Rui Armindo Freitas, Portugal's assistant secretary of state for immigration, said on 1 July that 30,000 complex cases remain from the roughly one million his government inherited at the migration agency AIMA1. He described the remainder as files needing further analysis or applicant contact. It is the first real dent in the backlog that has throttled the D8 nomad-visa pipeline all year.
No breakdown by visa type came with the figure, and no fresh deadline. AIMA wound up its formal Mission Structure at the end of 2025 and left the Porto office to carry the tail. D8 applicants were still waiting nine months for a card in early June, so a shorter queue counts only if the cards themselves issue faster.
The Regulamento da Nacionalidade, the regulation implementing Lei Orgânica 1/2026, is still unpublished. That law took force on 19 May and doubled the residency-to-citizenship horizon; the government has 90 days to write the rules beneath it, a deadline near mid-August. Whether the regulation restarts the residency clock, as promised when the nationality law passed, decides how long today's D8 arrivals wait for a passport.
