Moving to Portugal: visas, taxes and what it costs in 2026

For a non-EU citizen with no Portuguese or EU family, there are two realistic residence visas. The D7 is designed around income you receive without working: a pension, dividends, rent, royalties. The threshold is the national minimum wage, EUR 920 a month in 2026, raised by 50 percent for a spouse and 30 percent for each dependent child. Consulates usually want to see about a year of that income sitting in a Portuguese bank account as well, which puts a single applicant near EUR 11,000 of demonstrable savings before anything else.

The D8, the digital nomad visa, is for people who keep earning from outside Portugal. It asks for four times the minimum wage, EUR 3,680 a month in 2026, from foreign clients or a foreign employer. Both thresholds move every January because both are tied to the minimum wage, which is scheduled to rise by EUR 50 a year to EUR 1,020 in 2028. A file assembled against last year's number gets refused, and that is a common and avoidable reason for rejection.

Neither visa is bought. You apply at a Portuguese consulate in your country of residence, receive a four-month entry visa, and then attend an AIMA appointment in Portugal to convert it into a residence permit, initially for two years. Property ownership does not shortcut any of this. If residency against an investment is the actual goal rather than relocation, the mechanics of what changed are set out in our note on the golden visa shift.

One point on timing that catches people who buy first and move later: the 7.5 percent non-resident IMT introduced by Decreto-Lei 97/2026 is refunded only if you become a Portuguese tax resident within two years of the deed. A visa file that drags does not stop that clock.

The non-habitual resident regime closed to new applicants on 31 December 2023. A transitional window let people who had already committed, with a signed employment contract, a property purchase or lease, a school enrolment or a valid permit dated before the cut-off, register as late as 31 March 2025. That window is shut. Existing holders keep their ten years, so you will meet people in Portugal living under a regime you cannot join.

The replacement is IFICI, the tax incentive for scientific research and innovation, in article 58.º-A of the tax benefits statute and detailed in Portaria 352/2024/1. The headline is the same 20 percent flat rate on Portuguese employment or self-employment income for ten years. The eligibility is not. IFICI reaches a defined list of activities and professions: researchers, university teachers, doctors, engineers, ICT specialists, certain company directors, and staff at companies that qualify under specified CAE codes or investment-support regimes. Whether you qualify depends on your job and your employer, not on your income or your nationality.

Two differences matter more than the rate. First, retirees are out. Under NHR a foreign pension was taxed at 10 percent; under IFICI there is no pension provision at all, so a foreign pension is taxed at ordinary progressive rates. That is the single biggest change for the D7 population, since the D7 and the old NHR were usually applied for together. Second, the deadline is hard: the application goes to the tax authority by 15 January of the year after you first become tax resident, and it cannot be made retroactively.

If you are weighing Portugal against its obvious alternative on tax grounds, the comparison is in Spain versus Portugal. Neither country now offers what Portugal offered in 2019, and any adviser presenting NHR as available should end the conversation.

Portuguese tax residence is not something you elect. You become resident by spending more than 183 days here in any 12-month period, or, well below that, by keeping a home in Portugal that you intend to use as your habitual residence. The second test is the one people trip over: a bought and furnished house used as a base can make you resident on considerably fewer days than the calendar suggests. Residence then runs from your first day in the country, not from the day you registered anything.

A resident is taxed on worldwide income. For 2026 the IRS scale has nine bands, starting at 12.5 percent on taxable income up to EUR 8,342 and reaching 48 percent above EUR 86,634, with a solidarity surcharge of 2.5 percent over EUR 80,000 and 5 percent over EUR 250,000. Those bands apply to taxable income after deductions, not to gross salary, so the effective rate on a moderate income is well below the marginal one. Double-taxation treaties decide which country taxes what, and for most nationalities they leave pensions taxable in Portugal.

Property income has its own rates. Residential rental income is taxed at a flat 25 percent, with reductions for long-term contracts, and annual IMI runs at 0.3 to 0.45 percent of the taxable value for urban property, set by each municipality. If you plan to own rather than rent, the one-off side of that is modelled in our purchase cost calculator.

Once you hold a residence permit you can register at the health centre for your area and be assigned a numero de utente, the SNS user number that everything else keys off. Registration itself costs nothing. Bring the permit, your NIF and proof of address; the number is issued on the spot at the health centre or on your first visit to a public unit.

The SNS is not a paid insurance system. Since 1 June 2022 taxas moderadoras, the small user charges that used to apply to appointments and exams, have been abolished across the service. The one situation where they survive is a hospital emergency visit made without a referral from SNS 24, a health centre or INEM. Go through the SNS 24 line on 808 24 24 24 first and the fee does not arise.

What the SNS does not solve is waiting time. Assignment of a family doctor can take months in high-demand areas, and elective specialist waits are long, which is why a large share of foreign residents carry private insurance alongside the SNS rather than instead of it. Budget for it as a supplement, not as a replacement, and note that the D7 and D8 files both require proof of health cover before a permit exists.

In the gap between arriving and holding a permit, the residence visa itself does not open the SNS. Travel or private cover has to bridge that period, which given AIMA scheduling can be a good deal longer than the four months your entry visa runs.

Eurostat puts Portugal at 87 on the price level index for household consumption, where the EU-27 average is 100. That is real, and it shows up in food, restaurants, transport and services. It does not show up in Lisbon housing, where asking prices sit around EUR 6,100 per square metre against roughly EUR 3,870 across the Algarve and under EUR 1,000 in 139 interior municipalities, according to the idealista price index.

The gap between local wages and foreign-facing prices is the thing to plan around. A national minimum wage of EUR 920 sets the rhythm of local costs, while the housing market in Lisbon, Porto and the Algarve is priced against foreign buyers. A budget built on the national average will be wrong in the three places most newcomers actually want to live, and right almost everywhere else.

That spread is also the argument for looking inland. Prices have risen about 70 percent over five years nationally, so the cheap Portugal of a decade ago is gone from the coast, but not from the interior. The full price and cost picture for buyers is on our Portugal country page.

The order is fixed and each step gates the next. First the NIF, the Portuguese tax number, which a non-EU applicant obtains through a fiscal representative and which a lawyer can arrange remotely. Then a Portuguese bank account, which requires the NIF. Then the visa application at the consulate in your country of residence, with proof of income, savings, accommodation, health cover and a clean criminal record. Only after that does anything happen inside Portugal.

You arrive on a four-month entry visa and attend an AIMA appointment to be issued the residence permit. This is the step with no reliable timetable. AIMA issued around 386,000 permits in 2025 and has cut its worst backlog, but appointment and card waits still run from a few months to well over a year depending on the delegation, with the Lisbon area consistently slowest. Plan for the long end, and do not commit to dates that depend on the card arriving.

Registration with the SNS follows the permit, as does the tax authority registration that starts your residence for tax purposes. If IFICI is relevant to you, the application deadline of 15 January of the following year sits at the end of this chain, which is why the chain needs to start earlier than most people assume.

Nothing in this sequence requires owning property, and buying does not accelerate any part of it. If you buy before residency, the flat 7.5 percent non-resident IMT applies at the deed and comes back only once you are actually tax resident within two years.