D7 Visa

D7 Visa Requirements

There are a few different types of visas that you can apply for depending on your circumstances. We applied for the D7, which is a retirement or passive income visa. Everything needs to be in order by the time you submit your application with VFS which is the agency that collects the required paperwork and sends them to the Consulate. There are different offices in different regions of the U.S. and you have to go to the correct one for your region. Ours was in San Francisco and had to be in person. Appointments are usually released about one month in advance and there doesn’t seem to be any logic as to when they open up, so you have to just keep checking the website. I got ours booked at about 2 in the morning and within a few hours the appointments were gone. The visa allows you to enter the country, once you are there, you have to go to another appointment at an SEF office, with more paperwork, to get your residency card. (I will make a post about the SEF appointment soon.) That appointment is set for you and you get the details of it when you get approved for your visa. It’s usually a few months out of when you arrive in Portugal.

D7 visa requirements- 

• Visa application
• You need to prove sufficient income, ideally passive. You need to show a minimum €760/month or about €9000 a year for 1 person or 1.5 times that for a married couple. The more you show, the better your chances are
•  Passport valid for at least 6 months after your visa would expire and a Notarized copy of the main page
• 2 passport sized photos  
• Personal statement about why you want to live in Portugal
• Portuguese bank account with sufficient funds, as mentioned above
• NIF which is a Portuguese tax number
• FBI report in unopened envelope or apostilled if opened and completed within 6 months of application
• Release for a criminal record check
• Travel insurance, must show proof
• Proof of accomodation in Portugal for 1 year minimum
• Travel plan proof- they apparently dont always ask for it and you dont have to buy the flight ticket, just show an itinerary of your intended departure date

You can not apply more than 90 days of your intended arrival date and you must arrive within 90 days of your visa start date. The timing of all of this is very stressful, from when you start getting your requirements together until the day you get your visa in your hand.  After you submit everything then you just wait. We left our passports with them with a prepaid Fed/Ex label but you can also keep them and mail them in when you get notice of your approval. Approval can take anywhere from like 15 days to 6 months. Additionally, there is virtually no way to check status of it, especially if it’s within 60 days of submitting it. This will definitely be a total exercise in patience, and it’s hard!!! We had ours set to mail to family in Florida and expected to leave on our road trip from New Mexico when we got the email that they were approved, but we never got an email. My sister-in-law texted me one morning that our package had arrived at their place, so we were delayed a bit, but oh well, what was another week of waiting.

Once you arrive in Portugal you can have 1 more entry in the 90 days. After the 90 days you can not leave again until you receive your residency card after your SEF appointment. Once you have residency you can travel through the Schengen Area as long as you are in Portugal for the required amount of time for your specific visa. The D7 requires 8 months a year in Portugal. You can also work, go to school, get healthcare (private insurance is still required but you are able to use the public system), and you can apply for Non-Habitual Residency, which is a 10 year tax cap. 

There are other types of visas, as I mentioned above and I know the requirements for those are different. The D8 (digital nomad) visa just became available if you don’t have passive income, but I don’t know what it entails. Visit and bookmark vfsglobal.com. It will have all the information needed to apply as well as this is where you will make the appointment with the proper VFS office. I also highly recommend joining the Americans & Friends PT group on Facebook if you are considering the move. They have current information about everything. The visa process is very stressful and overwhelming so it is so helpful to be able to search for information because there is a lot of people in there going through the same thing.

I know this all seems like a lot and hard to get everything done from the U.S., but there are companies that you can hire to help with certain steps. Some people also hire immigration lawyers, but from what I have heard, it is a waste of money to do so and they aren’t always familiar with current requirements. Most things you can do yourself and the services you will need to pay for will cost far less than a lawyer. We used NIFOnline.com for our NIF. We were able to open a bank account through Millenium Bank. We also hired a realtor, Andre Fernandes, to help us find our apartment.

I hope you find this information helpful if you plan of applying for a visa to move to Portugal. The information can change at any moment though, so always make sure you are checking with the VFS website as to what current requirements are. It is also very important to stay organized with everything. Get a simple file folder, like this, to keep all your paperwork organized. It will save you a ton of stress and the agents at VFS really appreciate it. And remember, the stress will be so worth it!!!!