President Seguro Signs the New Nationality Law Into Force — Naturalisation for Non-EU Residents Doubles to 10 Years, CPLP and EU Citizens Move to 7, and Birth-Right Citizenship Tightens to a Five-Year Parental Residency Test

President António José Seguro promulgated the new Lei da Nacionalidade on Sunday, 3 May 2026, signing into law the package that doubles the residency requirement for Portuguese citizenship from five to ten years for most non-EU applicants, lifts it to seven years for citizens of EU and CPLP states, and ends the Sephardic Jewish descendant route that has run since 2015. The decree, approved by Parliament on 1 April with the votes of PSD, Chega, IL and CDS-PP — a supermajority above the two-thirds threshold — was the first major piece of legislation Seguro has signed since taking office on 9 March, and he used the moment to flag publicly that he wished the rewrite had been built on "greater consensus around its essential lines" rather than carrying "ideological marks of the moment."

What changes, line by line

The headline figure is the naturalisation clock. Under the law that has been on the books for two decades, a foreign resident could apply for Portuguese citizenship after five years of legal residence regardless of nationality. The new text splits that single track into three:

• Ten years of legal residence for citizens of countries outside the EU and outside the Community of Portuguese-Language Countries (CPLP) — the cohort that covers most Golden Visa, D7, D8 digital-nomad and family-reunification applicants from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, China, India and the Gulf.
• Seven years for nationals of EU member states and of the eight CPLP countries — Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé and Príncipe, East Timor and Equatorial Guinea — a track previously identical to the five-year general regime.
• Five years of legal parental residence for children born on Portuguese soil to qualify for citizenship at birth, replacing a one-year test that did not require the parent to be in any particular legal status.

The Sephardic Jewish descendant programme, the route that produced more than 60,000 naturalisations since 2015, is repealed outright. Special access provisions for residents of former Portuguese territories are also removed.

The political backdrop

The promulgation closes the cycle that began with the PSD–Chega parliamentary deal in April 2025 and survived a Constitutional Court intervention on 15 December that knocked out a parallel decree on loss of nationality as a criminal penalty. Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa vetoed the first version on 19 December; the redrafted text was reapproved on 1 April by PSD, Chega, IL and CDS-PP, with PS, Livre, PCP, BE and PAN voting against and JPP abstaining. The supermajority means the government did not need Belém's signature to push the rewrite through; Seguro's decision to sign with reservations rather than send the text back removes the last institutional friction point.

Pending applications: the Belém request

The most concrete signal in Seguro's promulgation note was on the application backlog. He stressed "the importance of guaranteeing that pending processes are not — effectively — affected by the legislative change," arguing that government processing delays must not be allowed to push existing applicants over the new ten-year threshold. AIMA, which inherited the citizenship desk from the former SEF, is sitting on a backlog measured in tens of thousands of files; whether implementing regulations carve out a transitional regime for applications already submitted is now the most consequential drafting question in Lisbon for the foreign-resident community.

What it means for foreign residents

• Already past five years of legal residence: file now if you have not. The law takes effect on publication in the Diário da República, expected within days, and only applications already on the AIMA desk before that date are likely to be processed under the old regime.
• On a D7, D8, Golden Visa or work-permit track: assume the ten-year clock applies unless you hold an EU passport. Plan tax residency, compliance and language-test preparation around a longer horizon.
• CPLP applicants: the seven-year track remains the most accessible non-EU route into Portuguese citizenship.
• Children born in Portugal: birth-right citizenship now requires five years of prior legal parental residence, a shift Seguro singled out as needing future legislative attention to protect access to health and education.

The implementing regulation, the AIMA transition rules and the still-pending Constitutional Court review of the criminal-penalty decree are the three documents to watch over the next four weeks.