# Portuguese Citizenship Grants Fell 45% in 2025, INE Data Shows

> INE data show naturalisations dropped to 25,829 in 2025 — before 2026's tougher residency and language rules even applied.

- Source: https://www.growinportugal.com/news/portuguese-citizenship-grants-plunged-45-in-2025-before-the-2026-10-15
- Publisher: GrowIN Portugal (https://www.growinportugal.com)
- Published: 2026-10-15
- Last reviewed: 2026-10-15
- Language: en

> **Key figures — as of 2026-10-15:** Portuguese citizenship grants fell **45%** in 2025 to **25,829**, down from roughly 47,000 the year before — a drop of about **21,000 people** in a single year — with Israeli naturalisations falling **65%** (17,647 → 6,155) and Brazilian naturalisations falling **30.5%** (11,133 → 7,740); applications filed from abroad halved, from 26,216 to around 13,000; the IRN still held **515,334** pending cases as of June 2025; the new Nationality Law (Lei Orgânica n.º 1/2026) took effect **19 May 2026**, raising naturalisation residency to **7 or 10 years** and ending the Sephardic route entirely.

## The number that should worry anyone counting on a fast passport

Portugal's statistics institute, INE, confirmed what immigration lawyers had been warning about for months: in just one year, the number of foreigners who obtained Portuguese citizenship fell 45%, to 25,829 people — 21,000 fewer acquisitions than in 2024, a drop hitting Israelis and Brazilians hardest. The figures, reported by Jornal de Notícias and drawn from INE data, cover 2025 — a year that ended seven months *before* the tougher 2026 nationality law came into force. That timing matters. It means the bottleneck foreigners are now describing isn't a future risk. It already happened, and the rules got stricter after the fact.

## Where the collapse actually came from

The steepest fall came among Israelis: 17,647 obtained Portuguese nationality in 2024, mostly Sephardic descendants, but a year later only 6,155 did — 11,492 fewer people, a 65% drop. The cause is traceable to a specific rule change rather than a general slowdown: the tightening mainly reflects stricter rules for Sephardic Jewish descendants that took effect in January 2025, requiring three years of residence in Portugal and proof of ancestry before an evaluation commission. That 2025 tightening was itself a precursor to the law that followed in May 2026, which abolished the Sephardic route altogether — a point our editorial standard flags as a hard stop, not a slowdown.

Brazilians, Portugal's largest foreign community, weren't spared either. Among Brazilians the drop was also significant: acquisitions went from 11,133 to 7,740, a fall of 3,393 people and a 30.5% reduction in a single year. And it wasn't only people already living in Portugal filing fewer applications — the international pipeline thinned out too: applications originating from outside Portugal were cut roughly in half, from 26,216 in 2024 to around 13,000 in 2025, a 50% fall.

## What this means if you're mid-process or planning to apply

The backlog is the part nobody talks about enough. As of 30 June 2025, a total of 515,334 cases were under analysis, including attribution and naturalisation acquisition processes, reflecting the accumulated volume of recent years. Run that against the 2025 approval rate and the implied queue is stark: at roughly 25,829 grants per year, clearing 515,000-plus pending files — even with zero new applications — would take close to two decades. That back-of-envelope arithmetic, derived from INE and IRN's own published figures, is GrowIN's own calculation, not an official projection, but it illustrates why patience has quietly become the main eligibility requirement.

"A 45% drop in approvals before the stricter 2026 rules even applied is the clearest signal yet that Portuguese citizenship is becoming slower and harder to secure, not easier," says GrowIN Portugal Editorial.

The structural problem compounding the slowdown is staffing, not just policy. The IRN has been adding registrars after years without new hires, but turnaround times remain long for most categories. None of this means approval is impossible — it means budgeting years, not months, and treating the **A2 Portuguese** requirement and the **7- or 10-year residency clock** (running from the date your residence permit is issued, per our [visas](/visas/) guide) as the baseline, not a worst case. Anyone who filed *before* 19 May 2026 is still assessed under the old five-year rule, so existing pending applications aren't automatically swept into the tougher regime — but new applicants are.

## What to watch next

Keep an eye on IRN's published statistics for the second half of 2026 to see whether the backlog starts shrinking now that fewer new Sephardic-route applications are entering the system, or whether the extended 7/10-year residency requirement simply shifts the bottleneck further down the pipeline. For the grandparent-descent (Article 6) route, which the 2026 law left untouched, demand may now rise as the Sephardic alternative closes — worth monitoring for anyone with Portuguese ancestry weighing their options via our [visas](/visas/) hub.

Citizenship via naturalisation in Portugal was already a multi-year process before this. The 2025 numbers confirm it's getting longer, not shorter, and the rules that just landed in 2026 only add distance to the finish line.

## Sources

- [Jornal de Notícias (INE data)](https://www.jn.pt/nacional/artigo/atribuicao-de-nacionalidade-portuguesa-sofre-tombo-de-45/18131432)
- [IRN — Institute of Registries and Notary](https://irn.justica.gov.pt/Noticias-do-IRN/Nacionalidade-IRN-recebeu-mais-de-1-5-milhoes-de-pedidos-em-5-anos)
- [Público](https://www.publico.pt/2025/07/09/sociedade/noticia/pedidos-nacionalidade-so-20-meio-milhao-processos-pendentes-sao-imigrantes-2139584)

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© GrowIN Portugal. Cite as: GrowIN Portugal, "Portuguese Citizenship Grants Fell 45% in 2025, INE Data Shows", https://www.growinportugal.com/news/portuguese-citizenship-grants-plunged-45-in-2025-before-the-2026-10-15