Key figures — as of 2026-08-20: Portal das Renovações opened for permits expiring September and October 2026 on 29 June 2026 — apply at portal-renovacoes.aima.gov.pt — as part of a rolling monthly cycle running since July 2025; roughly 370,000 foreign residents were caught in the pre-portal backlog (permits expired February 2020–June 2025); AIMA has tendered a €208,000 contract for a replacement system, due within 12 months.
A new cohort, the same routine
AIMA has opened the Renewals Portal for Residence Permits expiring in September and October 2026, telling holders to visit portal-renovacoes.aima.gov.pt to renew. For anyone whose título de residência falls due in either of those two months, this is the moment to actually submit — not just check eligibility.
The announcement is the latest in a now-familiar monthly drip. AIMA has been saying it intends to bring forward the portal's opening for coming months to reduce delays and give immigrants more predictability, and the agency itself has said it wants to "continue working towards bringing forward the opening of the Portal to the coming months, in order to meet the needs of citizens." The system has been running long enough now to have a track record: it completed a year in operation in July 2026, having launched in July 2025 to let foreigners renew residence permits entirely online and cut in-person delays.
Where the friction actually is
The good-news headline masks a persistent complaint. Coverage of the previous cycle (permits expiring July–August 2026) noted that while AIMA tries to bring the portal's opening forward for citizens' benefit, immigrants continue to complain about IT system failures. That's not new to this round — user complaints filed with Portuguese consumer platforms describe cases such as a renewal delayed more than 60 days with the applicant's portal account deleted, and readers of The Portugal News reporting delays of over three months for some, with people unable to travel because their resident card had expired.
AIMA itself appears to recognise the software is the bottleneck. Reporting from May 2026 confirmed the agency opened a public tender for a company to build a new portal, worth €208,000, with delivery required within a maximum of 12 months once a winning bid is confirmed — an admission, in effect, that the current system needs replacing rather than patching.
Behind the September–October cohort sits a much larger, older backlog. The pre-portal caseload — permits that expired before the online system existed — is still being worked through separately: residence permits whose validity ended between 22 February 2020 and 30 June 2025 are handled by AIMA's Estrutura de Missão under specific legislation, and these cases still face delays and are not managed through the main online portal. At its peak that backlog covered at least 370,000 foreign citizens.
GrowIN's read: the calendar isn't as even as it looks
Here's the detail that gets lost in the headline. The portal opened for the September–October cohort on 29 June 2026 — but that single announcement date doesn't give everyone the same runway. Someone whose permit expires on 1 September has roughly 63 days between the portal opening and their expiry date; someone whose permit expires on 31 October has closer to 124 days. That's a gap of nearly two months of preparation time — document-gathering, NIF/NISS checks, address corrections — hidden inside what looks like one uniform announcement. Under the general rule that renewal requests can be lodged from up to 90 days before the permit's expiry, with the request formally due at least 30 days before that expiry, the earliest expiries in a released window sit right at the edge of comfortable timing, while the later ones have real breathing room.
AIMA's rolling calendar gives some applicants two extra months to prepare and leaves others racing a nine-week clock — purely because of the day their card happens to expire, as GrowIN Portugal Editorial puts it.
What to actually do now
If your permit expires in September or October 2026: register on the portal, correct your address first if it's changed (submitted separately via AIMA's contact form, not the renewal form itself), and upload documents into the correct categories rather than combining them into one PDF — a common source of delays is an outdated address, since both correspondence and the physical card are sent wherever AIMA has on file. Keep every payment receipt and the QR-code confirmation once submitted; it currently serves as your proof of regularity while the physical card is produced. If your permit expired before July 2025, you fall under the separate Estrutura de Missão process, not this portal — check status via AIMA's contact channel rather than repeatedly resubmitting.
The next cycle, covering permits expiring in January 2027, has no confirmed opening date yet. For a fuller walkthrough of the renewal process, eligibility windows and required documents, see our visas hub. Given the volume of complaints still surfacing on this system, anyone with a complicated case — a change of permit category, a prior refusal, or a family reunification component — should budget extra time and consider professional support well before their expiry date arrives.