By Sorina Burlacu, Co-Founder at Talent Journey | talentjourney.tech | April 2026 | 8 min read

There is a version of Portugal's immigration system that exists on paper.

Thirty-day or Sixty-day processing times.

Straightforward residence permit applications.

A clear, linear process from visa approval to legal residency.

Then there is the version that actually exists in 2026.
Six to eighteen months for a residence card appointment.

Candidates legally in the country, legally working, but without the documentation that allows them to travel freely, change jobs, or fully settle their lives.
If you are hiring internationally into Portugal this year, this is the reality your programme needs to be built around, not the official version, but the operational one.

What AIMA delays actually mean for your company

The most important thing to understand about the current AIMA situation is that it creates a two-stage reality for every international hire.

Stage one: the candidate gets their visa, arrives in Portugal, and begins working legally. This part of the process is functioning broadly as expected, four to six months for most visa types, longer for some.
Stage two: the candidate registers with AIMA and waits for their residence card. This is where the system is breaking down. What should take thirty days is taking six to eighteen months. During this period, the candidate has restricted travel rights, limited banking options in some cases, and significant uncertainty about their long-term legal status.

For most employers, the immediate operational impact is on travel. Employees waiting for residence cards cannot always travel internationally for work without additional documentation.

If you are sending employees to conferences, client meetings, or other offices abroad, you need to know the travel status of every person in your team before you book a ticket.

For candidates themselves, the impact is psychological as much as practical.

Six months into a new country, a new job, and a new life, still waiting for a piece of paper that makes it feel permanent, is genuinely stressful.

How your company manages that experience has a direct effect on retention.

The four compliance risks you are carrying right now AIMA registration.

Every non-EU employee must register with AIMA when arriving in Portugal, if they don’t have an automatic appointment. This is the employee's responsibility to execute, and it is the step that most commonly gets missed.
Not because anyone is negligent. Because the employee is busy settling in, onboarding into a new role, finding housing, and navigating an unfamiliar bureaucratic system.

Failure to register on time delays the residence card process by additional months. At scale, with multiple international hires arriving across the year , missing this deadline becomes a statistical certainty without a system that tracks and reminds.

Document validity windows.
Criminal records are valid for three months. Some visas must be used within four months of issuance. Residence cards expire two years after issue.
These windows create a compliance calendar that needs to be actively managed. A criminal record obtained in January for a visa application that gets delayed to May is invalid. A residence card that expired in March while the renewal slipped through the cracks is a legal violation.
At one or two relocations per year, a diligent HR manager can track these manually. At ten or twenty, without a system generating automated alerts, something will be missed.

Residence card renewal tracking.
Once your employees finally receive their residence cards, after the six to eighteen month wait, those cards are valid for two years. The renewal process needs to begin approximately ninety days before expiration.
This is a long-horizon compliance item that is easy to deprioritise when you're focused on active relocation cases. But an employee with an expired residence card is legally non-compliant, and the employer carries liability for that status.

Communication with hiring managers.
This is the compliance risk that nobody talks about, but that causes the most internal friction.
When a hiring manager is told a new hire will start in two months and they actually start in five, that's a planning failure. When they're told someone can travel to the Berlin office and it turns out they can't because of visa travel restrictions, that's an operational failure.
Managing expectations across HR, legal, finance, and hiring managers, in real time, accurately, throughout a process that takes many months, is one of the most demanding parts of global mobility work. And it's the part that falls apart fastest when the process lives in a spreadsheet.

What this means for your 2026 hiring plan

Build five to six months from offer acceptance to Portugal arrival as your baseline.

Not two to three.

Not the timeline your hiring manager is hoping for.

Five to six months, communicated clearly, before the process begins.

Build AIMA delay into your onboarding communication to the candidate. The most common source of candidate anxiety during relocation is silence, feeling like nothing is happening, that nobody is paying attention.

A candidate who understands at the outset that their residence card will take six to eighteen months after arrival, and who receives regular updates throughout, is a different candidate from one who expected thirty days and hears nothing.

Offer remote work during visa processing wherever possible. This is increasingly standard practice for companies hiring internationally into Portugal, and it is both a practical solution and a competitive advantage in the talent market.
And build a compliance tracking system before you need it. The moment to implement a system is not when something has already been missed, it is before the process reaches the scale where manual tracking becomes unreliable.

What we are watching for the rest of 2026

The Portuguese government has announced plans to hire an additional three hundred AIMA staff, and a new digital appointment system is in pilot. Neither will meaningfully reduce delays before 2027 at the earliest.

For the remainder of 2026, the operational reality remains: plan for long timelines, communicate proactively, track compliance rigorously, and build your international hiring programme around the system as it actually operates, not as it is supposed to work.

Talent Journey is a workforce relocation platform with specialists who help companies navigate Portugal immigration and manage the full relocation process. We've processed 5000+ cases and we know this system from the inside.
If you want to audit your current Portugal immigration process or discuss how to build proper compliance tracking, book a call with our team at talentjourney.tech