Three to Four Months to Legalise an Imported Car, the Motor Trade Says, and the Tax Clock Starts Before the Queue Ends

The trade body for Portugal's car dealers says some imported vehicles are now taking three to four months to get through the first stage of legalisation at the Instituto da Mobilidade e dos Transportes (Institute for Mobility and Transport), and that the wait can then run on again at the vehicle registry before the owner has a document to drive on.

The Associação Portuguesa do Comércio Automóvel (Portuguese Motor Trade Association), or APDCA, set out the complaint in a communiqué on Monday. Its account is built from what its members report rather than from published service statistics, and the association is explicit about that. The picture it describes will be familiar to anyone who has brought a car with them when moving to Portugal, because the process is the same whether the importer is a dealership or a household.

Where the queue forms

According to the association, there are files at the IMT taking three to four months before it is possible to complete the steps tied to the Pedido de Certificado do Veículo (Vehicle Certificate Request), known as the PCV, and make the corresponding payment. The PCV is the stage at which the IMT establishes what the vehicle actually is for Portuguese purposes and clears it for a Portuguese registration plate.

Clearing that stage does not always release the file. The association reports cases where, even after the PCV is finished, the vehicle's data does not become immediately available in a form that allows the initial property registration to be requested. And the delay can extend into the registo automóvel itself. The problem is not confined to one city, the association says, but it is at the Porto vehicle registry that it has received some of its most worrying reports, with requests submitted through the Automóvel Online service waiting several months for completion.

The association calls the result an accumulation effect: several months of waiting at the IMT can be followed by a further period before the registration is completed and the Documento Único Automóvel (Single Vehicle Document), also called the Certificado de Matrícula, is issued.

For a dealer, that is money standing still. The association says capital is immobilised, vehicles are difficult to manage and to sell, and staff are left managing customer expectations. For a private importer it is a car sitting on a driveway that cannot legally be used.

The deadline that does not wait

The part of the complaint with legal teeth is about tax. The association points out that in the year a Portuguese plate is assigned, the Imposto Único de Circulação (Single Circulation Tax), the annual road tax, must be paid within 30 days of the end of the 60-day legal period for registration. When the administrative process runs well past those deadlines, it argues, businesses and citizens can be left unable to meet a tax obligation on time for reasons that are not theirs.

The registration deadline it refers to is in Article 42 of the Regulamento do Registo de Automóveis (Vehicle Registration Regulation), which requires compulsory registrations to be applied for within 60 days of the relevant event. Crucially, for an initial property registration that article counts the 60 days from the date the matrícula is assigned, not from the date the registry finishes its work. So the clock starts at the front of the queue that APDCA says is blocked, and keeps running through it.

Nuno Silva, who chairs the association's board, put it this way in the communiqué: "It is not acceptable that a company complies with every procedure required of it and then waits months for different public administration services to complete the process. Still less can we accept that those delays may then put companies or citizens in breach of legal deadlines."

The association says it had already alerted the ministry to delays in IMT procedures, and that what is now urgent is coordinated action between the IMT and the Instituto dos Registos e do Notariado (Institute of Registries and Notaries), the body that runs the vehicle registry. That is the substantive ask: not more staff at one agency, but two agencies whose steps currently hand off badly being made to hand off cleanly.

Why this keeps happening at the IMT

The institute has been identified by the government itself as a bottleneck. Earlier this month Lisbon moved to unpick the Troika-era merger that created the IMT, blaming the combined body for exactly this kind of delay and moving rail safety out to the transport regulator. That restructuring will not shorten a queue this winter, but it does mean the complaint is landing on a ministry that has already accepted the premise.

Neither the IMT nor the IRN had responded publicly to the association's communiqué by Monday evening, and neither publishes a current processing time for the PCV, so there is no official figure to set against the three to four months the trade reports.

What this means for you

• If you are importing a car, start the paperwork before you need the car. The 60-day registration clock runs from the assignment of the plate, and the queue APDCA describes sits inside that window. Budget months, not weeks, and do not plan a move around driving the vehicle immediately.
• Keep dated proof of every submission. If a deadline is missed because a service has not finished its part, the evidence that you filed on time is what you will need. Screenshots of Automóvel Online submissions and PCV payment receipts are worth keeping.
• Do not assume a missed IUC deadline forgives itself. The association is asking for the problem to be recognised, which is not the same as it having been fixed. If your plate has been assigned, the tax timetable has started, whatever stage your registration is at.
• Check whether you qualify for the change-of-residence exemption before anything else. It is the single largest variable in the cost of bringing a car, and it has its own deadlines. Our guide to importing and legalising a foreign car in Portugal sets out the ISV rules and the document stack, and our guide to paying the IUC explains how the annual tax is calculated once the plate exists.
• Buying locally avoids all of this. A car already registered in Portugal needs a transfer of ownership, not a legalisation. Our guide to buying a used car in Portugal compares the two routes.

Import legalisation is one of those procedures that works invisibly until it does not, and the people most exposed to it stalling are the ones with the least room to wait: a new arrival who needs a car to get to work, and a small dealer whose stock is its balance sheet. The association's request for the IMT and the IRN to be made to work as one sequence rather than two is modest. Whether it produces anything before the next importing season is a different question.