Portugal's Airport Queues in August: Budget an Extra Hour

Border control at Porto’s Francisco Sá Carneiro airport ran superiores aos parâmetros de referência — above the reference wait times — on the morning of Friday 31 July. The PSP named the cause in a written statement: constraints in the EU’s Entry/Exit System at European level. By early afternoon, the force said, the situation had normalised.

Our advice for the rest of August: if you are arriving on a non-EU passport for a short stay, budget an extra hour for passport control at Lisbon, Porto or Faro, and keep room around any onward connection.

If you live in Portugal on a residence permit, none of this is aimed at you. The Entry/Exit System does not register residence-permit holders.

One date is worth a note in the calendar. On 6 September the rule that lets Portuguese police switch off the slowest part of the check runs out.

What happened at Porto airport on 31 July?

The PSP’s national directorate issued a note early on Friday afternoon. Waiting times at Porto’s border control had been “above the reference parameters” that morning, it said, because of “constraints in the EES (‘entry/exit system’) at European level”. By the time the note went out, “the situation is now normalised, with waiting times back within the reference parameters”.

As incidents go it was a short one, and the police closed it out the same day. What makes it worth recording is the cause on the record. Porto was already the airport with the worst published waits — its 55-minute arrivals maximum on 31 May was the highest of the three — and Lisbon’s queues have made news repeatedly since the Entry/Exit System started in Portugal on 12 October 2025. What 31 July added is the plainest statement yet from the PSP that the system itself, “at European level”, is what is stretching the lines.

How long are the queues, really?

Two kinds of numbers are on the record, and they measure different things.

The PSP publishes its own maxima and has pushed back hard on the wildest circulating claims — reports of six-hour waits it singled out as unverified information that causes “unjustified alarm”. Its figures for 31 May, counted to 15:00, looked like this.

Airport	Longest wait, arrivals	Longest wait, departures
Lisbon (Humberto Delgado)	32 min	14 min
Porto (Sá Carneiro)	55 min	35 min
Faro (Gago Coutinho)	30 min	35 min

PSP maxima for a single day, 31 May 2026, counted to 15:00. The force said arrivals waits that day ran between half an hour and an hour.

Lusa’s reporting through the spring also described days when Lisbon’s waits ran well past those maxima. Both can be true: the PSP’s table is one day counted to mid-afternoon, and the worst reports are other days and other hours. What we would not do is treat a screenshot of somebody’s worst morning as a measurement — or a police maximum taken before the school holidays as a promise.

Capacity has gone up since May. Lisbon added 48 PSP officers on 29 May and now has 34 control booths and 31 e-gates at arrivals, 14 more of each than before. Another 360 officers were due to join the national borders unit in July, and the interior ministry promised capacity reinforcements at Porto and Faro over June and July.

No August figures have been published, and May is not August. The extra hour is ours, not the PSP’s — it is what we would leave in a schedule given 55-minute maxima in May, heavier traffic now, and nothing yet to show the new booths have absorbed it.

Does the Entry/Exit System apply to you?

For a good share of this site’s readers, it does not.

The EES registers non-EU nationals travelling for a short stay, meaning up to 90 days in any 180-day period, each time they cross an external border of the 29 countries using it. It replaced passport stamping on 10 April 2026.

It does not register:

• nationals of EU countries, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway or Switzerland;
• non-EU nationals holding a long-stay visa or a residence permit issued by a country that operates the EES, Portugal included (permits from Cyprus or Ireland are the exception, and are registered);
• non-EU family members of an EU, Icelandic, Liechtenstein, Norwegian or Swiss citizen who hold a residence card or residence permit, whether or not they are travelling together.

Exempt travellers show a passport and the permit, and give no fingerprints and no facial scan.

For everybody else, the first crossing is the slow one, because it creates the record: name, travel document data, fingerprints, a facial image, and the date and place of entry and exit. Every crossing after that needs “only a quick verification”, in the Commission’s words.

That first stop happens at the first external border you cross. Fly direct and the PSP registers you in Lisbon, Porto or Faro; connect through another Schengen airport and it happens there instead, leaving you to reach Portugal on an internal flight.

Our guide to the best time to visit Portugal already makes the case for late May, June and the second half of September, on weather, crowds and price. It says nothing about queues. The queues point the same way.

What changes on 6 September?

The relief valve Portuguese airports have been leaning on is written into EU law with an expiry date attached.

Under the EES rollout regulation, a member state may partially suspend the system at a single border crossing point for a maximum of six hours, when traffic is heavy enough that the wait becomes excessive. During that window it does not have to register biometric data, and it must tell the European Commission and eu-LISA, the agency that runs the system, within six hours. The entry or exit is still recorded; only the fingerprints and the facial image are dropped.

Portugal has been using it. The PSP’s spokesman, Sérgio Soares, told Lusa in May that since 10 April the force has resorted to partial suspension of biometric collection when the wait at an air border post becomes excessive. Departures biometrics were suspended at Lisbon, Porto and Faro on 11 and 12 April, and the government suspended the EES at Lisbon for three months from late December under contingency measures; it is running there again.

The power lasts 90 days from the end of the phased rollout, with an automatic 60-day extension where fewer than 80% of the individual files created during that rollout carried biometric data. The expiry date the member states themselves work to is 6 September 2026.

Nine European governments would like that pushed back. Portugal and seven other EU states, together with Switzerland, wrote to the European home affairs commissioner, Magnus Brunner, calling the scheduled end “a source of serious and legitimate concern” shared by several member states and by the whole transport sector, and asking for concrete written guarantees before 6 September. Portugal’s signature is the interior minister’s, Luís Neves.

The Commission has not agreed. Brunner has said only that it would now redouble its efforts to help the member states still facing difficulties. That is a request, not a rule change. Until Brussels says otherwise the six-hour valve closes on 6 September, and if your trip falls after that date, the mechanism that has been absorbing the worst mornings may not be there.

What should you do next?

• Landing and moving on? Getting around Portugal covers the trains, coaches and travel cards waiting on the other side of passport control.
• Trip not booked yet? The best time to visit Portugal makes the case for the shoulder months, and August queues are one more argument for them.
• August already booked? Plan the days around our 7-day Portugal itinerary.

Border rules and the suspension arrangements are moving month to month. Verify the current position with the European Commission’s Entry/Exit System pages before you travel.