, at a cost of €1,360 million in 2022 and €1,297 million in 2023. The tax authority's own figure for 2023 is about €1,230 million, and ECO reported 39,909 registered NHRs at the end of 2023 against the same 54.4% rise, which does not fit the other numbers. No source splits NHR by pensioners or nationality.

The replacement, IFICI, applies a 20% flat rate to Portuguese-source employment and self-employment income for ten years. It covers a list of qualifying activities in teaching, research, investment, startups and highly qualified jobs, and excludes current and former NHR holders. The guide we read does not mention pensions, so the statement that retirees cannot use it is our reading of the activity list. How foreign pensions are taxed now rests on accountancy sources, and a new UK-Portugal tax convention signed on 15 September 2025 had an entry-into-force date we could not confirm.

The Algarve: where the foreign share is highest

INE's estimate for the end of 2025 puts 161,556 foreign residents in the Algarve, up from 97,580 in 2021, and 27.9% of the region's population against 19.2% in 2021 (Barlavento, 22 June 2026). It is the highest of any region. The 27.9% is the foreign share of the Algarve's own population, not the Algarve's share of Portugal's foreigners, and it is sometimes misquoted as the second. AIMA's 2025 report, released on 22 September 2026, gives 34.5% for Faro district, with 166,124 foreign residents in one Postal report and 167,124 in another on the same day. One of those is a typo.

The Algarve foreign population is not mainly British. On INE's count the largest groups are Brazil with 42,943, the United Kingdom with 19,277 and India with 13,255, which is 26.6%, 11.9% and 8.2% of the region's 161,556 foreign residents (derived). The stereotype of the British retiree on the coast describes a visible minority of a population that is far more mixed. British tourists remain the region's largest market, with the Algarve holding 57.3% of all UK nights in Portugal in 2025 and 73.1% of Irish nights (ECO, 10 July 2026). Our Algarve tourism statistics and UK tourist analysis cover that side. No survey we found links tourists who later relocate, and the question is open.

The housing figures show where foreign money goes without naming the buyers. Non-residents bought 8,471 homes in 2025, down 13.3% and the third annual fall, for €3.4 billion, or 5.0% of all transactions (INE via idealista, 24 March 2026). The Algarve took 29.7% of those purchases and 42.4% of the value. The average price was €234,120 for buyers with Portuguese tax domicile, €335,640 for EU domicile and €470,277 for domicile outside the EU, which is about twice the first (derived). INE does not give buyers' nationality. A broker, Engel & Völkers, reports about 80% foreign buyers at Quinta do Lago and Vale do Lobo and 75% at Vilamoura, but that is prime-area broker data. An independent study put real house price growth in Portugal at 81% from 2013 to 2023, against 40% for the OECD, and did not attribute it to D7 holders. We found no study that measures a D7 effect on rents or prices.

Elsewhere, INE's end-2025 estimate puts 546,419 foreign residents in Greater Lisbon and 311,095 in the North, and Madeira's statistics office reports more than 19,000 in the region (DREM, 24 June 2026, headline only). Those are larger populations than the Algarve's with lower shares. For a retiree the choice among them turns on climate, cost and the health service, and no source we found counts D7 holders by region.

Health services are the other pressure point, and the evidence is thin. A party statement reported by Barlavento says more than 150,000 Algarve users have no family doctor, citing unnamed data from February and no year. It does not mention foreigners. We found no source on foreign users of the national health service.

Citizenship, rankings and rival schemes

A D7 holder from outside the EU and CPLP now faces a 10-year path to citizenship. Lei Orgânica 1/2026 (Diário da República, 1st series, no. 95, 18 May 2026, in force 19 May) requires 10 years of legal residence, or 7 for EU and CPLP nationals. Article 15 defines legal residence as a regularised stay under any title, visa or authorisation, and has no D7-specific rule, so on our reading D7 time counts as ordinary residence. Article 7(2) leaves procedures pending on 19 May 2026 under the old text. The detail is in our nationality law analysis.

Portugal's retirement rankings are lower than the headlines suggest. International Living's 2026 Annual Global Retirement Index, published on 1 December 2025, puts Greece first on 90.1, then Panama on 89.3 and Costa Rica on 87.6, with Portugal fourth on 87.4 and Mexico fifth on 87.3 (via 401(k) Specialist, 2 December 2025). The same article says Portugal was second in the 2024 and 2025 editions, which we did not verify. A visa adviser's 2026 index ranks Portugal fifth after Uruguay, Mauritius, Spain and Costa Rica, though the article's own metadata says fourth. InterNations ranks Portugal eighth overall for expats in 2026. That is a survey of expats, not retirees.

What this means for travelers, businesses and analysts

Travelers. A D7 requires a visa from a consulate before you arrive, so a long stay on a tourist entry is a test drive and not a start. The savings figure to plan around in 2026 is €11,040 for one adult, rising with dependants, and you should check your own consulate's list. The Algarve towns with the highest foreign shares are Vila do Bispo, Aljezur and Albufeira, and Tavira is above 30%. Visit one in winter before judging it on a summer week. Our Algarve travel guide and Tavira guide cover where to base yourself.

Tourism businesses and investors. Do not size a relocation market from the 33,292 figure. It mixes routes, and about 80,000 foreign residents over 65 is a stock, not a flow. The signals that would change the assessment are an AIMA breakdown of new titles by purpose, which the 2025 report may contain, a published consular D7 count, and any codification of the 12-month savings rule. On the demand side, non-resident home purchases have now fallen three years in a row, US permits fell 8.6% in 2025 and British ones fell 21.6%. Retiree-driven demand is not the growth engine that the 2021 to 2024 headlines implied.

Journalists and analysts. Safe to cite: 33,292 "other reasons" first permits in 2025 (Eurostat); Brazil 6,560, the US 2,600 and the UK 1,343 within that bucket; 12 times the minimum wage as the checklist savings rule, €11,040 in 2026; 161,556 foreign residents in the Algarve, 27.9% of its population (INE via press); 218,332 new titles in 2024 (AIMA). Do not repeat: any D7 count by year or nationality, "most popular visa", the €920 monthly income as an official test, 4 times the minimum wage for the D7, €9,000 to €10,000 as the current balance, and five years to citizenship. The series finding is that the D7 joins the D8 as a route with no official series, which makes a data request to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and AIMA the most useful next step.