Key figures — as of 2026-09-22: AIMA's workforce has grown from 742 to 867 employees since January 2026 — a 17% rise — with 48 more hires expected by year end, taking the total to 915; an independent estimate puts the residual active backlog at 40,000–60,000 cases in early 2026; AIMA issued 386,000 residence permits in 2025, a 60% jump on 2024.
The headline number
AIMA's president, Pedro Portugal Gaspar, told PÚBLICO Brasil that the agency has added 125 employees since January, taking its workforce from 742 to 867. A further 48 people are expected to join by the end of the year, bringing the total to 915. For anyone who has spent the last two years refreshing the AIMA appointments page at 3am hoping for a slot, that's the number that matters: more caseworkers, in theory, means more appointments processed per week.
The agency frames the hiring push as a turning point. AIMA says it is entering a different phase, with more staff and a growing number of services moving online. Gaspar said the agency was now in a position to focus more heavily on the quality of its service after a period dominated by clearing outstanding cases.
Why the backlog still bites
Context matters here, and the context is brutal. The Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum has been under intense pressure since it replaced SEF in October 2023, inheriting a huge backlog of immigration cases alongside responsibility for new applications. Various estimates over the past two years have put that inherited pile at over 400,000 files, most of them handed down from a system that was already collapsing under its own weight.
The agency's own headline stats look strong: it processed record volumes in 2025 and claims a very high clearance rate on pending files. But GrowIN Portugal's own reporting on the backlog earlier this year flagged that this figure blends approvals with archived and rejected cases, and one legal estimate put the genuinely active, unresolved caseload at 40,000 to 60,000 files as of early 2026 — a very different picture from "problem solved." Anyone whose residence card expired in the last eighteen months has likely lived that gap between the statistic and the lived experience.
There's a separate, parallel backlog too: AIMA-related lawsuits. A task force of judges set up to work through court cases against the agency has been chipping away since April, but tens of thousands of cases remained in the queue as of mid-2026 — a reminder that hiring more caseworkers at AIMA doesn't automatically clear the court dockets that many frustrated applicants had to open just to get a response.
GrowIN's read on the numbers
Here's the calculation worth sitting with. AIMA issued 386,000 permits in 2025 with an average workforce well below its current 867. If AIMA processes a similar volume in 2026, spreading that load across 915 staff by December rather than the 742 it had in January works out to roughly 422 permits per employee for the year, against an implied load of around 520 per employee at the January staffing level — a drop of close to 19% in per-worker caseload, even though headcount only grew 23% over the same period. That's a meaningful efficiency gain on paper. It doesn't, on its own, guarantee a shorter wait for any individual applicant, because so much depends on which desk their specific case lands on and how complex it is.
"A 17% bigger AIMA is good news on paper, but the people still waiting on a card that expired eighteen months ago will judge this hire by their next appointment slot, not by a staffing chart," says GrowIN Portugal Editorial.
What foreigners should actually watch
There is a genuine data point worth tracking separately: complaints against AIMA have reportedly halved compared with 2024, according to the agency's own president, though the technicians' union has publicly questioned whether that figure tells the full story. If you're mid-renewal right now, the practical advice hasn't changed: check the Portal das Renovações regularly, keep your proof-of-status documents printed, and don't assume a staffing increase in Lisbon means your specific regional office has more capacity this month. For a fuller walkthrough of how the renewal windows and permit extensions currently work, see our guide in the visas section.
What's next
Watch for AIMA's next quarterly update, expected to show whether the 915-strong workforce target was hit and whether appointment wait times in high-demand districts like Lisbon and Porto actually move. The EU's 90-day decision deadline for non-EU permit applications, now in force, gives the agency a hard external benchmark it hasn't always met — and that's arguably a better test of this hiring wave than any internal headcount figure.