Portugal's 2026 Nationality Law: 10 Years to Citizenship (7 for EU and CPLP), by the Numbers

How the law was made: two votes, two presidents, three court rulings

The government's first proposal, tabled in June 2025, would have applied the new rules to any application filed after 19 June 2025. That retroactive cut-off was dropped in October 2025, according to the Ordem dos Advogados. Parliament approved the first version on 28 October 2025 by 157 votes to 64, with PSD, Chega, IL, CDS-PP and JPP in favour and PS, Livre, PCP, BE and PAN against. A separate decree made loss of nationality an accessory penalty for certain crimes.

Fifty PS deputies asked the Constitutional Court to review both decrees on 19 November 2025. On 15 December the Court issued Acórdão 1133/2025 on the nationality decree and Acórdão 1134/2025 on the penal one. It struck down four norms of the nationality decree, three of them unanimously: an automatic bar for anyone sentenced to two or more years in prison, an opposition ground based on "manifest" rejection of national symbols, a carve-out from the ten-year consolidation of nationality held in good faith, and the transitional rule that would have judged pending applications against requirements on the day they were filed. It also struck down loss of nationality as a penalty. President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa vetoed both decrees on 19 December, as the Constitution requires after such a ruling.

António José Seguro took office as President on 9 March 2026. Parliament passed a revised nationality decree on 1 April 2026 by 152 votes to 64, with one abstention (JPP). Seguro promulgated it on 3 May, saying he would have preferred "maior consenso". It was published on 18 May as Lei Orgânica 1/2026 together with Declaração de Retificação 17/2026, and entered into force the next day. The 10-year period itself was never before the Court: none of the norms struck down concerned it.

The penal decree failed again. The Court struck down the revised version unanimously on 8 May 2026 (Acórdão 409/2026), Seguro vetoed it on 12 May, and on 3 July parliament declined to confirm it, by 152 votes to 56 as reported by Diário de Notícias. Loss of nationality as a criminal penalty is therefore not in force.

What changed on 19 May 2026

The headline change is in Article 6(1)(b). Legal residence for naturalisation rises from 5 years to 10, or to 7 for nationals of CPLP countries (Brazil, Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe, Timor-Leste, Equatorial Guinea) and of EU member states. Stateless people need 4 years. Great-grandchildren of original Portuguese citizens get a new discretionary route after 5 years.

Four requirements are new. Applicants must show knowledge of Portuguese culture, history and national symbols as well as the language, "através de teste ou de certificado". They must know their fundamental rights and duties and how the state is organised. They must sign a solemn declaration of adherence to the democratic rule of law. And they must be able to support themselves. CPLP nationals are presumed to meet the language part. The language level under the old regulation was A2 (Portaria 176/2014); the new law sets no level, and the regulation that would define the test had not been published by 3 October 2026.

The criminal bar is narrower than before. The old law excluded anyone with a final sentence of three years or more for any crime. The new one excludes effective prison sentences of more than three years for terrorism, violent crime, organised crime, crimes against state security and assisting illegal immigration, and adds people under UN or EU sanctions. Birthright also tightens: a child born in Portugal to foreign parents now becomes Portuguese only by declaration and only if a parent has been legally resident for 5 years, against 1 year of residence of any kind before.

When the ten years start

The rule that matters most to people already living in Portugal is a deletion. In 2024 parliament added Article 15(4), which counted residence from the date someone applied for a residence permit, as long as it was eventually granted. That protected applicants from AIMA's backlog, which the government put at about a million pending cases in 2024. Lei Orgânica 1/2026 revokes it.

The law does not say, as many websites claim, that the clock starts when the first residence card is issued. Article 15(1) still defines legal residence as being in Portugal "ao abrigo de qualquer dos títulos, vistos ou autorizações". In practice lawyers expect IRN to count from the residence title. Whether time on a national residence visa before the card counts, as it might for D7 and D8 holders, is untested. Until IRN issues guidance or decides cases, nobody can answer that with certainty.

The window for interrupted residence also shrinks. Under the old law, 5 years could be assembled from periods spread across 15. Now 10 years must fit inside 12 and 7 inside 9, which allows two years of gaps at most. For a golden-visa investor whose first card took three to four years to arrive, a delay lawyers quoted by ECO in July 2026 described as common, the realistic time from application to passport becomes about 13 to 14 years before IRN's own processing time is added. That figure is our derivation, not an official one. Permanent residence after 5 years, a separate status under the immigration law (Lei 23/2007), is unchanged.

Who keeps the old rules: the pending-application line

Article 7(2) is the transitional rule. Administrative procedures pending when the law entered into force are decided under the old Lei 37/81. The line is the filing date: a nationality application lodged by 18 May 2026 keeps the five-year rules. A person with four years and eleven months of residence who had not applied gets no protection and now needs 7 or 10 years.

That made the size of IRN's queue a policy variable. IRN's own note of July 2025 reported 1,543,170 nationality applications between 2020 and June 2025 and 515,334 under analysis on 30 June 2025, up from 156,543 at the end of 2020. In September 2025 IRN's president put the stock at about 522,000, of which 158,000 were Sephardic files, about 142,000 children born abroad, 106,000 residence-based naturalisations and 71,000 grandchildren. Público reported 520,000 in February 2026 and 516,000 in March.

Applications rose about 74% between March 2025 and the law's entry into force, according to IRN president Blandina Soares, who gave no absolute base. The average wait for a residence-based naturalisation is about three years. IRN had 474 of 704 registrar posts and 2,910 of 4,322 registry-officer posts filled. A recovery team of 41 staff issued 1,240 final decisions and 3,312 preliminary rejection notices on residence files between 1 July and mid-August 2026, according to the Justice Ministry. No official pending figure for after May 2026 has been published.

Three different numbers called "citizenship grants"

The resident series is the one the new law acts on, and it has been flat for fifteen years. Acquisitions by residents were 22,408 in 2008 and 20,624 in 2024, with a single spike to 32,147 in 2020. Of the 2024 total, 15,021 came through the residence route according to Pordata, about 73%. Brazilians were the largest group, with 7,187 acquisitions or 34.8%, followed by Cape Verdeans (2,265), Angolans (2,003) and Bissau-Guineans (1,440). Only 128 British and 68 American residents acquired Portuguese citizenship in 2024.

The denominator explains the falling rate. Eurostat's naturalisation rate divides acquisitions by the foreign population at the start of the year, and that population grew from 520,487 in 2020 to 1,045,398 in 2024 while acquisitions stayed near 20,000. Most of the people who arrived in the 2022–2024 wave had not yet reached five years of residence when the law changed. The law therefore lands on the largest cohort Portugal has ever had approaching eligibility, a point IRN's president made in September 2025 when he forecast a rise in naturalisation requests.

Non-residents are where the volume sat. In 2023 INE recorded 41,393 acquisitions in total, of which 24,408 (60%) went to people living abroad and 16,377 (40%) to Israelis. In 2024 people abroad received 26,216 grants, 81% of them through the Sephardic route according to Pordata.

The Sephardic route closes

The Sephardic route opened on 1 March 2015. By the end of 2021 IRN had received 137,087 applications, granted 56,685 and refused 300. In 2022 alone 124,663 applications arrived, a third of all nationality applications that year, and 18,121 were granted. Cumulative grants to the end of 2022 come to about 74,806 and applications to about 261,750, both derived from IRN figures and consistent with the "around 75,000" and "262,000" reported by the Jerusalem Post in October 2023. No official cumulative total after 2022 has been published.

Israelis filed 112,297 of the 167,530 applications received to May 2022 (67%), followed by Brazilians (16,554), Turks (7,100), Mexicans (6,492) and Colombians (6,251). Lei Orgânica 1/2026 revokes the route. The roughly 158,000 Sephardic files pending in September 2025 continue under the old law, which means grants will keep appearing in the statistics for several years after the route closed.

Who is now on the ten-year clock

AIMA's 2025 Migration and Asylum Report counted 1,585,854 foreign residents at the end of 2025, 13.9% of the population and 2.7% more than a year earlier, after growth of 18.3% in 2024. Brazilians were 493,622, or 31.1%, followed by Angolans (99,050), Indians (91,405), Ukrainians (84,889) and Cape Verdeans (71,005). Of the total, 1,324,411 held valid residence titles. Those people, minus anyone whose nationality application was pending on 19 May 2026, are the population on the new clock.

The 7-year rule makes nationality the dividing line. CPLP and EU nationals need 7 years, and CPLP nationals are presumed to speak Portuguese. Brazilians alone are 31.1% of foreign residents, and Angolans and Cape Verdeans add another 10.7% (derived from AIMA's counts). The British (47,726), Americans, Indians, Nepalis and Ukrainians need 10. A Público report in May 2026 put the number holding CPLP mobility residence at 220,000.

The long-stay visas that feed Portugal's relocation market sit on the 10-year side for most holders. The Foreign Ministry had received 9,322 D8 digital-nomad applications and issued 7,664 visas from the launch in October 2022 to September 2025, according to Conta-Lá. Applications fell in each of the three years. No official D7 issuance series has been published. Digital nomads cluster in Lisbon, Madeira and Porto, where the tourism and housing pressures documented in our Lisbon tourism statistics article are sharpest. The temporary-stay version of the D8 is a stay visa, not residence, and almost certainly does not count toward nationality at all.

Golden visa: residency unchanged, citizenship delayed

The golden visa (ARI) had its best year in 2025, the year the new law was being debated. AIMA granted 2,685 ARI, up 29% on 2,081 in 2024 and above the previous record of 2,091 in 2023. Americans led with 535, then Chinese (392), British (252), Turkish (188), Indian (170), Russian (160), Brazilian (154) and South African (97) investors. The cumulative total since October 2012 reached 18,254. AIMA's last published investment total was €6.451bn for the first 12,718 visas, to September 2023. It has stopped publishing the figure, so the capital behind the 5,536 visas granted since then is unknown.

Nothing in Lei Orgânica 1/2026 mentions the ARI. Golden-visa time counts as legal residence like any other title, so most investors now need 10 years, and the law adds no physical-presence test beyond the ARI's own minimum of 7 days in the first year and 14 days in each later two-year period. The government's position, given by the minister of the presidency's office on 19 May 2026, is that the golden visa "nunca teve como finalidade a atribuição da nacionalidade portuguesa" and that the state had legislated on residence permits, "não sobre garantias automáticas de nacionalidade".

Investors disagree. Lawyers at AGPC, representing golden-visa holders, said in July 2026 that 1,260 investors had joined a complaint and about 2,000 were expected, with lawsuits planned for September unless the government acted. We could not confirm that a suit was filed. Fund-flow data is contested: APFIPP figures reported by ECO show €94.7m of redemptions from golden-visa funds in January–May 2026, more than in all of 2025, while Bloomberg reported about €20m withdrawn. The two almost certainly cover different sets of funds.

The property link is weaker than marketing suggests. INE recorded 8,471 home purchases by non-residents in 2025, worth €3.4bn and down 13.3%, or 5% of all transactions, the lowest share since the series began in 2019. The Algarve took 29.7% of those purchases and 42.4% of their value. That decline began before the nationality law, after the golden visa's real-estate route ended in October 2023, so no causal effect of the 2026 law can be shown yet.

Portugal against the rest of Europe

Before May 2026 Portugal sat with France, Germany and the Netherlands in the five-year group. It now sits with Spain and Italy at ten years for most non-EU nationals, and its seven-year track for EU and CPLP nationals matches Greece's general rule.

Portugal is part of a tightening wave across northern and western Europe. Finland moved from 5 to 8 years in October 2024. Germany abolished its 3-year fast track on 30 October 2025. Sweden moved from 5 to 8 years on 6 June 2026, according to the Riksdag. France raised the language requirement to B2 from 1 January 2026 and added a civic exam. Portugal made the largest single change, doubling the requirement for most non-EU nationals.

For Brazilians the comparison with Spain is stark. Spain's Civil Code allows nationals of Ibero-American countries, and Portuguese citizens, to naturalise after 2 years of residence. Portugal now asks them for 7. Portugal keeps one advantage: it allows dual citizenship without conditions, which Spain grants only to the privileged nationalities and the Netherlands generally refuses.

Eleven claims tested

Much of what ranks for "Portugal citizenship 10 years" was written before the law was published and never updated. Some pages still say five years applies or that ten years is a proposal. Others present an inference about the start of the clock as statutory wording, or treat the binding transitional rule as a non-binding remark. Two of the claims that fail came from the planning document behind this series: our wording of AIMA's 2025 card figures, and our statement that the clock runs from card issue.

The plan's other legal claims held up. The Constitutional Court ruling number (Acórdão 1133/2025), the 152–64 vote of 1 April 2026, Seguro's promulgation on 3 May and entry into force on 19 May are all confirmed against the law text and the Court. The title figure needed qualifying: ten years is the default, seven applies to EU and CPLP nationals, and both are minimum residence periods before IRN's processing time starts.

What this means for travelers, businesses and analysts

Travelers. Nothing in the nationality law changes how tourists enter Portugal or how long they can stay. The law matters to people who are turning repeat visits into residence: a D7 or D8 holder who arrives in 2026 should plan on 10 years to a passport, plus processing, and on permanent residence after 5. Keep every residence title, entry stamp and tax filing, because the summing window now forgives only two years of gaps. For the city most relocators start in, our Lisbon travel guide covers neighbourhoods, costs and what has changed on the ground.

Tourism businesses and investors. Relocation services, golden-visa funds, long-stay rentals and coworking operators sold Portugal partly on a five-year passport. That proposition has gone for non-EU, non-CPLP customers, while residence products are untouched: the ARI still requires 7 days in the first year and 14 days per two-year period, and 2025 was its record year. Watch three thresholds. If 2026 ARI grants fall below the roughly 2,080–2,090 of 2023 and 2024, the law is costing demand. If the regulation defines a demanding culture test, CPLP advantage widens further. If IRN guidance counts residence-visa time, the effective wait for D7 and D8 holders shortens by months.

Journalists and analysts. Safe to cite: Lei Orgânica 1/2026 of 18 May 2026, in force 19 May; 10 years, 7 for EU and CPLP, 4 for stateless people; applications pending on 19 May keep the old law; 20,624 acquisitions by residents in 2024 and a naturalisation rate of 1.97 per 100 non-nationals against an EU average of 2.73 (Eurostat); 515,334 nationality files pending at IRN on 30 June 2025; 1,585,854 foreign residents at end-2025; 18,254 golden visas since 2012. Do not repeat: "700,000 pending applications" (a union estimate), "141,300 naturalised in 2023", "€7bn raised", "affects 700,000 immigrants", or any wording that says the law starts the clock at card issue. The series finding this article adds is a measurement gap: Portugal publishes three incompatible nationality series, no headcount of people affected, and has stopped publishing golden-visa investment totals.