D8 visa
Portugal's digital nomad residence visa; requires €3,680/month income and AIMA appointment within 120 days.
AIMA's lawsuit backlog against D8 and other residency applicants stood at 124,000 suits on 23 July 2026, prompting Portugal to strip Lisbon's courts of their exclusive jurisdiction over the cases.
Last refreshed: 24 August 2026 · Appears in 1 active topic
Is Italy's frictionless nomad visa now a better bet than Portugal's D8?
Timeline for D8 visa
Portugal's backlog moves to the courts
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Nomads & CommunitiesContinued to impose approximately nine-month residency card waits on new applicants
Nomads & Communities: Portugal clears files, D8 wait holdsBecame available via fully digital application workflow from 1 June 2026 following its 2 March Gazzetta Ufficiale implementing decree
Nomads & Communities: Italy makes its nomad visa fully digitalBackground
Portugal's D8 visa is the country's dedicated digital nomad residence pathway, introduced in October 2022 for remote workers and freelancers serving clients outside Portugal. The income threshold stands at €3,680 per month for a single applicant, four times the national minimum wage, with an upfront deposit of roughly €11,040. Adding a spouse raises the requirement to €5,520 a month, with a further 30% per child.
Applicants enter on a D8 entry Visa, then must attend an appointment with AIMA, Portugal's immigration and asylum agency, within 120 days to convert to a formal two-year residence permit, renewable for a further three. AIMA replaced the disbanded SEF in 2023 and inherited a residency-case backlog that has shaped the D8's practical usability ever since.
The Visa remains attractive on paper, drawing thousands of applications, with Lisbon, Porto, Madeira and the Algarve hosting established nomad communities. In practice, the scheme's reputation now rests less on its eligibility rules than on how quickly AIMA can turn an entry Visa into a residence card.
Court reform targets its own backlog
Portugal's Council of Ministers approved diplomas on 23 July 2026 creating specialised immigration and asylum courts and ending Lisbon's exclusive hold on suits against AIMA . AIMA faced 124,000 suits, with just 34% of 152,000 pending cases resolved, despite a 28-judge task force clearing 22,436 between April and June.
For D8 holders and applicants, the reform is a bet that spreading cases nationally will match that task-force pace rather than simply relocate the same delay. By 1 July, the overall national backlog had fallen to roughly 30,000 cases from close to a million at its peak, though officials again published no D8-specific figure .
A strike exposed its processing bottleneck
Cultural mediators at AIMA struck on 30 March 2026 with adhesion above 70% in Porto, hitting D8 appointment scheduling during the March-to-May application peak, against a backlog of 40,000 to 60,000 unresolved residency cases . By 2 June, new D8 applicants still waited about nine months for a first residency card, and Portugal's revised nationality law now starts the citizenship clock from card issuance rather than application .
That friction now has a direct competitor: Italy made its own nomad Visa fully digital from 1 June 2026, with consulates clearing applications in 35 to 45 days . The D8's real cost in 2026 has become processing delay, not the income requirement.