Portugal's New Citizenship Test Exists in Law and Nowhere Else, Three Weeks After the Deadline to Write the Rules Ran Out
Lei Organica 1/2026 gave the government 90 days to define the knowledge test now required for naturalisation. That ran out on 16 August with nothing published. Article 6 fixes the subject matter; the format, the pass mark and the venue remain unwritten.
Since 19 May, the law has required anyone seeking Portuguese nationality by naturalisation to prove they know the Portuguese language and culture, the country's history and its national symbols, and to know "sufficiently" the fundamental rights and duties attached to Portuguese nationality and the political organisation of the Portuguese State. Nobody can yet sit that examination, because the regulation that would define it does not exist, and the deadline for writing it expired three weeks ago.
The requirement sits in Article 6 of the Lei da Nacionalidade (Nationality Law) as rewritten by Lei Orgânica n.º 1/2026, published in the Diário da República on 18 May and in force the following day. Paragraph 1(c) says the applicant must show, "through a test or a certificate", sufficient knowledge of the language, the culture, the history and the national symbols. Paragraph 1(d) adds the rights, duties and state organisation, and names no mechanism at all for proving them.
Article 4 of the same law told the government to make the necessary changes to the Regulamento da Nacionalidade Portuguesa (Portuguese Nationality Regulation), annexed to Decreto-Lei n.º 237-A/2006, within 90 days of publication. Counted from 18 May, that ran out on 16 August. Nothing has been published since.
What already exists, and what does not
The language half of the test is the part with an established route. The Prova de Língua Portuguesa para Aquisição de Nacionalidade (Portuguese Language Examination for the Acquisition of Nationality) runs through the Instituto de Avaliação Educativa (Institute for Educational Assessment) under Portaria n.º 176/2014, and the nationality regulation accepts alternatives, including a school certificate showing at least two academic years of Portuguese. That is why the state-funded Português Língua de Acolhimento courses matter so much to applicants.
The civic half has nothing: no syllabus, no format, no pass mark, no fee, no examination centre, and no statement of whether any existing qualification counts instead. The IRN is meanwhile refusing preliminary applications for an "absence of legal requirements", a category hard to argue with when one requirement has not been defined.
The reach is wider than most applicants assume. Article 1(3) makes the grandchild route to originary nationality, claimed by declaration, conditional on the same paragraphs (c) to (h), and great-grandchildren under Article 6(8) are excused the residency clock but not the knowledge requirements. Acquisition by declaration through marriage or a recognised união de facto is not caught, and neither are files already lodged: Article 7(2) leaves procedures pending on 19 May under the previous wording.
A study guide for an exam nobody has written
Into that gap has walked a preparation product. Edouard Baillot, a French engineer who has never lived in Portugal but visits regularly, has built a site called Teste Nacionalidade after friends resident here found themselves caught out. "When the law changed in May they were surprised and did not know where to start," he told DN Brasil. "There was a new test, but nobody was saying what would come up, or when, or how."
The result is 477 multiple-choice questions written from the text of the law and the Constitution, sorted into five themes: history, culture and society, national symbols, rights and duties, and organisation of the state. A 20-question sample is free and fuller access is sold, with a mobile application alongside it. Baillot says the project has no link to the government or to the IRN, and that the five-theme arrangement is his own: "The temptation was to invent a syllabus and present it as official. I preferred to say clearly on the page what the law fixes and what is still open."
That caveat describes where applicants stand. The subject matter is settled, because Article 6 lists it. How it will be examined rests entirely with a government now past its own legal deadline. For the investors already in court over the ten-year clock and for everyone whose file falls under the rewritten law, the answer to "when can I take the test" is still that nobody knows.
Feature image: Palácio de São Bento, Lisbon. Photograph by Carlos Luis M C da Cruz, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
