AIMA delay: what a court can actually order

Yes, a court can act on this — and since October 2025 the immigration statute says so in as many words. If you filed for a residence permit and months have passed with no answer, you can ask an administrative court to order AIMA to decide, with a deadline set in the judgment and a daily fine attached if it misses that deadline. What the court will not normally do is decide the application itself; there is one exception, and it is below. If you are still untangling who handles what, start with what runs at AIMA and what runs at the IRN, and if you are already looking past the permit, the nationality file begins with which of the two language proofs your route requires.

Three numbers carry the whole thing. The law gives AIMA 90 days to decide a first permit and 60 days to decide a renewal, and your right to sue over inaction expires one year after that legal deadline runs out. The last one is what catches people: waiting patiently for two years costs you the simplest route.

How long does AIMA actually have?

This is not left to the agency's discretion. An application for a residence permit “must be decided within 90 days”; a renewal “within 60 days”. These are statutory deadlines, and everything else is counted from the end of them — including the window you have to react.

Write down two dates and keep them: the day you filed, and the day you supplied the last document AIMA asked you for. A file stalled because something of yours is missing is not administrative inaction — it is a file waiting on you, and that distinction decides the case.

Silence on a renewal is a yes. Silence on a first permit is not

Here is the distinction almost everyone gets wrong, and it lives in how the provision is drafted. Right after setting the 60-day renewal deadline, the law adds that where there is no decision “within the deadline provided in the preceding paragraph”, for reasons not attributable to the applicant, the application is taken as granted and the permit is to be issued immediately.

“The preceding paragraph” is the renewal one, not the 90-day one. On the face of the text, tacit approval is written for renewals. Someone waiting on a first permit past 90 days does not end up holding an automatic permit — they end up holding a right to demand a decision. That is a difference in kind, and it is why the two situations are handled differently from here on.

The ordinary route: asking a court to order the decision

Portuguese administrative law calls it condemnation to perform the due act, and it is an ordinary administrative action. Its stated purpose is to obtain an order that the competent authority perform, within a set deadline, an administrative act unlawfully omitted or refused — and the code is explicit that the subject of the case is your claim, not the missing paperwork.

The requirements are modest. You filed something that put the authority under a duty to decide, and no decision came within the legal deadline. That is the whole trigger. You do not need a refusal first, and you do not need to provoke one.

The deadline is the trap. Where the administration has simply not acted, the right of action lapses one year after the statutory decision deadline expires. For a first permit that means: 90 days of statutory deadline, then twelve months in which to act. People who reason the other way round — “I have waited three years, so I must have plenty of grounds” — find that they waited too long.

The urgent route, and the two locks on it

This was the October 2025 change: the immigration statute now has its own provision on judicial protection covering AIMA's decisions and its failures to act, and it opens the door to the urgent injunction for the protection of rights, freedoms and guarantees. Urgent is a legal category here, not a mood: these cases run during court vacations, registry acts are done the same day, and they are tried ahead of everything else.

The door has two locks, and it is only fair to say so before anyone pays for a petition. The first is the general rule: the injunction is available where a swift ruling is indispensable to secure the exercise, in useful time, of a right, freedom or guarantee, and where an interim measure would not do. The second is specific to AIMA: the delay must compromise that exercise in a “demonstrably serious and direct” way. That adverb is not decoration — the burden is on the person asking.

In practice this separates two people who have waited exactly as long. One is inconvenienced; the other has a child out of school, a job offer expiring, or treatment booked. The statute put the difference in writing.

What the judge orders, and what ignoring it costs

Once the case is allocated, it goes to the judge with the greatest urgency for an initial order, to be issued within a maximum of 48 hours; if the petition is admitted, the other side is summoned to respond within seven days. Where the petition shows imminent and irreversible harm, the judge may shorten that response time, hear AIMA by any suitable means of communication, or hold an oral hearing within 48 hours and rule at the end of it.

The ruling itself must come within the time needed to preserve its useful effect, and never more than five days after whatever steps were necessary. This is where the judgment stops being a declaration and becomes an instruction: the judge sets out the concrete conduct to be adopted and, where applicable, the deadline for it and who is responsible for it.

Non-compliance exposes the responsible office-holder to a compulsory pecuniary penalty set by the judge, whose daily amount may range between 5 % and 10 % of the highest national minimum wage in force — for each day of delay, and without prejudice to any civil, disciplinary or criminal liability. The penalty falls on the office-holder, individually identified, not on an acronym.

The defence the legislature wrote next to the remedy

This is the half that law-firm advertising tends to leave out, and it is the half that sets expectations. In the same provision that opened the injunction, the law tells the judge what to weigh before ordering anything:

Read “if so requested” carefully: this weighing is not automatic, it enters the case if AIMA raises it. Both halves are true at once — the remedy genuinely exists, and the queue argument is also in the statute. Anyone promising you a guaranteed outcome is selling you half of the provision.

The one case where the court decides instead of AIMA

As a rule, the court orders a decision; it does not make one. There is one exception written into the code: where what is sought is a strictly bound act — notably the execution of an administrative act already taken — the court issues a judgment that produces the effects of the act that was due.

In plain terms: if the administration has no discretion left and only the act itself is missing, the judgment can supply it. If there is still an assessment to be made, it cannot. Which of the two your file is in is the first question to put to a lawyer — and if cost is the obstacle, read first about how Portuguese legal aid works.

Does any of this speed up citizenship?

Not directly, and the two clocks should not be mixed up. Everything above is immigration law and runs against AIMA, about your residence permit. A nationality application runs somewhere else entirely, at the IRN, under its own rules — and a refusal there has its own path, set out in the guide on appealing a nationality refusal from abroad.

What does change, and changes a lot, is the starting line: legal residence is what makes the naturalisation clock run at all. A permit that takes two years to issue is two years that do not count. For many people, unblocking AIMA is therefore the first step of the citizenship process rather than a separate matter — the sequence is laid out in the full timeline from arrival to registration.

Where to start this week

Three things, in order. Write down the date you filed and the date AIMA last asked you for anything — that pair decides whether the one-year window still runs in your favour. Keep evidence of what the wait is actually costing you, because the urgent route lives on that evidence. And if citizenship is the destination, use the wait: the time until the permit lands is exactly the time in which the test is prepared.

If you want to start now, our free practice test shows you in ten minutes where you stand and what is left to study.