Key figures — as of 2026-09-19: AIMA owes an estimated €88,000 to lawyers and solicitors contracted to clear its residency backlog — this while the agency collected €101 million in related revenue between September 2024 and December 2025 — fee per case: €7.50 — earlier in April 2026 the Bar Association had put the unpaid total as high as €244,000.
A tiny debt against a very large number
AIMA has collected around 101 million euros in revenues associated with the activity developed under the Mission Structure for backlog recovery between September 2024 and December 2025, according to a parliamentary question filed by the Livre party. Set against that sum, the Bar Association's estimate that AIMA owes around 88,000 euros to the lawyers and solicitors who worked those cases looks almost trivial in scale — and that's precisely the point critics are making.
The two figures come from the same source: a written question Livre put to the Government on Wednesday about reported delays in payments to lawyers and solicitors contracted by AIMA to help process residence-authorisation cases. The party wants the Government to explain why an agency handling tens of millions in fee revenue can't settle a debt worth a fraction of a percent of that income.
Where the debt comes from
The unpaid fees trace back to a 2024 protocol between AIMA, the Portuguese Bar Association (Ordem dos Advogados) and the Order of Solicitors, under which external lawyers were paid €7.50 per case to help clear the roughly 400,000 pending residency files inherited from the defunct SEF. It wasn't the first time the arrangement produced complaints. In July 2025, Público reported that AIMA had not paid, since May, the nearly 300 lawyers contracted to analyse immigrant regularisation cases.
The problem resurfaced in April 2026. Bar president João Massano said the last information he had was that AIMA owed 244,000 euros. AIMA's president, Pedro Portugal Gaspar, gave a lower figure to TVI, saying it was around 200,000 euros, and attributed roughly half of that to service providers themselves failing to submit required documents — such as certificates showing no debt to Social Security and the Tax Authority — or providing incorrect email addresses that caused payments to bounce back. By July, the Bar's own estimate had fallen to €88,000, suggesting some of the backlog was cleared — but not all of it, and not fast.
Massano has also been blunt about the fee itself. He called the 7.5 euros paid per case not dignified, describing it as a devaluation of the work, adding that he'd go so far as to call it almost insulting, even while acknowledging it was what the previous Bar leadership had agreed to.
GrowIN's read on the numbers
Run the maths and the dispute looks smaller in euros but larger in principle. €88,000 owed against €101 million collected works out to roughly 0.09% of the revenue AIMA booked from the same backlog-clearing operation — less than one-tenth of one percent. Framed the other way, at €7.50 a case, that outstanding balance represents close to 11,700 individual case reviews lawyers and solicitors have effectively done for free, pending payment. For an agency simultaneously publicising a 60%+ jump in service-counter attendances and a 35.8% drop in complaints in the first half of 2026, a debt this small — and this persistent — is an odd hill to leave unresolved.
"An agency that can collect €101 million from a backlog scheme should be able to explain, line by line, why €88,000 of it hasn't reached the lawyers who did the work," says GrowIN Portugal Editorial.
Why this matters if you're waiting on AIMA
None of this changes the practical reality for foreigners with a pending residency case: the external lawyers and solicitors handling document checks are, by AIMA's own admission, still working through payment friction on their end. That's unlikely to directly slow individual case outcomes, but it does undercut the narrative of a fully modernised, transparent agency that AIMA has been pushing hard this year. Anyone tracking a renewal or first permit should keep using AIMA's official channels — including the Portal das Renovações — rather than relying on informal fixers near service centres, a practice both the Bar Association and immigrant-support groups have separately flagged as a source of exploitation.
What to watch next
Livre's question is now with the Government, and a formal response — plus any updated figure from AIMA or the Bar Association — is the next milestone. Whether the debt gets fully cleared, and whether AIMA publishes a breakdown of the €101 million rather than just the headline figure, will say a lot about how seriously the agency takes the transparency it claims to be building. For background on how AIMA's residency process works day to day, see our visas hub; readers dealing with a stalled case can also find support through GrowIN's services team.
Foreigners navigating AIMA in 2026 are, in effect, watching two versions of the same agency argue with each other in public — one citing record numbers, the other still waiting to be paid.