Portugal D7 visa requirements in 2026: €920 a month, indexed to the minimum wage

Portugal asks a retiree on a D7 to prove €920 a month. It asks an investor who has transferred €500,000 to prove exactly the same €920 a month — and almost every page written about the Portuguese golden visa omits that, because the people writing them sell the service.

That is the shape of this guide. Portugal is not a hard country to move to, but it is a country where the number in the advertisement and the number in the instrument have drifted apart, in both directions: some pages publish a threshold 17% below the real one, others publish a digital-nomad figure that exists in no law at all.

Everything below is quoted from the act that sets it, with the article number and the date the text was read. Where we could not read something at source, the guide says so instead of filling the gap.

Portugal residency routes in 2026: which ones still exist

Two rows in that table are where readers are most often misled, and both are dealt with in full below: the investment permit's income test, which is real and which almost nobody mentions, and the D8's income figure, which is real but is a multiplier rather than the euro amount everybody prints.

Portugal D7 visa requirements: €920 a month, indexed to the minimum wage

Portugal sets no euro figure for residence income. It sets a share of the national minimum wage and lets the figure move on its own.

Portaria 1563/2007, article 2(2) fixes the scale: 100% of the minimum monthly wage for the first adult, 50% for each further adult, and 30% for each child under 18 and each dependent adult child. Article 13 of the same order makes the annual update automatic, in step with the wage, so no new instrument is issued each January.

Decreto-Lei 139/2025 of 29 December, article 3, sets that wage for 2026 at €920.00, in force from 1 January 2026.

The single most common error about this figure is the anchor. These thresholds are indexed to the RMMG, the minimum wage, and not to the IAS, the social support index. The IAS for 2026 is €537.13, set by Portaria 480-A/2025/1. Anyone quoting a multiple of the IAS for a Portuguese residence income test is reading the wrong instrument, and the gap between the two is €383 a month.

It also means you can predict next year's threshold: it will be whatever the January minimum-wage decree says, multiplied by 100%, 50% and 30%.

What counts as passive income for the D7

The categories are in Decreto Regulamentar 84/2007, article 24, which names them separately: foreign citizens who are retired; those living on income from movable or immovable property or from intellectual property; and those living on income from financial investments.

So a pension qualifies. Rent qualifies. Dividends, royalties and interest qualify. A salary from a foreign employer is a different thing and belongs on the D8.

Portugal D7 visa proof of income: what "stable and regular" means

Portaria 1563/2007, article 2(1) defines means of subsistence as *"recursos estáveis e regulares que sejam suficientes para as necessidades essenciais"* — stable and regular resources sufficient for essential needs.

Those two words carry the weight. A single transfer arriving in an account does not answer them, and this is the point at which the decision stops being arithmetic and becomes an official's judgement. Which statements and certificates a particular consulate will accept is a question about practice, not about the text of the order, and the honest answer is that it is a question for someone licensed in the jurisdiction.

Does the Portugal golden visa require proof of income? Yes, and here is the article

This is the claim on this page most likely to contradict what you have read, so it is set out in full and with its provenance.

Lei 23/2007, article 90-A(1)(a) — the residence permit for investment activity — requires that applicants *"Preencham os requisitos gerais estabelecidos no artigo 77.º, com exceção da alínea a) do n.º 1"*: meet the general requirements of article 77, with the exception of subparagraph (a) of paragraph 1.

Article 77(1) lists those requirements. Subparagraph (a) is possession of a valid residence visa. Subparagraph (d) is *"Posse de meios de subsistência, tal como definidos pela portaria a que se refere a alínea d) do n.º 1 do artigo 52.º"* — possession of means of subsistence, as defined by the order referred to in article 52(1)(d). That order is Portaria 1563/2007, the same one that produces the €920.

The exception is singular and named. It removes the visa. It does not remove the income test.

Where this was read, and when. Article 90-A was read on 28 August 2026 in the consolidated text of Lei 23/2007, nineteenth version, updated to Lei n.º 61/2025 of 22 October, in the legal database of the Procuradoria-Geral Distrital de Lisboa. Article 77(1) was read in the original Diário da República of 4 July 2007. We name the version because the article numbering is what the claim rests on: Lei 23/2007 was amended three times in 2025 alone, and a claim like this one made against a superseded text would be worthless.

Those three amendments are Lei 9/2025 of 13 February, Lei 55-C/2025 of 22 July and Lei 61/2025 of 22 October. The amendment lists of the first and third name neither article 77 nor article 90-A. Lei 55-C/2025 creates the Unidade Nacional de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras and touches Lei 23/2007 only through a renaming provision.

What the investment permit does waive, and what it does not

In exchange for the waived visa, art. 90-A(1) adds its own conditions: a valid Schengen visa, regularising the stay within 90 days of first entry, and meeting the investment-activity requirement of art. 3(1)(d).

The practical consequence is small in money and large in paperwork. €920 a month is the lowest income bar of any Portuguese route, and an investor who has moved half a million euros will clear it. But it is a document to produce, and a page that tells you the golden visa has no income requirement has told you something that is not in the law.

Portugal D8 digital nomad visa requirements: four minimum wages, and two different visas

Article 61-B of Lei 23/2007 creates the residence visa for remote professional activity, and article 54(1)(i) creates a temporary-stay visa for the same activity. Both are called the D8. Neither states an income figure.

The figure is one level down, in the regulation: articles 18-B(c) and 31-A(1)(c) of Decreto Regulamentar 84/2007 both require average monthly income over the last three months of at least four guaranteed minimum monthly wages. At the 2026 minimum wage of €920 that is €3,680 — this year. It is a multiplier, not a euro amount, and it moves every January.

Which of the two visas you hold decides everything that follows, and only one of them leads to a residence permit. The full comparison, the income test in the regulation's own words, and the reason a remote worker already in Portugal has no published route to convert are all in the D8 guide.

How to apply for a D7 visa: the residence visa, four months, and the AIMA appointment

There is no article of Lei 23/2007 dedicated to the D7, and that is a fact about where to look rather than a gap in the law. Articles 59 to 64 create the specific residence visas — subordinate work, independent work, research, study, student mobility, family reunification — and none of them is for a person living on their own income. The contrast is worth holding on to: when Parliament wanted a dedicated article for remote workers it made one, article 61-B, by Lei 18/2022. For passive income it never did.

So the answer to "which article is the D7" has three parts and only the last one carries a number you can quote at anybody: the general residence visa of article 58, the general permit conditions of article 77, and — for the categories themselves and the money — article 24 of Decreto Regulamentar 84/2007 with Portaria 1563/2007, both set out earlier on this page. A page citing an article of Lei 23/2007 for the D7 is citing something that does not exist.

Article 58 sets the mechanics:

• the residence visa exists to let its holder enter Portugal in order to apply for a residence permit, not to be the permit itself;
• it is valid for two entries;
• it allows a stay of four months;
• the deadline for deciding a residence-visa application is 60 days.

The consular fee for a national visa is €110, set by Portaria n.º 91/2025/1 of 10 March, which amended the consular emoluments table, in force since 11 March 2025.

Where the D7 application is filed, and what we could not confirm

Whether the file goes to the consulate directly or through an outsourced visa centre is stated on the consular portal and on individual consulate sites. Every one of those hosts was unreachable across this research, and no primary source we could open states the channel.

So this guide does not tell you. Pages that name a specific operator may well be right; we have not verified it, and on a site whose whole claim is that its figures are traceable, an unverified logistics detail is not worth borrowing from someone else.

The AIMA appointment is not a separate 120-day rule

This is a small thing that most guides state as a rule of its own, and it is not one.

Decreto Regulamentar 84/2007, article 14 provides that AIMA's favourable opinion on a residence visa includes the appointment for the applicant to present themselves at AIMA, whenever the application states the travel date — and that *"O agendamento previsto no número anterior deve respeitar o prazo de validade do respetivo visto de residência"*: the appointment must fall within the validity of the residence visa.

The deadline is therefore the visa's own four months under article 58(2), not a separate 120-day clock that starts on arrival. The appointment is set before you fly, inside the opinion, and it is set to fit inside the visa.

AIMA processing times and the backlog in 2026

The statutory deadlines are in article 82 of Lei 23/2007: 60 days to decide an application for a permit, 30 days to decide a renewal, with tacit approval on renewal where the delay is not attributable to the applicant. We read article 82 in the 2007 original; it is not in the amendment list of Lei 61/2025, but we could not open a consolidated text to confirm the current wording, so treat it as very likely current rather than verified.

The reality is a queue. At a hearing of the Assembleia da República's constitutional affairs committee on 1 July 2026, Secretary of State Rui Armindo Freitas put the number of files still awaiting a grant or refusal decision at 30,000. The AIMA Estrutura de Missão, the task force set up to clear the backlog, closed at the end of December 2025.

That figure is a minister's oral statement carried by the Lusa news agency, not an AIMA publication — AIMA's own site was unreachable throughout this research. It is attributed here to the person and the date rather than to the agency, and it should be read as an order of magnitude.

Any page promising a specific number of months is describing either the statute or a hope. The statute says 60 days. The queue is 30,000 files.

After the permit: renewal, and permanent residence at five years

Article 75(1) makes the temporary permit valid for two years from the issue of the title, renewable for successive three-year periods. At five years, article 80 opens permanent residence — on five cumulative conditions, of which the one people miss is that the income test applies again at that point.

Two things about that stage are worth knowing before you reach it. Under article 76(1) the permanent authorisation has no validity limit at all: what gets renewed every five years is the card, not the status. And the statute asks for "Português básico" and names no CEFR level — the A2 that every page publishes comes from regulation, not from article 80.

The whole of that stage — the card itself, what the renewal costs, what article 80 requires line by line, and why EU long-term resident status is a different thing — is set out in our guide to the Portuguese residence card, renewal and permanent residency.

Portuguese citizenship after the 2026 law: ten years, or seven

The rule changed this year, and pages written before May are now wrong.

Lei Orgânica n.º 1/2026 of 18 May 2026, in force from 19 May, rewrote article 6(1)(b) of the Nationality Law: seven years of legal residence for nationals of Portuguese-speaking countries and citizens of EU member states, ten years for everybody else. It was five for everyone before. Article 6(1) also gained an examination in culture, history and national symbols and a solemn declaration of adherence to the democratic rule of law, and the statute names no CEFR level for the language — the A2 in circulation is regulation-level, not statutory.

Two sentences decide what happens to a reader already living here. Article 7(2) keeps the old five-year rule for nationality proceedings pending on 19 May 2026. And article 5 of the same law repealed article 15(4), under which time spent waiting for a residence permit had counted towards the period since March 2024 — so for anything filed after that date, the AIMA queue no longer counts.

That is the whole of what a D7 applicant needs here. The statute article by article, the two counting regimes running side by side, and what the Constitutional Court did and did not strike down are in Portugal's nationality law.

Portugal tax for residents: the 183-day rule and the IFICI 20% regime

When you become tax resident. Article 16 of the personal income tax code makes you resident if you have remained in Portugal more than 183 days, consecutive or not, in any twelve-month period beginning or ending in the year in question. Two drafting points are commonly misstated: the window is a rolling twelve months and not the calendar year, and any day that includes an overnight stay counts, whole or partial. A habitual abode is an independent alternative test for those present fewer days.

The 20% regime. What replaced the old non-habitual resident regime is IFICI, created by article 58-A of the Estatuto dos Benefícios Fiscais and regulated by Portaria n.º 352/2024/1 of 23 December. It applies a special rate of 20% to employment and self-employment income from a qualifying activity, for ten consecutive years.

The qualifying activities are listed in the annex by occupational code, and the list is narrower than the old regime: company directors and executives, administrative and commercial services directors, production and specialised services directors, specialists in the physical sciences, mathematics and engineering, doctors, university and higher-education teachers, and information and communication technology specialists.

The deadline is the part people miss. Registration is due by 15 January of the year following the one in which you become resident. That is a hard date in article 2 of the portaria, and it is confirmed on the tax authority's own guidance.

Pensions are outside it. Category H income and income from blacklisted jurisdictions are excluded from the regime and taxed at 35% — which matters directly to the D7 reader, since a pension is the archetypal D7 income.

Family reunification in Portugal: two years first, since Lei 61/2025

Article 98(1), as amended by Lei 61/2025: a holder of a residence permit valid for at least two years has the right to family reunification with the family members covered by articles 99 and 100.

That waiting period is new. Exemptions survive for dependent minors and incapacitated persons and for holders under articles 90, 90-A and 121-A, with a carve-out for spouses who cohabited for fifteen months before entry.

Who counts as family, under article 99(1): the spouse; minor or incapacitated children dependent on the couple or on one spouse; adopted minors; adult unmarried dependent children studying in Portugal; adult unmarried studying children where the sponsor holds an investment permit; dependent first-degree ascendants in the direct line; and minor siblings under the sponsor's guardianship. Lei 61/2025 added a paragraph requiring the marriage to be valid and recognised under Portuguese law, and setting a minimum age of 18.

The income requirement rises with the household, and the statute now says so. Article 101, as amended, requires means of subsistence *"suficientes para sustentar todos os membros do agrupamento familiar, sem recurso a apoios sociais"* — sufficient to support every member of the family group, without recourse to social support. The amount is not set in that article; it is the Portaria 1563/2007 scale applied across the whole household.

*The enumeration in article 99 was readable only in a secondary compilation; the added paragraph and the article 98 wording are from the Diário da República text of Lei 61/2025.*

Figures in circulation with no legal source

An audit of other people's numbers is only fair if it is specific, so here are the pages, the figures and the dates they were seen. All were checked on 28 August 2026 against the searches a reader would actually run.

The pattern is worth naming because it is not carelessness. Every page in that table carries a "last updated" stamp more recent than the figure it publishes. A timestamp records that a file was touched; it does not record that a number was checked against the instrument. Those are different events, and only one of them is worth anything to a reader.

Frequently asked questions

What else here bears on this

How Portugal's €920 compares with what the other four jurisdictions ask, and what living in each of them costs, is in the income and cost-of-living piece. Whether buying property gets you residency at all — in Portugal it stopped doing so in 2023 — is read against the statute for all five in the property piece. Greece, the one country in this set where property is still the route in full, has a guide of its own. Every act named above, with the date each was read, is on the sources page.

Sources: where each figure comes from

Every figure on this page traces to the instrument that sets it. The immigration provisions come from Lei 23/2007 and its 2025 amendments, read in the Diário da República and, for the consolidated text of article 90-A, in the legal database of the Procuradoria-Geral Distrital de Lisboa on 28 August 2026. The income scale comes from Portaria 1563/2007 and the wage from Decreto-Lei 139/2025. The nationality provisions come from Lei Orgânica 1/2026 of 18 May 2026. The tax provisions come from the Estatuto dos Benefícios Fiscais, Portaria 352/2024/1 and the personal income tax code, with the registration deadline confirmed against the tax authority's own guidance.

Five things on this page are not verified to that standard, and each is marked where it appears: where a D7 application is physically filed; the CEFR level behind "basic Portuguese" and behind the citizenship language test; the 30,000-file backlog, which is a Secretary of State's oral statement carried by a news agency; the current wording of article 75(1) and the enumeration in article 99, both read in a secondary compilation; and the Constitutional Court decision, read in a mirror rather than at the court's own domain.

Naming those is the point rather than an apology for them. A guide that reads the same whether or not it checked is a guide you cannot use.

We do not sell property and we are not lawyers. This site compares rules and publishes the instrument beside the figure. If you have read the above and want to act on it, the next step is a licensed firm in Portugal, and finding you one is what we do.