Portugal’s Golden Visa processing system is showing measurable movement for the first time in years, but the bottleneck has simply moved rather than cleared, according to two independent industry outlets covering the same parliamentary hearing.
On October 7, 2026, Portugal’s Minister of the Presidency, António Leitão Amaro, told parliament’s Constitutional Affairs committee that AIMA (Agência para a Integração, Migrações e Asilo) had processed approximately 6,000 of the 46,000 Golden Visa (Autorização de Residência para Investimento, ARI) applications pending before it — roughly 13% — and had scheduled approximately 30,000 biometric appointments for applicants in the queue. The figures were reported independently by both Get Golden Visa and IMI Daily, which separately covered the same committee session.
For applicants, the gap between those two numbers is the key signal. “With roughly 30,000 appointments booked against 6,000 decisions, the constraint has moved to the stage between biometrics and the decision itself,” said Werner Gruner, Partner at Get Golden Visa. Applicants who already have a biometric appointment scheduled may see shorter waits from here, he said, “provided AIMA allocates enough analysts to match the volume it has scheduled” — but the appointment volume alone does not indicate how quickly those cases will actually be decided.
The committee hearing also covered AIMA’s wider workload: the agency’s workforce has grown from 723 to 850 staff this year, and clearing nearly all of a separate, 445,000-case backlog of “expressions of interest” regularization applications (only 5,000 of which remain unresolved) has freed capacity for golden-visa and family-reunification processing, Leitão Amaro told the committee. Family reunification appointments total 55,000 this year, with 26,000 permits granted — above what he described as a historical annual average of under 20,000.
The backlog itself splits into two tracks, according to Madalena Monteiro of immigration-services firm Liberty, who said she has attended golden-visa biometric appointments almost daily since the start of the year. Applications filed before 2025 followed a paper-based procedure and are “the delayed cases from 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024,” now “analyzed with slower timelines.” Filings from January 2025 onward follow a fully digital procedure and are “processed a bit faster.” Her firm received roughly 500 biometric appointment notifications in October 2025, all scheduled for 2026 dates, after what she called “years of inactivity” — a shift she linked to industry criticism that followed the minister’s own earlier admission that investor files had been left for “the end of the queue.”
João Pedro Oliveira Cunha of MFG Consultants urged caution against reading the appointment-scheduling progress as proof that decisions will speed up across the board. “Scheduling appointments and completing applications are two different stages of the process,” he said, adding that “it is still too early to conclude that processing times will shorten consistently for all new applicants.” His firm’s more recent, already-digitized filings are currently seeing roughly eight to nine months from submission to biometric invitation.
Two operational changes are already live for applicants to use directly: since February 16, 2026, Golden Visa renewals have been handled entirely online through AIMA’s renewal portal, cutting the need for in-person renewal appointments, and applicants can now track their own application’s progress online — a visibility option that did not previously exist.
On timing for new applications, estimates vary slightly by source but point in the same direction. Get Golden Visa currently advises new applicants to plan for approximately 18 months from submission to issuance of a first residence card, explicitly describing this as “a planning estimate, not a guaranteed processing time.” IMI Daily reports Lisbon practitioners currently quoting 14 to 18 months for new filings. Separately, IMI’s own Q2 2026 Processing Time Survey — a measure of the program’s broader historical backlog rather than new filings specifically — put the average wait across all cases processed to date at 50.4 months, underscoring how much of the current queue predates the recent operational changes.
The Portuguese government had previously pledged to clear the Golden Visa backlog by the end of 2026. Whether that holds, Gruner said, “will depend on how quickly the appointments already scheduled are converted into decisions” over the remaining months of the year.
References
Get Golden Visa – Portugal Golden Visa Processing Update: Where AIMA’s Backlog Stands in October 2026 / IMI Daily – Portugal Says It Has Processed 13% of Its Golden Visa Backlog
