🇵🇹 Portugal vs 🇬🇧 United Kingdom: Digital Nomad Visa Compared

Portugal offers D8 - Residence Visa for Remote Work. United Kingdom has no visa officially called a "digital nomad visa". 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 United Kingdom's: 24 months versus 6.

🇵🇹 Portugal🇬🇧 United Kingdom

Minimum income

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

TBD

The UK has no digital nomad visa and the Standard Visitor visa has no fixed income figure in the Immigration Rules. Appendix V requires only that applicants show 'sufficient funds to cover all reasonable costs in relation to their visit without working or accessing public funds' (accommodation, subsistence, and the return/onward journey). Informal guidance commonly benchmarks this around GBP 100-150/day after accommodation and travel are paid, but that is not an official figure, so it is left TBD rather than stated as fact - verify current expectations with UKVI before applying.

Visa duration

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

6 months

Standard Visitor visa: up to 6 months per visit, not renewable/extendable in-country for this purpose - you must leave and can reapply for a new visit. Remote work must stay incidental to the visit, not its primary purpose, or the visit itself is out of category.

source · verified 2026-07-16

Tax regime

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

A visit that stays within the Standard Visitor visa's 6-month cap is not automatically outside UK tax residence: the Statutory Residence Test (SRT) can make you UK tax-resident from as few as 46 days a year if you have strong UK ties, or up to 183 days with none. Nomads working remotely from the UK should count SRT days, not just visa validity.

Figure is the Statutory Residence Test's day-count thresholds (46/91/183 depending on UK ties), not a visa rule - the visitor visa itself imposes no tax regime. Foreign income taxed only if UK tax-resident under the SRT; confirm your own tie count before relying on the automatic overseas test.

source · verified 2026-07-16

Family (spouse / children)

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

Spouse + children admitted

Spouse and children can accompany as visitors on their own Standard Visitor visas (or visa-free if from a non-visa-national country); each family member is assessed and, where required, pays separately - there is no family/dependant visa tied to remote work under this route.

source · verified 2026-07-16

Application fees

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

135 GBP

GBP 135 for a 6-month Standard Visitor visa, effective from the 8 April 2026 fee rise (up from GBP 127). Visa-national applicants pay this fee; non-visa-nationals (many nationalities, including most of the EU, US, Canada, Australia) do not need a visa at all for stays up to 6 months, but as of 2026 they do need a separate Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA) before travel - mandatory carrier-level enforcement for all visa-exempt nationalities went live 2026-02-25, and the ETA fee rose from GBP 16 to GBP 20 on 2026-04-08. So a visa-exempt remote worker doesn't pay a visa fee but does now pay GBP 20 for a mandatory pre-travel ETA (2-year multi-entry) - not "nothing" - and the same permitted-activities rules still apply either way.

source · verified 2026-07-17

Health insurance

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

Re-checked 2026-07-17, unchanged.

source · verified 2026-07-17

Not required

source · verified 2026-07-16

Processing time

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

Typically around 3 weeks for standard processing

source · verified 2026-07-16

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