If you've spent an afternoon staring at an "unable to find the requested action" error on AIMA's renewal portal, you weren't imagining it. The agency itself has now admitted, in the clearest way a public body can, that the system doesn't work properly: it has opened a tender to have it rebuilt from scratch.
What's actually happening
AIMA — the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum — launched a public procurement notice via Diário da República on 26 February 2026, inviting companies to bid for the job of building a new, unified online portal for foreigners in Portugal. The tender was launched on 26 February, and the agency is prepared to pay up to €208,000 for the new system. Bids had to be submitted by 7 March. The contract is valued at €208,000, and once the winning proposal is confirmed, delivery of the portal must occur within a maximum of 12 months.
That's a hard, publicly stated deadline — not a vague promise. If the winning bidder signs sometime in mid-2026, the replacement system is contractually due by roughly mid-2027.
Crucially, AIMA isn't pretending this is a routine upgrade. The agency opened the tender to hire a company to develop a single portal for immigrants, having faced serious problems with its IT systems since it began operating in October 2023 in place of the defunct SEF, with many immigrants complaining that information and documents disappeared along the way. That's about as close as a government agency gets to a public confession that its flagship digital tool is broken.
Why the current portal is so painful
Anyone who has used the Portal das Renovações this year has their own horror story. Comment threads under Portugal News coverage of monthly portal openings read like a support group. One user renewing a permit expiring in January 2026 wrote: "We have residence permits that expire on January 31st and are unable to even register in the AIMA portal... Yet, people with February expiration are getting access to renewal." Another, commenting on the February 2026 relaunch, put it more bluntly: "Well that will be another piece of software that doesn't work then!"
The portal currently works on a rolling, month-by-month basis rather than accepting everyone at once. As of late June 2026, AIMA had opened the Renewals Portal to Residence Permits expiring in September and October 2026, telling holders they must visit portal-renovacoes.aima.gov.pt to renew. That staggered rollout has been the norm since the portal launched, with windows opening for one or two expiry months at a time and expanding gradually — a design choice AIMA says prevents system overload, but one that leaves people with older expired permits waiting months for their turn.
The scale of the underlying backlog explains some of the strain. To try to unblock roughly 900,000 stalled residence permit cases, the Portuguese government created a task force through the Estrutura de Missão in September 2024, which has since largely cleared the more than 400,000 pending requests filed under the now-extinct "manifestação de interesse" mechanism. The renewals system was bolted onto an agency still digging out from that mountain of paperwork — which goes some way to explaining, if not excusing, why the software keeps buckling.
What foreigners should actually do
For now, nothing changes procedurally. The existing Portal das Renovações remains the only route for online renewal, and the new €208,000 system is a future replacement, not an immediate fix. Under the tender's terms, AIMA will use its own funds to pay the contracted company, so there's no suggestion of extra fees being passed on to applicants.
Practical takeaways if your residence permit is coming up for renewal:
- Check your expiry-month window before assuming you're locked out. The portal only opens to specific expiry months at a time; being unable to register often just means your month hasn't been activated yet, not that something is wrong with your file.
- Keep tax and social security status current. AIMA has repeatedly flagged that unregularised fiscal or contribution status is a common cause of renewal delays or rejections.
- Screenshot everything. Given how often users report vanished documents or "not known in the system" errors, keep dated proof of every submission in case you need to dispute a lapse later.
- Use the official contact form, not informal channels, if the portal genuinely won't recognise your details — AIMA's own guidance directs data-correction requests through contactenos.aima.gov.pt.
For a fuller walkthrough of the renewal process and current eligibility windows, see our visas hub.
What to watch next
The real test isn't the tender — it's delivery. AIMA has a well-documented habit of missing its own deadlines; even the current portal was billed as a modernisation and has drawn sustained public criticism since its rollout began. Whether a new €208,000 system, built within a strict 12-month window, actually fixes the "not known in the system" errors and vanishing documents that have defined 2026 for thousands of renewal applicants remains to be seen. GrowIN Portugal will track the tender's award and the new portal's rollout as details emerge — check back on our /news/ page for updates, and seek professional advice on any renewal that stalls past its legal processing window.