🇯🇵 Japan vs 🇵🇹 Portugal: Digital Nomad Visa Compared

Japan offers Designated Activities (Digital Nomad) - Notice No. 53. Portugal offers D8 - Residence Visa for Remote Work. Every figure below comes from each country's own sourced, dated fiche - compare income, duration, tax, family rules, fees and processing time before you decide. Portugal's initial visa period runs longer than Japan's: 24 months versus 6.

🇯🇵 Japan🇵🇹 Portugal

Minimum income

10,000,000 JPY / year

Attributed to MFA/ISA (pages not fetched directly). Income must be from outside Japan; work for Japan-based entities is not allowed.

source · verified 2026-07-05

3,680 EUR / month

EUR 3,680/mo = 4x the 2026 minimum wage; well corroborated but not read on an official page. A separate ~EUR 3,480 figure circulates as a lower threshold - confirm with AIMA. Also expected: 12x min wage in savings (~EUR 11,040). Family uplift: +50% for a spouse, +30% per dependent child. Re-checked 2026-07-17, unchanged.

source · verified 2026-07-17

Visa duration

6 months

6 months, NON-renewable. A stay under 6 months generally keeps you a non-tax-resident of Japan.

source · verified 2026-07-05

24 months, renewable

D8 leads to a renewable residence permit; permanent residence remains a 5-year milestone. Citizenship is different: Portugal's Nationality Law reform (in force since 2026-05-19) raised the residency requirement for citizenship from 5 to 10 years (7 years for EU/CPLP nationals), with the clock now starting from residence-card issuance rather than application date. Re-checked 2026-07-17: the reform survived Constitutional Court preventive review (Acordao 1133/2025) with this timeline intact - the Court struck down four unrelated provisions (criminal-conviction bar, vague fraud clause, loss-of-nationality-as-penalty), not the residency clock. RE-CHECKED 2026-07-30: a citizen petition asking Parliament for transitional protections for people already mid-process under the old 5-year rule was discussed by a parliamentary committee on 2026-06-06 - no legislative change has resulted, still just a discussed petition, not actionable yet; the 10-year (7-year EU/CPLP) timeline stands unchanged.

source · verified 2026-07-17

Tax regime

A stay of 6 months (under 183 days) generally does not make you a Japanese tax resident, so foreign income is not taxed by Japan under the visa.

General rule tied to the 6-month cap; confirm your own residency position.

source · verified 2026-07-05

The old NHR regime closed to new entrants; the successor incentive is IFICI ("NHR 2.0", 2024), which is narrower and role-restricted. Do not assume a blanket tax break.

NHR replaced by IFICI in 2024; eligibility is restricted (generic remote workers/EOR setups typically do NOT qualify - IFICI targets certified startups, exporters >50% turnover, and R&D centres). Verify with the Portuguese tax authority (AT) before relying on any exemption. Re-checked 2026-07-17, unchanged.

source · verified 2026-07-17

Family (spouse / children)

Spouse + children admitted

Spouse or child of a digital nomad may accompany under the same Designated Activities category.

source · verified 2026-07-05

Spouse + children admitted (+50% income for a spouse, +30% per dependent child)

Family can be included in the initial consulate application alongside the main applicant with no waiting period. Filing for family reunification SEPARATELY, after the sponsor already holds their D8 permit, now requires the sponsor to hold 2 years of legal residence first (Lei 61/2025, in force since 2026-04-22). A transitional grandfather period let already-resident sponsors skip that wait, but RE-VERIFIED 2026-07-27: it ran 180 days from the law's 2025-10-23 entry into force (Article 6), closing around 2026-04-22 - not 2026-10-19 as earlier reported and previously left unresolved here. That window is now CLOSED. Exemptions remain in force: minor children (and dependent adult children still in education) are exempt from the 2-year wait; a spouse/partner with 18 months of documented prior cohabitation gets a reduced 15-month wait instead. Confirm current status with AIMA.

source · verified 2026-07-27

Application fees

15,000 JPY

Japan's general visa issuance fee rose from JPY 3,000 to JPY 15,000 (single-entry) effective 2026-07-01 - the first revision since 1978. A consulate Digital Nomad checklist states the visa follows the general single-entry fee schedule. RE-CHECKED 2026-07-15: a search-indexed snippet of this exact MOFA fee page now corroborates "approximately 15,000 yen for a single-entry visa," but the live page still could not be fetched directly this pass either, so confidence stays "reported" pending an on-page read.

source · verified 2026-07-15

110 EUR

EUR 110 is the National Visa (Visto Nacional) administrative processing fee charged by the consulate for the D8 application - non-refundable if refused, and this is the figure well and consistently corroborated (incl. a search-engine snippet of the official vistos.mne.gov.pt/emolumentos page, which itself still 403s on direct fetch). It is NOT the total cost: after arrival, AIMA charges a separate residence-card (Titulo de Residencia) issuance fee, reported at roughly EUR 170 following a March-2026 fee-table revision, making total government fees commonly cited around EUR 320-400 - that AIMA figure is only attested by secondary sources, so it is deliberately left out of this single Money value rather than guessed. RE-CHECKED 2026-07-25: Portuguese press (Publico/SAPO, not independently fetchable) reports AIMA's March-2026 fee-table update may have raised the relevant residence-permit lines to roughly EUR 133 + EUR 307.20 (~EUR 440 total) for the general temporary-residence category, well above the EUR 170 figure tracked here - but several D8-specific guides published after March 2026 still cite ~EUR 155-180, so it is unresolved whether the March increase applies to the D8 line item specifically. The EUR 170 estimate stays as the best-attested D8-specific figure pending confirmation; do not treat EUR 440 as sourced for this visa yet. A reduced EUR 45 fee applies to children aged 6-12 and to nationals of a short list of EU-facilitation-agreement countries. RE-CHECKED 2026-07-30: found the first D8-specific guide published clearly after the March-2026 revision to state a concrete residence-card figure - idealista.pt/en (2026-03-31) cites a EUR 185.60 D8 residence-permit fee (plus a EUR 109.40 application fee), close to the pre-revision EUR 170 estimate and well below the EUR 440 general-category figure. Still secondary-sourced (no AIMA official page fetchable), but this is the strongest D8-specific evidence yet that the March revision's higher line items apply to other residence categories, not the D8 - EUR 170 stays the tracked estimate, now with added corroboration.

source · verified 2026-07-25

Health insurance

Required - Private health insurance covering the full 6-month stay with medical coverage of JPY 10 million or more.

source · verified 2026-07-05

Required - Health insurance valid in Portugal required for the application.

Re-checked 2026-07-17, unchanged.

source · verified 2026-07-17

Processing time

Reported ~5 business days when applying with a Certificate of Eligibility (COE); 2 weeks to 1 month without one

No single canonical MOFA-stated figure found; based on convergent consulate guidance (Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles). Confirm with your consulate. RE-CHECKED 2026-08-04: mofa.go.jp and moj.go.jp/isa still 403 on direct fetch. No source dated after the prior pass changes income, duration, tax, fees or processing time - all reconfirmed by convergent 2026 guides. No material change. RE-CHECKED 2026-08-11: the JPY 3,000-to-15,000 fee rise (2026-07-01) is now strongly corroborated by mainstream press (Japan Times, CNBC, Nippon.com, Euronews, all dated mid-to-late June 2026) rather than only consulate-checklist sourcing - confidence strengthened, figure unchanged. Income, duration and processing time all reconfirmed. No material change.

source · verified 2026-07-12

Reported 6-9 months due to AIMA backlog (as of mid-2026)

Re-checked 2026-07-17, unchanged; some sources report newer applications (2025 onward) getting AIMA appointments in roughly 3-6 months, but 6-9 months remains the more commonly cited range for the D8 track specifically. RE-CHECKED 2026-08-05: a public-sector union called for an overtime boycott over AIMA understaffing in early August 2026, with the government reportedly proposing ~300 new hires - a fresh signal consistent with the backlog risk already reflected in this estimate, not a change to the range itself. AIMA also opened online renewal for permits expiring Sept/Oct 2026 (and, per a 2026-08-03 update, Nov/Dec 2026) - an operational improvement worth watching, not yet reflected in a shorter published range. RE-CHECKED 2026-08-14: the 2026-08-04 report of AIMA's backlog dropping to ~30,000 is now confirmed real (Publico, 2026-08-02, corroborating a parliamentary statement) but confirmed NOT applicable to this estimate - it describes the closed Estrutura de Missao legacy unit, not the ongoing D8/general AIMA queue, which current sources still describe as running months-long. Estimate stays unchanged at 6-9 months; this question is now closed rather than open.

source · verified 2026-08-14

Figures marked TBD are not yet verified and are never shown as facts. Last full review: Japan 2026-09-05, Portugal 2026-09-05.