Portuguese Citizenship by Residency in 2026: The Five-Year Rule Has Gone

If you moved to Portugal expecting a passport after five years, that plan expired on 19 May 2026. Lei Orgânica n.º 1/2026 rewrote the Nationality Law, and naturalisation by residence now takes seven years for nationals of Portuguese-speaking countries and EU member states, and ten years for everyone else.

The reassurance first, because it is the part people get wrong: if you submitted your application before 19 May 2026, the old five-year law decides it. That is written into article 7.º/2, after the Constitutional Court struck down an earlier attempt to apply the new rules to cases already in the queue — and the IRN has confirmed the date that counts is the day you submitted, not the day anyone reads the file.

Everything below is the law as it stands on 22 August 2026, with the parts that are still unwritten marked as such.

How long do you have to live in Portugal to get citizenship?

Article 6.º of the Nationality Law sets the residence period. Since 19 May 2026 it reads:

Who you are	Legal residence required
National of a Portuguese-speaking country (CPLP — Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde and the rest) or an EU member state	7 years
National of any other country — American, British, Canadian, Australian, Indian, Chinese	10 years
Stateless	4 years

Two further conditions travel with those numbers, and both are new.

First, the years do not have to be consecutive, but they do have to fit inside a window. Article 15.º/3 lets you add up all your periods of legal residence, “seguidos ou interpolados” (continuous or broken), as long as they fall within a maximum span of 6, 9 or 12 years — for stateless applicants, CPLP and EU nationals, and everyone else respectively.

Every bracket gives the same slack. A British applicant needs ten years of legal residence inside a twelve-year span, so the gaps can total two years and no more: leave for eighteen months mid-run and you still qualify; leave for three years and the earliest residence falls outside the window and stops counting. A Brazilian applicant needs seven years inside nine — again two years of slack. The subtraction is ours; article 15.º/3 gives the totals and the spans and says nothing further about how gaps are measured.

Second, the clock starts later than it used to.

When does the residence clock actually start?

At the residence permit, not at the application for it.

The old law contained a provision — article 15.º/4 — that counted the time from the moment you asked for a temporary residence permit, so long as it was eventually granted. Article 5.º of the new law repealed it outright.

For anyone caught in the AIMA queue, that repeal is the most expensive line in the statute. Months spent waiting for an appointment used to sit inside the count. Now they sit in front of it: if your first permit took a year to issue, your citizenship date moved a year further away. Our AIMA appointments guide explains how that queue works and what protects your right to stay while you are in it.

The President said this out loud when he signed the decree on 3 May 2026, listing among his reservations the need to guarantee that the periods for acquiring nationality are not compromised by the State’s own delays. He signed it anyway. The reservation is not a rule.

What else do you have to prove?

The residence period is one of nine requirements in article 6.º/1, and the list grew:

• Adulthood under Portuguese law.
• Language, plus culture, history and national symbols — proved by test or certificate. Nationals of Portuguese-speaking countries are presumed to meet the language half unless a clear lack of Portuguese shows up in the file.
• Knowledge of the fundamental rights and duties of Portuguese nationality and of how the Portuguese State is organised politically.
• A solemn declaration of adherence to the fundamental principles of the democratic rule of law.
• No final conviction to an effective prison sentence of more than three years for terrorism, violent or especially violent crime, highly organised crime, crimes against State security, or assisting illegal immigration.
• No danger or threat to national security or defence.
• Not subject to UN or EU restrictive measures.
• The means to support yourself.

That last one is new, and there is no published threshold for it. Nor is there a test for culture, history and symbols, or for rights and duties. Those definitions belong in the Regulamento da Nacionalidade (the nationality regulation), and article 4.º gave the government 90 days from publication to rewrite it — a deadline that fell on 16 August 2026. We could not find an amended regulation published when we checked on 22 August 2026, and a legal analysis dated 10 August reported the same absence.

Until it appears, the existing regulation governs the proof. Article 25 of the current regulation accepts language certificates at CEFR level A2 or above, issued by Portuguese public education establishments or recognised evaluation centres, and presumes language knowledge for people who are both natives and nationals of Portuguese-speaking countries. A2 remains the working standard for the language half. What nobody can tell you yet is how the culture, history and civics half will be examined.

The criminal-record rule is less mechanical than it looks. The bar is a rebuttable presumption: the Ministério Público (public prosecutor) weighs the sentence, the type of crime, whether it was deliberate, how long ago it happened, any repeat offending, and whether the person is genuinely integrated. If the prosecutor applies it, you can go to court to have it set aside, and your file is suspended while that runs. The Constitutional Court forced this design: in Acórdão n.º 1133/2025 it unanimously struck down the first version’s automatic exclusion as a disproportionate restriction on a fundamental right.

Does an application filed under the old rules still count?

Yes. Article 7.º/2 protects “procedimentos administrativos pendentes à data da entrada em vigor da presente lei” — administrative procedures pending when the law entered into force — and decides them under the previous version of the Nationality Law.

So what makes a procedure “pending”? The IRN answered before the law took effect. In a notice dated 7 May 2026 it said that for the purpose of applying the changes to the Nationality Law, the date taken is the date the request was submitted on the online platform — our translation. Submission, not decision, not the day someone opens your file.

The trigger is the submission, not your eligibility. Someone who completed five years of residence in April 2026 but submitted in June is under the new law and needs seven or ten years. Someone who submitted the same papers on 18 May is under the old one. That cliff edge is why filings rose 74% between March 2025 and 19 May 2026, on the IRN’s figures as reported by DN Brasil in July 2026.

This protection exists because the Constitutional Court insisted on it. Among the four norms it struck down in its preventive review of the first decree was the retroactive application of the new requirements to pending applications, which the Court found breached the protection of legitimate expectations.

Can you get Portuguese citizenship through marriage or a partner?

Yes, and the three-year threshold survived the rewrite.

• Marriage: a foreign national married for more than three years to a Portuguese citizen may acquire nationality by declaration, made while the marriage subsists.
• União de facto (an unmarried partnership recognised in law): article 3.º/3 requires that, at the date of the declaration, you have been living in união de facto with a Portuguese citizen for more than three years, and that acquisition follows the court’s recognition judgment.

Be precise about that clock, because it trips people. The three years are cohabitation counted back from your declaration, not three years starting after a judge recognises you: the court certifies cohabitation that already happened, which is why the government’s own checklist asks for a certificate recognising more than three years in conditions comparable to marriage. What the statute does not say is when that judgment must exist relative to the declaration, only that acquisition comes “após a emissão da decisão judicial de reconhecimento” — after it is issued.

What changed is what happens next. The Ministério Público can oppose the acquisition on the ground that you lack genuine ties to the national community, and the new law says that ground is measured against the same parameters as naturalisation — language, culture, civics, the criminal and security tests, and the means to support yourself. The window for that opposition is now two years from the registration of the acquisition. The law sets no transitional rule for that window: article 7.º/2 protects pending administrative procedures, and says nothing about how the two-year period applies to acquisitions registered before 19 May 2026.

There are two shelters. Opposition on effective-ties grounds cannot be brought where the marriage or partnership has lasted more than six years, or where the couple have common children with Portuguese nationality. In those cases only the criminal, security and sanctions grounds remain open.

One more mechanical point that catches people: registration of the acquisition now has constitutive effect. You are Portuguese from the registration, not from the declaration that led to it.

How does citizenship by descent work now?

Descent is still the fastest route to a Portuguese passport, and still a different animal from naturalisation. But the middle of the family tree got harder.

Children of a Portuguese parent are Portuguese by origin. Born abroad, they establish it by registering the birth in the Portuguese civil register or by declaring that they want to be Portuguese. Nothing here changed.

Grandchildren — the popular route — now carry a heavier burden. Article 1.º/1/d gives nationality of origin to a person with at least one second-degree ascendant in the direct line who is Portuguese by origin and has not lost that nationality, who declares that they want to be Portuguese and holds genuine ties to the national community. On top of that, article 1.º/3 requires the substantive tests from article 6.º/1, alíneas c) to h): language and culture, rights and duties, the solemn declaration, and the criminal, security and sanctions conditions.

Note what is missing from that list. Alínea b) — the seven or ten years of residence — is not imported. The grandchild route is attribution by origin, not naturalisation, and carries no residence requirement at all; the government’s own page for grandchildren asks for an originary Portuguese grandparent and a connection to the Portuguese community, and never mentions living in Portugal. Two other details bite: the grandparent must be Portuguese by origin, not naturalised, and “genuine ties” is one of the things the missing regulation was supposed to define.

Great-grandchildren keep a route, but a conditional one. Article 6.º/8 lets the government naturalise a third-degree direct-line descendant of an originary Portuguese national, waiving the residence period in alínea b), if they have at least five years of legal residence in Portugal. In other words: not a remote-ancestry route, a live-in-Portugal route.

Children born in Portugal to foreign parents can declare themselves Portuguese if, at the moment of birth, one parent had been legally resident in Portugal for at least five years (article 1.º/1/f, rewritten by the new law). This is a different five years from the one that just disappeared: a condition on the parent’s residence at the child’s birth, not on the applicant’s own, sitting in the attribution article rather than the naturalisation one. Article 6.º/2 repeats it for the naturalisation of minors born here.

What happened to the Sephardic route?

It was repealed. The provision that allowed naturalisation of descendants of Portuguese Sephardic Jews, with the residence and language requirements waived, was number 7 of article 6.º, and article 5.º of Lei Orgânica n.º 1/2026 revoked it. From 19 May 2026 there is no legal basis for a new application on that ground.

Applications lodged before that date fall under the same transitional protection as everything else: the old law decides them.

Does the Golden Visa still lead to a Portuguese passport?

Yes, and for most investors it now leads there in ten years rather than five.

Nothing in the new law singles out investment residence. Golden Visa holders hold a residence permit like anyone else, so their time counts like anyone else’s — which puts a US, UK, Canadian or Australian investor in the ten-year bracket, with the repealed counting rule hitting them too. The language, culture and civics requirements apply as well, which is a different proposition for someone whose plan involved a week a year in the country. Our Golden Visa guide covers the investment routes.

One common conflation to avoid: permanent residence and citizenship are separate statuses, granted under different laws with different conditions. Losing the five-year citizenship clock does not move every other date in your plan.

Can you keep your American or British citizenship?

Yes, on all three sides of the question.

Portugal does not require renunciation. Under article 8.º of the Nationality Law you lose Portuguese nationality if you hold another nationality and declare that you do not want to be Portuguese. Holding a second passport is not itself a ground for anything. Read the article closely, though: it opens with “sem prejuízo do disposto na lei” (without prejudice to what the law provides), which leaves room for grounds of loss written elsewhere in statute. Parliament has been trying to write one. More on that below.

The United Kingdom allows dual citizenship outright: you can apply for foreign citizenship and keep British citizenship, and you do not need permission.

The United States takes the same position: a US citizen may naturalise in another country without risking US citizenship. Two obligations come with it — you owe allegiance to both countries, and you must use a US passport to enter and leave the United States. US tax filing follows citizenship, not residence, and becoming Portuguese does not touch it. If tax is why you are here, start with our IFICI and NHR guide.

One related scare can be put down. Parliament twice tried to create loss of nationality as an accessory criminal penalty, and the Constitutional Court struck it down twice — the second time unanimously, on 8 May 2026, for breaching equality and proportionality by treating naturalised Portuguese differently from Portuguese by origin. The President vetoed it on 12 May 2026. It is not law. Separately, the Nationality Law consolidates nationality held in good faith for ten years, so an old administrative defect cannot unravel a settled status indefinitely.

How long does the IRN actually take?

Longer than the law implies, and it publishes no service standard.

The best current figure comes from the IRN itself, via the press. Reported by DN Brasil in July 2026, the president of the IRN’s directive council said applications based on legal residence were taking around three years, against a normal two, after the 74% surge in filings. Per Observador’s reporting of 19 August 2026, the Justice Ministry’s recovery teams cleared more than 26,000 backlogged registry cases from June 2026, while the registrars’ union, reading the same official statistics, counted 237 of 404 registry offices running late. Both of those are press-reported figures, not an IRN service standard. We unpicked the argument in our post on the IRN registry backlog.

Two practical consequences. Plan on three years between submission and a decision. And check the real queue rather than an average: the IRN publishes monthly service-status reports showing the delay at each registry, the same data both the ministry and the union quote.

What does it cost?

€250 for the application itself, on the government’s own numbers. The fee is set by the Regulamento Emolumentar dos Registos e do Notariado (the registries and notaries fee schedule, Decreto-Lei n.º 322-A/2001) — the Ministry of Justice names that instrument and says the cost varies with the type of application. We could not fetch a current consolidated text of that schedule on 22 August 2026, so the figure comes from the ministry’s own route pages: both the residence page and the marriage and união de facto page state €250. Other routes differ, and none of it covers translations, apostilles, certificates or a lawyer.

One warning about those pages: they are only partly updated for the new law. The residence page correctly says ten years, but its criminal-record condition still reads in the old terms rather than article 6.º/1/f’s. Where an official page and the statute disagree today, the statute is the law.

What should you do next?

• If you are close to five years, redo the arithmetic today. Seven or ten years, counted from your residence title, inside a 9 or 12-year window — that is the date to plan around.
• Still choosing a route in? Compare the D7 visa and the D8 digital nomad visa — both build the legal residence the new law counts.
• Investing rather than relocating? The Golden Visa guide sets out what the investment now buys, and on what timescale.
• Stuck in the queue that feeds the clock? Read AIMA residency appointments, then our post on the IRN registry backlog for the stage after it.
• Borderline case — a repealed Sephardic file, a criminal-record presumption, a court recognition of união de facto? That is lawyer territory. Our immigration lawyers directory lists the ones we have dealt with.

This is general information, not legal advice, and nationality law in Portugal has moved three times in three years. The rule that decides your case is the one in force on the day you file — verify it against Lei Orgânica n.º 1/2026 and the IRN, or with a qualified immigration lawyer, before you commit.