Some investors sick of waiting for Golden Visas are considering leaving

Delays of up to five years for the Portuguese authorities to issue Golden Visas to investors has become so intolerable that some are considering leaving the country.

Portuguese law firms are getting increasingly frustrated with the time it takes and say it is damaging the reputation of the country as well as having a negative economic impact for a programme that still manages to attract investment despite the notorious delays.

In 2025 alone, the programme contributed €732 million to sectors such as culture and science. Many of these investors are still continuing to wait for their Golden Visas to be issued or renewed.

They made the investment and all the requirements were met, but the backlog at Portugal’s immigration office AIMA is so long that many investors are still waiting years after the original application was made.

“There are investors wanting to give up on Portugal because they feel cheated,” says Inês Azevedo, a lawyer at Morais Leitão, saying that if the Government had the capacity to regularise 400,000 visas, it should also have the capacity to regularise the ARI investors, who number around 13,000. “It’s detrimental to Portugal and to our companies. It has a collateral effect that should be looked into.”

Vanessa Câmara, a lawyer at Abreu Advogados and immigration specialist, adds: “There are clients outraged by seeing different treatment,” highlighting that those who want to work in Portugal, are retired, or work remotely end up obtaining residency authorisation more quickly.

An official source from the Presidency of the Council of Ministers told Jornal Económico that this is an ongoing process and that, as indicated by Minister António Leitão Amaro, AIMA maintains the goal of sorting out all pending requests during 2026.

The Portuguese Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum (AIMA), an organisation created to manage migration and responsible for granting authorisations, faces major challenges.

It was launched in October 2023, replacing the Foreigners and Borders Service (SEF), and ended up inheriting a system marked by a lack of resources, overburdened by bureaucratic delays, widespread complaints, and employee strikes. “A snowball effect that has become an avalanche of delays since 2022,” both lawyers say.

SOURCE: Journal Económico
Image: Freepik