Lukas Wander moved from Leeds to Portugal's Silver Coast on a D7 visa in 2023. This is what he tells people who message him asking if it still works.
On 19 May 2026 the law changed and nobody I know in the Silver Coast Facebook groups noticed for a month.
The new nationality law, Lei Orgânica 1/2026, made it ten years of legal residence before you can apply for Portuguese citizenship. It was five. And the clock now starts from the day your first residence card is issued, not the day you applied for it, which for a lot of us was a year or more earlier because the immigration agency was drowning. My five-year plan became a ten-year one over a single weekend, and I read about it on a Portuguese news site, not in any of the groups I am in.
I am still here. I am not going anywhere. But I have spent the summer answering the same three messages from people back in the UK, so here are the honest answers, with the 2026 numbers, because the version doing the rounds is mostly from 2021.
"Can I still get in?"
Yes, and it is more mechanical than people think. The D7 visa is for anyone with passive income: a pension, rent, dividends, savings that produce income. The bar is the Portuguese minimum wage, which is €920 a month in 2026 (paid fourteen times, so €11,040 a year). Add half again for a spouse, so €1,380 a month for a couple, and 30% per child. Most consulates also want to see about a year of that threshold sitting in a Portuguese bank account before you apply.
The D8, the "digital nomad" visa, is for people still working remotely. The bar is four times the minimum wage: €3,680 a month, €5,520 for a couple.
The trap that catches people is not the number. It is the date. The immigration agency assesses your income against the minimum wage in force on the day of your residence-card appointment, not the day you filed. Those appointments slip. If yours slides from December into January, the wage has gone up again and you can be under a threshold you cleared when you applied. Build a margin. The government's stated path is €1,100 by 2029.
"Is the 10% tax on my pension still a thing?"
No. That was NHR, and it closed to new arrivals on 1 January 2024. People who got in keep their ten years. The replacement, which the groups call NHR 2.0 and the law calls IFICI, is a 20% rate on Portuguese employment or self-employment income in a narrow list of qualifying jobs. It does not cover pensions at all. If you are retiring here, IFICI is not for you, and anyone who tells you otherwise has not read it.
What you actually pay: the ordinary progressive bands, which were trimmed slightly this year. A Portuguese adviser's worked example on a €23,500 pension came out at roughly 14% effective. Not 10%, but a long way from what the same pension pays at home once the personal allowance has been frozen for another year.
And there is a new UK-Portugal double taxation treaty, signed in September 2025, in force since December, applying to UK income tax from 6 April 2026. Under it, pensions paid to a Portuguese resident are taxable only in Portugal, with the usual exception for government-service pensions, which stay with HMRC. That replaces a treaty from 1968 and it changes what everyone's accountant has been telling them.
"What about a doctor?"
The state system, the SNS, is real and you are entitled to it as a resident. If you are on a UK State Pension, the S1 form from the NHS Business Services Authority transfers your healthcare costs to the UK and gets you registered here; allow eight to twelve weeks. The GHIC card is for tourists and does nothing for you once you are resident. Most of us also carry private cover because it buys speed, and the price depends brutally on age: €400 to €1,200 a year in your thirties and forties, €2,500 to €4,000 at 60, €6,000 to €10,000 at 75, and many insurers will not take a new customer over about 65 to 70 at all. Buy it before you are old enough to need it.
What it actually costs in 2026
Idealista's August asking rents: Lisbon €24.50 a square metre, Porto €18.60, Faro €15.10, Funchal €17.30, Leiria on the Silver Coast €9.40. In plain terms a one-bed in Lisbon is around €1,400 a month, Porto and Faro about €1,000, and on the Silver Coast or inland you will find one under €800. The minimum wage is €920. That gap is the housing crisis, and it is why the answer to "where should I go" is almost never Lisbon.
Is it still yes?
For me, yes. Not because of the passport, which was never the point, but because a British pension clears the threshold, a doctor here has time, rent is half of Leeds and the Atlantic is at the end of the road. The people it stops being yes for are the ones who came for a five-year passport, and the ones who arrive without knowing the numbers and pay a relocation agent a few thousand euros to be told what a NIF is.
So I wrote the numbers down. All of them, checked in September 2026: both visas and the appointment-date trap, the paperwork in the order that works, what the immigration agency is actually like now, the citizenship law date by date, the new treaty and what it does to a State Pension, a workplace pension and a SIPP, every property tax in the order you meet it, rents by region, healthcare at every age, renting and buying without being robbed, cars, pets, the border machine, freelancing, ISAs, wills, and the twelve mistakes British people make, ranked. It comes with an Excel planner that tells you from your income in pounds whether you clear the threshold with a margin, and a checklist pack. It is here:
Ten Years, Not Five: the honest 2026 guide to moving to Portugal
If you only take one thing from this page: the clock is ten years from your first card, the threshold is measured on the day of your appointment, and nobody in the groups is going to tell you either.