Via Verde Foreign-Worker Visa Scheme Crosses 6,080 Requests From 32 Nationalities One Year On — Ministry of the Presidency Posts a 4,042 Approval Tally as Agriculture Captures 66% of the Greenlit Cases Across 38 Consular Posts in 29 Countries

Portugal's Via Verde para a Imigração — the fast-track visa channel built around a 2025 cooperation protocol between six employer confederations and three government bodies — has crossed its first-year threshold with 6,080 visa requests submitted, 4,042 of them approved. The figures sit in a written reply the Ministry of the Presidency lodged with Parliament this week, in response to a question filed by the Livre group, and they push the running tally well past the more cautious 5,183 / 3,328 numbers the same ministry published at the 1 April anniversary point.

The headline is the geography. Requests have arrived from 32 different nationalities through 38 consular posts spread across 29 countries — a wider footprint than the protocol's drafters anticipated when the channel went live, and one that confirms the scheme has stopped being a Lusophone-and-South-Asian pipeline and started behaving like a general regulated-migration mechanism. The other headline is the sectoral concentration. Agriculture has captured 66% of the approvals, with construction sitting in second place and the government noting growing demand from commerce, services and industry — the latter three being the directions the Ministry of the Presidency wants the next twelve months to push.

What the Via Verde Actually Is

The Via Verde is not a new visa type. It is a procedural overlay on top of the existing Article 88, Article 89 and Article 90-A residence visas inside the Lei dos Estrangeiros — the work-visa categories that were already on the books but that, in the absence of a coordinated channel, took six to nine months to clear in practice. What the protocol changed is the workflow.

Under the Via Verde, an employer who has signed onto one of the partner confederations files a single dossier — by email, in PDF — directly with the Direcção-Geral dos Assuntos Consulares e das Comunidades Portuguesas (DGACCP). The DGACCP has roughly two business days to forward the file to the consular post nearest the prospective worker's residence. The consular post then schedules the worker's interview and runs the standard checks. AIMA — the Agência para a Integração, Migrações e Asilo — and the Unidade de Coordenação de Fronteiras e Estrangeiros at the Sistema de Segurança Interna (UCFE/SSI) issue parallel opinions, and the consular post takes the final decision. The Ministry of the Presidency now puts the average end-to-end response time at 21 days, against an unofficial baseline of 180 to 270 days for an unprotocolled Article 88 application filed cold at the same consulate.

The Six Confederations on the Protocol

The confederations sitting on the employer side of the protocol cover the bulk of Portugal's labour-shortage sectors: Confederação dos Agricultores de Portugal (CAP) and Confederação Nacional da Agricultura (CNA) on the agricultural side; Associação dos Industriais da Construção Civil e Obras Públicas (AICCOPN) and Associação de Empresas de Construção e Obras Públicas (AECOPS) on construction; Confederação do Comércio e Serviços de Portugal (CCP) on commerce and services; and Confederação Empresarial de Portugal (CIP) on industry and large-employer cases. Tourism comes in through the Confederação do Turismo de Portugal (CTP) under a separate sectoral annex.

That spread is what the 32-nationality / 38-post geography reflects. CAP and CNA have steered their member farms toward consular posts in Bangladesh, Nepal, India, Pakistan and Morocco — historically the source countries for Alentejo and Ribatejo seasonal labour. AICCOPN and AECOPS have leaned on Brazil, Cape Verde and São Tomé. CCP and CIP have started routing requests through posts in the Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam, which is where the commerce-and-services growth the ministry has flagged is coming from.

The Gap Between 6,080 and 4,042

The 2,038 cases that sit between the requests submitted and the visas approved is not a refusal pile. The Ministry of the Presidency's reply to Livre breaks the residual into three buckets: cases still in process at consular post (the bulk), cases returned to the employer for additional documentation, and a small set of formal refusals — most often where a worker's police-clearance certificate could not be authenticated, or where the employer turned out not to have the social-security clearance the protocol requires.

That structure matters because it means the headline approval rate in the first year is not 66% (which is the agriculture share), nor 4,042 / 6,080 = 66.5% (which is a mathematical coincidence). It is closer to the proportion of completed files that get a yes — and on completed files the Ministry of the Presidency puts the figure above 90%. The bottleneck is not selection. It is throughput.

The 21-Day Number, in Context

The 21-day target is tight by any European comparison. Spain's equivalent regulated-migration channel for agricultural labour — the Catálogo de Ocupaciones de Difícil Cobertura — runs to 60–90 days for the consular phase alone. Italy's Decreto Flussi caps annual quotas and routinely takes nine to twelve months from employer click-to-issue. The German Fachkräfteeinwanderungsgesetz fast-track runs around 60 days for the Bundesagentur-für-Arbeit-approved cases.

Portugal's 21 days is reachable because the Via Verde routes the AIMA and UCFE/SSI opinions in parallel rather than sequentially. The single largest delay risk inside the channel is at the worker's end — a missing notarised translation, an apostille that has not arrived, a criminal-record certificate that has been issued by the wrong authority. The DGACCP has now issued a one-page checklist that confederations distribute to member employers, which the Ministry of the Presidency credits for compressing the average response time from the launch-year 28 days to the current 21.

What Is Likely to Change in Year Two

The Ministry of the Presidency's reply flagged three directions for the second year. The first is sectoral diversification — a push to lift the commerce, services and industry share above the current ten-or-so percent and reduce the agricultural concentration that has dominated year one. The second is geographic broadening — opening the channel through additional consular posts in West Africa and Latin America to reduce the Bangladesh-Nepal-Brazil weight that drove year-one volumes. The third, less developed but signalled in the reply, is an annexed pathway for highly qualified workers under Article 90 — the existing tech and engineering visa — which the protocol has not yet absorbed but which CIP has been pushing for since the launch.

What This Means for Expats and Employers

• The Via Verde is for employer-sponsored migration only. If you are coming as a remote worker, freelancer, retiree, investor or student, the channel does not apply to you. The relevant routes remain D7, D8, the golden visa, the highly qualified-activity visa and the student visa. Family-reunification cases run through AIMA on a separate track.
• The 21-day clock is consular only. It does not include the time to assemble your file in your home country, the time to apostille and translate documents, or the post-arrival residence-permit issuance with AIMA. End-to-end, plan for three to four months from first contact with a Portuguese employer to a residence card in your hand.
• Membership of one of the six confederations is the first filter. A small farm, builder or shop that is not a member of CAP / AICCOPN / CCP / CIP / CTP cannot route a worker through the channel. The first move for any Portuguese employer hiring abroad is checking whether the relevant trade association is on the protocol, and whether the company is paid up.
• Agriculture remains the path of least resistance. If you are an employer in the agro-sector and your file is clean, the Via Verde is now operating at something close to its target speed. The Ministry of the Presidency's commerce-and-services growth narrative is real but small in absolute volumes.
• The 6,080 number is small. It puts the Via Verde at roughly 6,000 visas a year against a Portuguese labour-market shortfall the Banco de Portugal recently estimated at 80,000–120,000 workers across the construction, agriculture and elderly-care sectors combined. The protocol is closing a procedural bottleneck, not the structural gap.
• Watch the 90-A annex. The Article 90-A search-for-work visa — the cousin to the Via Verde — sits separately from the protocol but has been adopted by some confederation members as a faster front-end. Year-two policy will probably bring the two channels into closer alignment.

The figures in this piece are drawn from the Ministry of the Presidency's written response to a Livre parliamentary question filed in late April 2026, with cross-reference to the same ministry's 1 April 2026 anniversary statement. The Via Verde for immigration entered into force on 1 April 2025. The Lei dos Estrangeiros is Lei 23/2007, as amended.