Portugal's government published backlog figures on Tuesday 2 June that look large and resolve little. AIMA (the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum) reported 525,000 immigration files decided, 763,000 appointments completed and 473,000 positive outcomes since its task force began1. The totals read as reassuring, yet none carries a breakdown for the D8 digital nomad visa, so a D8 applicant cannot tell from the figures whether their own file is moving. Immigration lawyers still call the pledge to clear the backlog by the end of 2026 offensive, the same word they used in March.
The D8 now demands income of about €3,680 a month and a deposit near €11,040, and the first card takes a year or more to arrive. AIMA's March mediator strike, which cut D8 processing capacity, is the operational backdrop against which these June totals were published; throughput rose against a capacity that had already been hit. The deeper problem sits in how Portugal counts citizenship. The promulgated nationality law runs the clock from first card issuance, so a wait of a year or more before the clock even starts pushes the practical naturalisation floor past eleven years from arrival.
The government's reply is that throughput is genuinely rising and that the figures cover all files since the task force began, not the pre-existing queue alone. That framing is defensible on the arithmetic. The lawyers' counter is that a headline total of decisions tells an individual applicant nothing about the category they applied under, and that a nomad still waits a year or more for a first card regardless of how the cumulative number grows. Italy's fully digital route, opened on 1 June, throws that Portuguese wait into sharper relief for anyone weighing the two destinations.
