🇯🇵 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.
- Minimum income
- 10,000,000 JPY / year
- 3,680 EUR / month
- Visa duration
- 6 months
- 24 months, renewable
- 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.
- 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.
- Family (spouse / children)
- Spouse + children admitted
- Spouse + children admitted (+50% income for a spouse, +30% per dependent child)
- Application fees
- 15,000 JPY
- 110 EUR
- Health insurance
- Processing time
- Reported ~5 business days when applying with a Certificate of Eligibility (COE); 2 weeks to 1 month without one
- Reported 6-9 months due to AIMA backlog (as of mid-2026)
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
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
6 months, NON-renewable. A stay under 6 months generally keeps you a non-tax-resident of Japan.
source · verified 2026-07-05
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.
source · verified 2026-07-17
General rule tied to the 6-month cap; confirm your own residency position.
source · verified 2026-07-05
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
Spouse or child of a digital nomad may accompany under the same Designated Activities category.
source · verified 2026-07-05
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 is reported to run to roughly 2026-10-19 for those already resident, per legal-advisory sources - not independently confirmed on an official text, and a 2026-07-25 re-check found only a 180-day transitional window described elsewhere, which would close around April 2026 rather than October; treat the Oct-19 date as unresolved pending reconciliation). Re-checked 2026-07-17, exemptions corroborated: 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 2026-07-17
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
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.
source · verified 2026-07-25
No single canonical MOFA-stated figure found; based on convergent consulate guidance (Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles). Confirm with your consulate.
source · verified 2026-07-12
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.
source · verified 2026-07-17
Figures marked TBD are not yet verified and are never shown as facts. Last full review: Japan 2026-07-12, Portugal 2026-07-25.