Immigration

Portugal | Expression of interest — current situation

Summary

This news alert aims to raise awareness of the recent changes to the Expression of Interest regime introduced by the Portuguese Government, due to the backlog of the services. The government launched a portal where the foreign nationals can register themselves under a new category, i.e., for people that do not have an Expression of Interest but can attest that, before June 4, 2024, were paying social security contributions.

The detail

Last year, the Portuguese government revoked the Expression of Interest regime and announced a task force to address thousands of pending applications that have been clogging the system.

Up until this moment, it used to be possible for third country nationals that entered Portugal without a Residence Visa to submit a Residence Permit request online, via the Expression of Interest regime. After this first step online, the applicants should be contacted by the authorities for an in-person appointment to collect the biometrics, submit the original documents and pay the applicable fees. However, the volume of applications increased in a way that was unexpected by the government and the authorities were understaffed to process all applications. For this reason, people that requested their Residence Permit under this regime were waiting for more than 2 years to be contacted by the authorities for the in-person interview, preventing them from regularizing their immigration status in the country.

In this sense, the authorities introduced a series of new procedures to expedite these applications, namely:

• AIMA started to contact the foreign nationals who submitted an Expression of Interest in the old SAPA portal to register in a new platform, specifically created for this purpose;
• Afterwards, the payment instructions were provided to settle the payment of the government fees within the following 10 days – this procedure was an important step to understand if the applicant was still interested in moving forward with the application or not;
• Once the payment was received, AIMA contacted the applicant with a date for the in-person appointment and a link to re-submit the required paperwork;
• AIMA created specific offices that are only responsible for receiving Expression of Interest applications.

* These fees depend on the nationality of the applicant: for CPLP citizens, the fee amounts to EUR 56,80. However, for the remaining situations, the applicants are required a fee of EUR 397,90.

However, this situation created a loophole for the foreign nationals that were already paying social security contributions, but did not submit their application before the government announced the end of the Expression of Interest regime. This situation led to a public debate, and on November 7, 2024 a new amendment was introduced to address this issue.

Following the above, on the January 25, 2025, the government launched a portal where the foreign nationals can register themselves under a new category, i.e., for people that do not have an Expression of Interest but can attest that, before the June 4, 2024, were paying social security contributions.

What this means for employers

With the end of the Expression of Interest regime, it is essential that employers in Portugal prioritize that the candidates/employees from third-country nationals only relocate to Portugal with the applicable visa, since the possibilities of regularization directly in the country – without a proper visa – are extremely limited and highly bureaucratic.

Contact us

For a deeper discussion on the above, please reach out to your Vialto Partners point of contact, or alternatively:

Ana Duarte
Partner

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