If you have been Googling "retirement visa Portugal," you have probably seen a confusing range of income numbers — €705, €820, €870, €920 — across different sites. That is because Portugal's D7 passive income visa, which most people call the retirement visa, has had its threshold raised every January for the past three years.
This article does three things: tells you the current number, explains the two bigger changes underneath (the tax regime that ended and the family-reunification rule that improved), and shows how Portugal compares to Spain and Italy as a destination right now.
The number you came here for
€920 per month. That is the minimum passive income a single applicant must demonstrate for the Portugal D7 visa in 2026.
The D7 is the official name. "Retirement visa," "passive income visa," "D7 retirement visa" — all the same program. The visa works for retirees, but it does not actually require you to be retired, and there is no minimum age. The single qualifying criterion is that your income comes from passive sources: pensions, rental, dividends, royalties, intellectual property, savings interest, or annuities (visa category established under Lei 23/2007 — Lei de Estrangeiros, consolidated text, with the means-of-subsistence quantum set by Portaria n.º 1563/2007; see also AIMA official D7 information).
A couple needs €1,380/month combined (€920 + €460). Each dependent child adds €276/month. So a couple with two children needs to show €1,932/month.
That is the answer most readers came for. The next four sections explain why the number got there, what changed around it, and whether Portugal is still the deal it used to be.
How €820 became €920 in three years
Portugal indexes the D7 minimum income to the national minimum wage (salário mínimo nacional), updated annually by government portaria published in the Diário da República. When the minimum wage rises each January, so does the D7 threshold. The trajectory:
| Year | D7 minimum income | Trigger |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-2024 | €705/mo | Old indexing reference |
| 2024-01-01 | €820/mo | First post-reform jump |
| 2025-01-01 | €870/mo | Minimum wage rise |
| 2026-01-01 | €920/mo | Minimum wage rise |
The 2024 jump from €705 to €820 was the largest single move and it grabbed the headlines. But the bigger pattern is that this number keeps rising every January, by €50–€115. If you are reading this article a year from now, the 2027 number will likely be different again.
There is a small but important quirk in how Portugal applies this: AIMA (the immigration agency) assesses your financial means against "the threshold in force at the time of your appointment." Meaning if your application was submitted in 2025 but you get scheduled in February 2026, you may be measured against the €920 figure, not the €870 you applied under. Build in a margin.
The two changes that matter more than the income number
While everyone was watching the income threshold, two larger changes shifted the D7 deal between 2024 and 2026.
Change 1: NHR ended. IFICI replaced it. Most D7 applicants do not qualify for IFICI.
For years, Portugal's biggest sales pitch to retirees was the NHR (Non-Habitual Resident) tax regime: a 10-year tax break that gave foreign-source pensions and other income highly favorable treatment.
NHR closed to new applicants on January 1, 2024, with a narrow transitional window through March 31, 2025 for applicants who could document pre-2024 ties to Portugal (a 2023 lease or property purchase, school enrollment, employment contract, or a valid residence visa/permit). After that, anyone newly arriving in Portugal on a D7 is not eligible (Portugal country profile, tax section; confirmed against Autoridade Tributária guidance for non-habitual residents and the PT 2024 state budget law (Lei 82/2023, Article 236) that closed the regime).
When we first traced this for our country data, three different English-language sources gave three different dates for the NHR closure. The honest answer is two dates: January 1, 2024 for the regime closure proper, and March 31, 2025 for the transitional grace window. Aggregators tend to pick one and drop the other. The noise around that pair of dates is part of why we treat aggregator listicles as starting points, not endpoints.
The Portuguese government replaced NHR with IFICI — Incentivo Fiscal à Investigação Científica e Inovação ("Tax Incentive for Scientific Research and Innovation"). IFICI is much narrower than NHR. It targets researchers, scientists, and high-skilled professionals in qualifying R&D activities. A typical retiree on the D7 does not qualify for IFICI.
What does this mean for someone applying now? Your foreign pension is taxed under standard Portuguese rules: top marginal personal income tax is 48% (OECD — tax on personal income data), standard VAT is 23% per the EU VAT Directive 2006/112/EC consolidated text, and corporate tax (IRC) is 19% in 2026 — down from 20% in 2025 and scheduled to fall to 18% in 2027 and 17% in 2028 (Lei n.º 64/2025, Orçamento do Estado 2026; small-business first-€50K bracket is 15%). There are progressive bands below the top personal income rate, so a modest pension will not be taxed at 48% — but the favorable foreign-pension carveout that defined the NHR era is gone.
This is the change that aggregator listicles consistently understate. The income threshold moved €100 over three years. The tax framework moved a lot more.
Change 2: Family reunification dropped from 5+ years to 2 years (October 2025)
Lei n.º 61/2025, published 22 October 2025 (amending Lei 23/2007 art. 98), cut the family-reunification waiting period sharply and entered into force the day after publication. Where D7 holders previously had to wait roughly five years before bringing additional family members under the reunification process, the new framework permits family reunification after 2 years of legal residence. A shorter 15-month track for applicants with documented long-term cohabitation has been widely reported, but the exact statutory wording on cohabitation evidence is worth checking with an immigration lawyer before relying on it. Exemptions to the 2-year wait include minor or incapacitated children, spouses sharing a minor dependent with the holder, and holders of Golden Visa, EU Blue Card, or highly-qualified-activity permits.
This is a meaningful pro-family policy move, and it is new enough — less than eight months at the time of writing — that most online D7 guides have not caught up to it. One operational caveat: as of late 2025, AIMA was reported as not yet fully processing the new 2-year right in practice (the law was statutorily in force but the agency lagged on system updates). If your reunification clock matters, ask AIMA directly about current processing status before counting on the statutory minimum.
Who actually qualifies — and where aggregators get it wrong
The most common reader confusion: mistaking the D7 for the D8.
The D7 is for passive income — pension, rental, dividends, IP royalties, savings interest. If you receive a paycheck from a foreign employer for remote work you are actively performing, that is not a clean D7 case. Portugal's D8 digital nomad visa is designed exactly for that situation — active remote work income for a foreign employer.
A 45-year-old with a remote software job earning €5,000/month does not want the D7. They want the D8. A 65-year-old with a €1,200/month pension is the textbook D7 applicant. A 50-year-old living off rental income from properties in their home country is also a D7 applicant. Source matters more than amount.
Three more things often missed about who qualifies:
- No minimum age. The "retirement visa" name is a folk label, not a legal requirement.
- Health insurance is required from day one. You must show Portuguese-recognized health insurance at application — many D7 applicants start with SafetyWing Nomad Insurance, which satisfies the Schengen-area requirement and renews per stay; verify it meets AIMA's current proof standards before submission.
- You must apply from outside Portugal. This is not a visa you switch to from a tourist stay — you apply at a Portuguese consulate in your country of residence.
Portugal vs Spain vs Italy: how the European retirement visas compare
This is the comparison that gets glossed over. Side-by-side, Portugal is dramatically cheaper to qualify for than its two main southern-European peers:
| Visa | Single | Couple | Remote work allowed? | Distinguishing fact |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Portugal D7 | €920/mo (€11,040/yr) | €1,380/mo | Passive sources only | Indexed to minimum wage; NHR ended Jan 2024 |
| Spain Non-Lucrative Visa | €2,400/mo (€28,800/yr) | Per dep: €600/mo extra | EXPLICITLY prohibited — including remote work | 400% × IPREM; new Real Decreto 1155/2024 procedural reform 2025-05-20 |
| Italy Elective Residence | ~€31K–€32K/yr (consular discretion upward) | ~€38K/yr (some consulates demand €62K — full per-applicant amount) | Strict no-work, including remote | Registered 12-month Italian lease (or property deed) required in hand at application (Ministero degli Affari Esteri — Visa for Italy portal); 7% flat tax (10-yr regime, all foreign-source income) available in southern + central-earthquake-zone towns with population ≤30,000 (Agenzia delle Entrate — cap raised from 20K by Law 34/2026, effective April 2026) |
Use the side-by-side visa comparison to see the full eligibility tables next to each other.
Three differences worth examining:
- Portugal's threshold is 2.6× cheaper than Spain's NLV and 2.9× cheaper than Italy's Elective Residence (single applicant).
- Portugal is the only one of the three that accommodates remote-work-shaped income, provided it is passive in nature (royalties, IP, dividends from your own business structure). Spain and Italy explicitly forbid all paid work — including remote work for a foreign employer — under their retirement-visa pathways. We spent a research session cross-checking this exact rule across both programs because it is the single most-misreported detail in English-language guides; many sources soft-pedal "no work allowed" into "flexible," which it is not.
- Italy has a hidden prerequisite: at the time you submit the application, you must already hold a registered Italian rental contract (or own Italian property) — and the lease must run at least 12 months forward from your arrival in Italy. You don't need to have been living in Italy for a year; you need a binding, registered, ≥12-month accommodation arrangement already in place. The contract has to be registered with Agenzia delle Entrate, signed by both parties, and list your codice fiscale. That requirement alone disqualifies many applicants who would otherwise meet the income bar.
All three visas: roughly 5-year path to permanent residency (residency permit, not citizenship), with a 183-day annual presence trigger for tax residency. Note for Portugal in particular: a 2026 reform to Portugal's Lei da Nacionalidade lifted the standard naturalization waiting period from 5 → 10 years for most third-country nationals (7 years for EU/CPLP nationals), in force from 2026-05-19 (Lei da Nacionalidade revision summary). PR after 5 years is unchanged; citizenship after 5 years is no longer the default. Pending applications at IRN as of the entry-into-force date keep the old 5-year regime.
The bar that's not the threshold: cost of living and what comes after
Meeting the €920 income bar is the entry ticket. The bigger questions for anyone considering Portugal are what life actually costs once you are there, and what the tax math looks like in practice.
Portugal's country profile has the full data, but the headlines: rent in Lisbon and Porto has climbed considerably since 2020, while the interior and smaller cities (Coimbra, Braga, Aveiro, Évora) remain meaningfully cheaper. The EU-27 rent index, sourced from Eurostat HICP CP041 (actual rentals for housing), places Portugal below the EU-27 average overall, though the gap has narrowed.
On taxes: without the NHR shield, a foreign pension is taxed at standard Portuguese progressive rates. If your pension or passive income arrives in dollars, pounds, or another non-euro currency, the FX conversion adds another layer to the math — a 1% spread on €5,000/month compounds to roughly €600/year. Doing the back-of-envelope math on whether the tax bill plus cost of living plus currency conversion still beats your current location is the real affordability question — not the €920 threshold.
A useful gut-check: Portugal still ranks #2 globally in our best-countries-to-retire preset (Japan #1, Spain #3), scoring 71/100 across life expectancy (82.2 years), healthcare spending (10% of GDP), and rule of law (75/100). The income bar rose and the tax break ended, but the underlying quality-of-life data that made Portugal popular in the first place has not changed.
The shift between 2024 and 2026 made Portugal a more expensive destination to qualify for and to live in. It did not make Portugal a worse retirement choice — it made it a less obvious one. The decision now depends on what you weigh and what you compare it against, not whether the headline number went up.
Practical next steps
If you have read this far and the D7 still looks like the right shape, three concrete next steps:
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Compare your visa options first. D7 isn't always the best fit — if your income is from active remote work, the D8 digital nomad visa is cleaner. If you're weighing Portugal against Spain or Italy, use our side-by-side visa tool to see eligibility tables next to each other, and our best-countries-to-retire match for the broader picture.
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Health insurance from day one. D7 applications require Portuguese-recognized coverage at submission — you cannot defer this. SafetyWing Nomad Insurance is the most common starting point for D7 applicants because it satisfies the Schengen-area requirement, renews per stay, and includes coverage for the application-to-arrival gap window. Verify current AIMA proof-of-coverage standards before purchase.
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Currency conversion and euro banking. Your D7 income proof must be in euros, and your ongoing monthly transfers will too. Wise (formerly TransferWise) is widely used for low-spread FX, multi-currency accounts, and SEPA-compatible euro IBAN — particularly relevant if your pension or passive income source is in USD, GBP, CAD, or AUD.
The income bar has moved. The work to actually qualify and arrive prepared has not. Get the documentation right, run your real numbers, and verify against the official AIMA D7 page before you submit.