Portugal

Portugal's Basic Health Law states the right to health protection as belonging to all persons, and the National Health Service is bound to be universal - care to everybody without discrimination. Who its beneficiaries are is a separate base and it is unusually explicit: all Portuguese citizens, and equally people with permanent residence or in temporary stay or residence here who are nationals of Union member states or equivalents, third-country nationals or stateless persons, applicants for international protection, and migrants with or without their situation legalised. The word for foreigner never appears in the law; the classes are named one by one instead.

A student permit in Portugal follows a residence visa and the ten general conditions, and then asks for proof of four things: enrolment at a higher education institution, payment of fees where applicable, means of subsistence as fixed by ministerial order, and cover by the National Health Service or health insurance. It runs three years, renewable, or the length of the programme if shorter. Secondary education has its own article with a one-year permit, and a pupil who entered legally without the right visa can still be granted one.

Portuguese naturalisation is granted by the Government to an applicant who meets nine requirements at once, and the second of them is where the answer divides: ten years of legal residence for nationals of most countries, seven for nationals of countries whose official language is Portuguese and for citizens of European Union member states. The language and culture test is presumed passed for the Portuguese-speaking class unless a lack of Portuguese is manifest. The same division runs through the arithmetic: broken periods of residence can be added together, but only if they fall inside a window of six, nine or twelve years, by the same three classes. The whole structure is new - it comes from Lei Orgânica n.º 1/2026 - and before it the period was shorter and the same for everyone.

Whether a short visit to Portugal needs a visa is not in any Portuguese instrument. Regulation (EU) 2018/1806 carries two annexes: nationals of the countries in Annex I need a visa to cross the external border, and nationals of the countries in Annex II are exempt for stays of no more than 90 days in any 180-day period. The Regulation is directly applicable, so the answer is the same here as in every other Schengen state, and Portugal cannot add a country to either list.

What a person brings when they move to Portugal is governed by a Union regulation. Personal property imported by someone transferring their normal residence from a third country enters free of import duties, subject to conditions that do the real work: the goods must have been owned - and, if durable, used - at the old residence for at least six months; the person must have lived outside the customs territory for a continuous twelve months; and the goods must be entered for free circulation within twelve months of the move. Alcohol, tobacco, commercial vehicles and the tools of a trade other than portable instruments get no relief at all.

Portugal builds every temporary residence permit on one list. Article 77 asks for ten things at once, and the first is a valid residence visa granted for one of the purposes the Act names, or a job-seeker visa - so the permit is the second step, not the first. The rest are the absence of anything that should have stopped the visa, presence in Portugal, means of subsistence as fixed by ministerial order, accommodation, social security registration where applicable, no conviction for a crime punishable here by more than a year, no live entry ban, and no alert in either of two information systems. The employed route then adds two: a contract made under the law and registration with social security. What it also carries is unusually generous - the holder may change employer by notifying the agency, and may move to self-employment by replacing the title.

Portugal has two ordinary tests and they are not the same shape. The first is presence: more than 183 days, consecutive or not, in any twelve-month period starting or ending in the year - so the window is not the calendar year and can straddle two of them. The second needs no day count at all: having stayed less time, you are resident if on any day of that period you had a home here in conditions suggesting a present intention to keep and occupy it as your habitual residence. A day of presence is any day, whole or partial, that includes a night spent here. Residence begins on the first day of the stay, not at the end of the count, and it is assessed for each member of a household separately.

Portugal does not let a resident bring their family immediately. The right belongs to the holder of a residence permit valid for at least two years - fifteen months for a spouse who lived with them for at least eighteen months before they came. The wait does not apply at all to dependent minors, to a spouse who is the other parent of a dependent minor, or to the family of someone holding a permit for highly qualified activity, investment or the tech visa. Who counts as family is a seven-item list reaching spouses, minor and adopted children, adult children who are unmarried and studying, dependent parents in the first degree, and minor siblings under the resident's guardianship. The applicant must then show accommodation and means for everyone, both fixed by ministerial order, and the family must attend Portuguese language and civic training afterwards.

Portugal still has a residence permit for investment activity, and its structure is unusual: it applies the ten general conditions except the first - the residence visa - and asks instead for a valid Schengen visa and for the stay to be regularised within 90 days of first entry. What counts as investment activity is defined elsewhere in the Act, in article 3, and renewal runs in two-year periods for as long as the investment is maintained.

Portugal's Act does not create a permit for people living on their own money. What it creates is the residence visa, valid for two entries and four months, which exists so that its holder can apply for a residence permit once here; and the general conditions, of which one is possession of means of subsistence as defined by ministerial order. The Act sets no amount anywhere. A person living on a pension, rent or savings therefore enters on a residence visa granted for that purpose and is measured against a figure that is not in the statute.

Nothing in the Portuguese Act is addressed to retired people. A pensioner uses the same residence visa and the same general conditions as anyone living on their own money, and a pension counts because article 77 asks for means of subsistence rather than for a source of them. Age appears nowhere in the conditions.

Portugal belongs to two movement regimes. The European Union's reaches nationals of member states, of the European Economic Area and of Switzerland, and nobody in this corpus. The other is the Mobility Agreement of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries, and the Act gives it a permit of its own: article 87-A lets a national of a state covered by the Agreement who holds a residence visa apply inside Portugal for a CPLP residence permit, with the criminal record pulled by the service. Brazil is the only state of this corpus inside the Agreement, so for everyone else in the region the answer is that no regional treaty reaches them.

Portugal's ancestry route is not a residence permit but nationality itself, and it reaches two generations. A person with at least one ascendant of Portuguese origin in the second degree of the direct line - a grandparent - who has not lost that nationality is Portuguese by origin if they declare that they want to be and possess ties of effective connection to the national community. Being Portuguese by origin is not naturalisation: there is no residence period and no test, and the status is attributed rather than granted.

The right to open a basic payment account in Portugal is a Union right before it is a Portuguese one. Article 16 of the Payment Accounts Directive obliges member states to ensure that consumers legally resident in the Union have the right to open and use one with credit institutions in their territory - and it names, inside that sentence, consumers with no fixed address, asylum seekers, and consumers who hold no residence permit but whose expulsion is impossible for legal or factual reasons. The right applies irrespective of where the consumer lives, though a member state may require a genuine interest in opening the account. A directive binds the state rather than the bank, so what a customer enforces is the Portuguese law that transposed it, and that law is not read here.

Portugal sorts foreign driving licences into three classes and the difference between them is the whole answer. Licences from the states named under Decreto-Lei n.º 46/2022 - CPLP members and non-EU OECD members that signed a traffic convention or a bilateral agreement - are accepted for driving here even after the holder becomes resident, subject to six conditions including that no more than fifteen years have passed since issue or renewal and that the holder is under sixty. Licences from states that acceded to the traffic conventions or hold a bilateral agreement are good for 185 days from the day after entry and only while the driver has not settled. Licences from states in neither group are not valid to drive on at all, and exchanging one means passing a theory test and a practical test for every category.