Moving to Portugal: Visas and Permits

For all the folks who have asked “how we did it” – this is what was involved in getting our Portuguese long-stay visa and applying for residency.

Visas vs Permits

When you visit another country, you always do so with a visa. You may not realize it, if your country has international agreements in place to facilitate. For example, an American visiting Europe is automatically granted a 90-day tourist visa, allowing them to wander around among any Schengen nations for up to 90 days from the date they first enter the zone. No paperwork required. To visit other destinations, you may be required to do a quick online registration, fill out a paper application, or complete some other process, depending on your country’s agreements with those nations.

In order to stay in Portugal longer than 90 days, we had to apply for a “long stay” visa. That allows us to stay long enough to apply for permission to become resident.

Choosing a Visa

Since we aren’t EU citizens, staying in Portugal required us to apply for a “National Visa”.  National Visas are branched into two types: Temporary-stay visas (less than one year) and long-stay visas, also referred to as residency visas.

Step one was to figure out which long-stay visa we could qualify for.

We applied for the D7 visa, which required us to show the following passive income:

• First applicant: amount equal to the Portuguese minimum wage. (€820/mo | €9.840/yr)
• Second adult: amount equal to half the Portuguese minimum wage. (€410/mo | €4.920/yr)
• For those with children: add 30% of minimum wage for each minor child.

So: €15.000/yr or just over €1200/month.  In USD that’s around (exchange rates vary daily!):

• First applicant: $900/Mo | $11,000/yr
• Second applicant: $450/mo | $5,000/yr
• Total: ~$1,350/mo | ~$16,000/yr

Note that this it “to qualify” – depending on where and how you live, this might or might not be enough to live on.

Applying for a Visa

Ostensibly, the application process is just a matter of gathering all the right documents and turning them in to the right office. That’s true, but in practicality, it’s a bit more involved.

Required Documents

The documents we needed for our application were:

Apostilles

Official records such as birth and marriage certificates must be apostilled.  This is a formal seal affixed in accordance with an internationally recognized process in which the issuing government entity confirms the record is official. For each required document you’ll need to order a new/current ‘certified copy’ of the record (one for each person’s application packet), and once you receive it, you must send it to the related State Department offices for apostille.  So, my birth certificate had to be sent back to Texas to be apostilled by their secretary of state, and Bernie’s to Pennsylvania. Our marriage certificate had to be sent to the New Mexico Secretary of State.

Getting a VFS Appointment

Application packets are reviewed in person at the VFS office associated with your assigned consulate. West coasters are sent through the San Francisco consulate, and cannot apply through any other location, so this meant scheduling appointments with VFS in San Francisco.

That sounds so simple, doesn’t it?

First hurdle – there are no humans involved in this process. It must all be done online. If there is a problem, you can email support – who will say soothing things to you but cannot change anything in any way.

Second hurdle – VFS has the worst, least responsive, least functional web site in the history of web sites. I used to think this was a way to torture, or at least limit applicants but once we saw how the staff worked with their computer systems I revised: VFS invests the least possible amount of money in tools and technology, period. They process about 10 million applications a year and spend as little of that $400 million in fees on others as possible.

VFS claims that when you attempt to schedule an appointment, you can generally get one within 6-8 weeks. Pretty sure I ruptured something laughing when I read that.  Here’s what really happened: Every day for a week or so, I hit their web site every hour from 0300 to 0700, to see if they had “released” (made available) any additional appointment slots (Pro tip: they seem to release more at the start of each month, but others come available throughout the month as well). I would select an appointment time from the (usually) zero to (miracle!) one available, and by the time I clicked [next] and got to the payment and confirmation page, it was no longer available.

Over and Over. For days.

When, at last, I was able to schedule an appointment for Bernie it was 9 weeks out. Miraculously, I was able, on the same day, to schedule a second appointment for myself. 13 weeks out. (Remember that we have to go to San Francisco in person for each appointment.)

So yeah, there was that. And remember that in order to be ready to schedule our appointment, we had to secure our apartment – so we’re paying rent on an apartment we can’t use the entire time. And once the application is submitted, it’s another 2-3 months of wait time to get our visas.

Rather like concert tickets, there are agencies that buy up slots (they’re theoretically not supposed to be able to do that but..) and then sell ‘premium’ appointments by basically reselling that slot to someone like me for a small surcharge of – more than the cost of the entire dang process.

I was somewhat annoyed.

Submitting our Applications

We did a thing which I do not recommend for others – and which should not have worked. (Except this time it did. So there.)

I researched for a couple of years, laid out financial plans, etc., and tracked savings and anticipated costs and didn’t begin to take any action until I was sure we could do it all financially, with some safety margin.  Once that was done, we carried on, just continuing to add to savings, until my job became just unbearable and in January of 2024, we made the call that it was time to leave that job behind.  I scheduled online – and took a few days off for an impromptu trip to San Francisco.

Bernie and I – and all of our documents – landed in San Francisco late in the evening, and first thing in the morning, we were outside the VFS offices.  When they let the first group of folks in the doors, we were with them. We hung to the back of the line, letting folks sign in for their appointments, and when we reached the desk said “hey, we have appointments in future, but we’re here in San Francisco this week, and we wondered if it was possible to queue as a walk in?”

They don’t do walk-ins. But the desk folks are nice people trying to do a decent job for folks, and when they asked where we were from, they had a heart for us not having to buy additional plane tickets, etc.  So after a bit of a wait – we were in! While we waited, I ducked around the corner to the nearby post office for the requisite money orders. Once we were sure we would be seen, I purchased our plane tickets (on my phone, while sitting in their waiting room) with an April 12 flight date – 90 days forward. In theory, visa decisions are made in 6-8 weeks, but most reports from users say more like 90-120 days, and sometimes up to 180.  90 days was considered “tight” and when we gave that date the VFS guy raised his eyebrows.

For each of us, VFS verified each of our documents, and gathered them into a submission packet. We paid the processing fee, including the added fee to have passports FedExed back to us (otherwise they are sent regular mail and we wanted them to be trackable). There is an option to wait and send the passports directly to the consulate once they have made a determination on your visa, but this adds time and opportunities for missed connections, so we opted to surrender our passports at VFS and wait for them to be returned.

It was a long shot, and it’s only brilliant because it worked. As I said to Bernie at the time, “worst case, you get to see San Francisco!” And indeed, I had scheduled two and a half days in San Fran (in case we had to go back to VFS the next day), and with our visas taken care of, we had time to see the city, ride the Golden Gate on eBikes, and have possibly the worst cup of coffee on the face of the earth.

Trivia: the folks in the office told us to email support to cancel our appointments. Support told us they can’t do that, but when the day came, the folks in the office would see that we had already been there. I mean, would have been nice if they had freed the appointment up for some poor person constantly refreshing their horrible web site praying for a time slot, right?

The Wait Begins

At this point, all of your stuff does into a black hole. There *is a status web site (VFS didn’t tell me that but I did find it). All it shows is whether VFS has sent your stuff to the consulate yet, and you get an auto-email when that happen. We received ours the first week of February. And then we received another one a couple of weeks later. With a new status number. That redirected back to the old status using the original date. VFA couldn’t figure out what that was about (I’m guessing it has to do with our registration numbers, tied to our original appointments, and a database duplicate).

Nine weeks later, in the third week of March (two weeks before our travel date) FedEx knocked on our door and delivered our passports, now decorated with a shiny visa authorization.

The Rush Begins

And then everything happened quickly. The week before our passports arrived, the movers had come to take our household goods away. We had spent the intervening weeks downsizing “stuff” and getting ready to go!

This included required veterinary exams for the dogs, which then had to be sent off to the USDA for certification. When the plane lands in Portugal, that document must be less than ten days old.

In the midst of this, we had to deal with the sudden realization that our older dog was not going to make the journey with us. We were able to give her a peaceful and loving end, and got her ashes back just in time to be able to scatter them in her favorite places before we left.

Now what…?

The visa, remember, only lets us “stay here long enough to apply for residency.” Once in country, we began the process of gathering another set of documentation – some of it the same, some of it new such as replacing our travel insurance with Portuguese medical insurance.

The visa imprinted in our passports included a url which pointed to information on our appointments at AIMA, the immigration offices. When the visa was issued, they assigned the next available appointment – we’ve heard of married couples whose appointments are a week apart in entirely different areas of the country. In many cases, they’re able to just both go to the first appointment and take care of it together. In our case, our appointments were scheduled on the same day, a half hour apart – on opposite ends of Lisbon.

We had our paperwork organized, but weren’t feeling confident enough about our Portuguese language skills, so we took local friends with us. Good thing, too! Bernie had an uneventful trip to Alverca, getting in a little early and out by the time my appointment was due to start.

Meanwhile, in Cascais…

Our friend Rui helped me practice saying “I have an appointment.” But my appointment wasn’t on the list!

The guard said it must have been rescheduled. I’m pretty sure she was about to tell me to just come back later that week and take a number or something but Rui jumped in to explain that he had brought me all the way from Setùbal (an hour’s drive).

“Setùbal?”

He nodded. And she took my passport and walked into the back.  When she returned, she handed me an application form – and took it back when we showed her that I already had it, filled out, in my stack of papers.

Ten minutes wait in a hot waiting room, and mine was the next name to be called.  Papers, pictures, fingerprints all done in time to join Bernie and Pedro for a choco frito lunch in Setubal afterward!

And Now What?

Now, we wait.  Sometime in the near future, our resident cards will arrive in the mail and we will be legal residents of Portugal!

Once we have those, we can apply for our ID numbers for the health and “social security” (slightly different meaning here) systems, and exchange our US drivers’ licenses for Portuguese ones (which required having our driving records verified by the consulate before we left).

Our permit is good for two years, after which it can be renewed for three more. At five years, we can apply for permanent residence, or for citizenship.

We are tax resident in Portugal at that point, which means we have to pay income tax here. Which we’ll do with the help of professionals for the first few years because…

• In general, our tax treaty ensures we don’t pay duplicate taxes, but the tax years don’t line up the same way. So, if we have to pay taxes in Portugal, the US government will allow us credit for that in our US taxes.
  • But US taxes are due, just as the Portugal tax season opens.
  • We won’t know what Portuguese taxes we owe until summer.
  • We can apply for extensions to the due date for US taxes so we can work that out
  • But if we owe money, extensions don’t mean the IRS won’t charge usurious interest on any payments not made by April 15.
• Our first year of taxes will be extra confusing because of selling our house, making an international move, and becoming tax resident in Portugal partway through the year.
• And in the end, it might not matter at all because our only income comes from state and federal pensions which, per the tax treaty, are not taxable here. So we probably don’t actually have any ‘income’ in Portugal until we start drawing social security.
  • But at that time, our other income – while not taxable – still contributes to establishing our tax rate, so our social security will be taxable at a higher percentage – possibly a higher percentage than in the US, in which case we will need to make sure we know how to claim that on our US taxes.
  • For the first five years, by which time we need to understand what changes (if anything) about all that if we become Portuguese citizens. The treaty would still protect us from double taxation, but might not protect us from taxation of our pensions.

So – it’s complicated, and it’s wise to have experts to work with for a while.

The cost of applying

The application process itself, with its documents, starts to add up – to around $500 per person, by the time all the little stuff is done, and that doesn’t include the cost of flying to San Francisco, or any of the actual costs of moving.

Once in Portugal, our medical insurance for two older people is around €500/mo, paid annually (we took the highest-level coverage and must remain at that level for three years, after which we can reduce coverage and price a little, but wanted all our bases covered while we’re figuring out the system).

Our residency applications were €177 each.

Portuguese Income Tax Rates