Portugal Start-up Visa

There is no investment threshold. The financial condition is holding own financial and subsistence means equivalent to twelve times the Social Support Index, under Article 5(1)(e) of Normative Order 4/2018. Ordinance No. 1563/2007 of 11 December 2007 is not the instrument that sets that level.

For 2026 the authority publishes that figure as 12 times EUR 537.13, namely EUR 6,445.56. It must be evidenced by bank statement, and where an application has more than one entrepreneur each must prove it individually with their own statement.

That level is tied to each year's Social Support Index, and IAPMEI states that the EUR 537.13 figure is the 2026 index. An application filed in another year must be recalculated on that year's index.

Capital for the business is not a condition of entry. What decides is acceptance of the project by a certified incubator, as recorded in the processing-time cell of this page.

What issues is a residence visa for the entrepreneur, and the most important quantitative point is a cap set per project rather than per person.

The authority writes two sentences that belong together: the programme accepts one entrepreneur or more per project, up to a maximum of five; and residence visas under the programme are also granted up to a maximum of five per project.

Read together they close an obvious workaround: a founding team of six cannot be split into two applications for the same project in order to exceed the cap.

The receiving body is IAPMEI, the agency for competitiveness and innovation, rather than the immigration authority — the immigration side enters only at the visa stage, once IAPMEI has completed its assessment. The minimum age for enrolment is eighteen.

One observation about the quality of the document itself, recorded rather than guessed at: the published FAQ is the seventh version, dated May 2022, and its answer on whether an upper age limit exists is garbled, so it cannot be read with any confidence either way.

The application runs in two phases. In the first, the entrepreneur opens the file, describes the project, identifies every co-founder, and sends a statement of interest to one or more incubators.

Only on a positive response from at least one incubator does the file move to the second phase for assessment by IAPMEI.

In other words, a certified third party is a compulsory gate, not an optional support service.

The programme runs under its own regulation, Normative Order 4/2018 of 2 February 2018. An incubator wishing to host applicants must first be certified under Ordinance 344/2017 as amended by Ordinance 275/2018, with IAPMEI analysing, selecting and certifying them.

Incubator certification opens in rounds. The 2023-01 and 2025-01 rounds on the IAPMEI page are both closed, and the list of certified incubators is published separately.

The deadline for the second phase is set in the regulation itself: under Article 6(9) of Normative Order 4/2018, IAPMEI decides on the application within a maximum of 30 working days of its submission, and IAPMEI's FAQ repeats that deadline. Applicants can ask at [email protected].

The real residence condition on this route sits where few read carefully: Article 4(i) of Ordinance 344/2017 of 13 November 2017 requires a certified incubator to physically incubate the entrepreneurs it hosts under the programme. IAPMEI's FAQ reads that clause as meaning the incubation contract must follow the physical incubation model and that the programme makes no provision for virtual incubation.

This is therefore not a route that can be run remotely — physical presence is a condition of the very contract the visa rests on.

On sequence, the start-up visa is a residence visa, and under Article 58(1) of Act 23/2007 of 4 July it allows the holder to enter Portugal in order to apply for a residence permit. The stay may be extended within Portuguese territory by up to ninety days under Article 72(1)(c) of the same Act, the provision that applies to holders of a residence visa.

A newly arrived holder must attend the immigration authority appointment, and the date of that appointment is printed on the visa sticker itself — the applicant does not choose it.

One procedural knot the authority acknowledges: the incubator contract must be signed before the entrepreneur holds Portuguese identity documents or a Portuguese tax identification number.

An ordinary contract, by contrast, requires the identification, signatures and domicile of the parties and a reference to the worker work visa or residence permit.

So the incubation contract cannot refer to those documents, because this contract is itself the step that leads to the residence permit being granted.

Note that this FAQ is the seventh version of May 2022 and still names the immigration authority SEF, a body replaced by AIMA in October 2023

On the family reunification route, the family cannot travel together, and the reason is structural rather than procedural. Under Article 98 of Act 23/2007 as amended by Law 61/2025, which applies to procedures started from 23 October 2025, only a person who has held a valid residence permit for at least two years is entitled to family reunification. The period is 15 months for a spouse or equivalent partner who lived with the permit holder for at least 18 months immediately before the holder entered Portugal.

The waiting period does not apply to dependent minors or incapacitated persons, to a spouse who is a parent of such a dependant together with the holder, or to the family of holders of permits under Articles 90, 90-A or 121-A. A start-up permit under Article 89(4) is not among those exemptions, and the waiting period can be waived or shortened only in exceptional, duly reasoned cases by decision of the member of the Government responsible for migration.

Reunification must also first be approved by the immigration authority.

On the reunification route, the application for a residence visa for a family member can therefore be made only after the authority has approved the family reunification.

The authority states plainly that the guarantee of reunification amounts to the right to request it, its approval being conditioned among other things on the right of residence having been granted to the entrepreneur.

On the reunification route, the family therefore passes through two doors and a waiting period: first the entrepreneur must convert from visa to residence permit and then hold that permit for two years, or 15 months for a spouse who meets the cohabitation condition, unless the family member is exempt as set out above; then the reunification file must be approved.

In return, on a favourable evaluation of the reunification request the family may live and pursue their regular and professional life in Portugal, and that right runs for as long as the entrepreneur visa remains valid.

The law has a second route that the 2022 FAQ does not mention: Article 58(5) of Act 23/2007 gives the residence visa the further purpose of allowing family members, within the meaning of Article 99(1), to accompany a residence-visa applicant, and allows those applications to be lodged at the same time. The visa portal of the Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs carries a separate residence visa for accompanying a residence-visa applicant, requiring proof of family ties and of stable resources sufficient for both the applicant and the accompanying family, and states that the family reunification visa is not intended for those who wish to accompany a relative and apply for a visa at the same time in the country of origin. No official text yet says how this accompanying route interacts with the Article 98 waiting period when the family members apply for residence permits, so it is a point to confirm with the Portuguese consular post before filing.

On company staffing, the authority also notes the possibility of visas for a minimum number of qualified employees during the start-up period of the company in Portugal, but that sits downstream of the project rather than travelling with the founder visa

The status this programme grants, whether a visa or a residence permit, does not replace the holder's passport. The holder still travels on the passport of their own country, so the figure below belongs to the Portugal passport and becomes the holder's only once they are issued a Portugal passport.

According to the Passport Index of Prosperous Intelligence, on data dated 30 September 2026, the Portugal passport reaches 202 destinations without applying for a consular visa in advance. The figure combines three forms of entry and does not count an e-Visa that must be obtained beforehand:

It is therefore a measure of how easily the holder travels, not a count of visa-free countries in the narrow sense.

For comparison, on the same source and the same method of counting, the Vietnamese passport reaches 44 destinations. The two lists of destinations do not nest inside one another, so the difference is an indication rather than a list of places newly opened.

Prosperous Intelligence dates its data and advises checking with the destination’s official authorities before travelling.

On this route tax is not a consequence of arriving but a condition of the file being considered at all. Article 5(1)(b) of the Legislative Order requires the applicant to "have tax obligations fulfilled concerning tax administration and social security, when applicable".

Proof splits into two clear branches.

Where the applicant already holds a Portuguese tax or social security number, they must grant authorisation to the assessing body IAPMEI to check online with the Tax and Social Security Authorities, and must themselves enclose the certificates obtained from those portals.

To open that access, the file must quote IAPMEI's tax identification number 501373357 and its social security number (NISS) 20004578827, as given in IAPMEI's application guide revised on 2 May 2022. Both the Portuguese and the English FAQ print this number with digits missing, so the figure in the guide is the one to use.

Where the applicant does not hold such numbers, a solemn declaration is provided instead.

One important limit of scope: the information on the existence or non-existence of debts is always relative to Portugal, not to the applicant country of residence — so a tax obligation abroad falls outside this check, while an old Portuguese debt falls inside it.

The condition should be read alongside the programme threshold, since the project must have the potential to attain a turnover above EUR 325,000 per year and/or an asset value above EUR 325,000 within five years of the start of the incubation contract, under Article 5(2)(f) of Normative Order 4/2018 — the file must be clean of tax debt in the present and able to show a revenue line in the future

The fee table is the one the programme page itself links to, issued under Portaria no. 307/2023 of 13 October, and it prints two prices on every line: the first column is the Portaria amount, the second the amount after point XIV is applied.

Point XIV states how those two columns are produced: a 25% reduction where the application is submitted through the digital channel, and a 10% reduction where it is submitted through assisted in-person attendance.

Across the whole table, Article 89(4) — the very provision this programme runs on — is named on exactly one line:

Item iii(b), the fee for examining a request to waive the consular residence visa made under Article 88(2), Article 89(2) and (4), Article 90(2), Article 91(4), Article 91-B(9), Article 92(3) and (4), Article 93(3) and Article 123. That is the most expensive charge in the whole of item iii.

Item (a) has to be read carefully to avoid a costly misreading: the EUR 133.00 and EUR 99.80 rate applies only to Subsections I, III, IV, VII and VIII of Section II of Chapter VI, and the Subsection containing Article 89 is not in that list.

The amounts for that line, for the remaining charges under item iii and for the further charges at the end of the fee table are as follows, in euro:

Three further charges sit at the end of the fee table and are easy to miss. The in-person collection charge under item XVI is the same in both columns, so the digital channel does not make it cheaper. The urgent service level under item XVII(b), with issue by the second working day counted from the date of the decision granting the permit, is again identical in both columns.

The remaining one is item XV, each official trip made at the applicant request costs EUR 86.00.

Item XIII(a) sets out one exemption worth remembering: paying the fees in this fee table exempts the applicant from the cost of forms, vignettes and residence titles; point (d) gives the amount where forms and residence titles are charged separately, shown in the last row of the table above