Is there an official website for Portugal's citizenship test? Not yet

No. As of this article's date — 29 July 2026 — there is no official website for Portugal's citizenship test. Not tnic.pt, not any other address. The reason is straightforward: the test itself does not exist yet. The regulation that will define it has not been published, and until it is, there is no designated body, no registration, no calendar, no syllabus and no questions.

This is worth stating bluntly, because you will read the opposite. What exists today is a requirement written into the statute, and what the law actually fixes about the new citizenship test fits into two subparagraphs. Everything else is undecided. This article covers where official information will appear when it appears, and how to check any claim you come across in about two minutes.

First, which institution would even run this?

English-language forums get this wrong constantly, so it is worth fixing before anything else. Nationality applications in Portugal go through the IRN — the Instituto dos Registos e do Notariado, the registries institute, under the Ministry of Justice. You file at a civil registry office (a conservatória), at a Balcão da Nacionalidade, or through the registry's online platform.

AIMA is a different agency. It handles residence permits and immigration — the thing most foreigners deal with first, and therefore the name most people know. It does not handle citizenship. If a civic test is ever introduced, the announcement will come from the Ministry of Justice side, not from AIMA. Anyone telling you to watch AIMA for test news is pointing you at the wrong building.

So where does official information actually appear?

In Portugal, a rule exists once it is published in the Diário da República, the official gazette. That is not a formality — publication is the moment the text becomes binding. So the list of places worth checking is short:

• diariodarepublica.pt — where the law, decree-law or ministerial order is published. The source, literally.
• justica.gov.pt — the Ministry of Justice portal, which turns rules into instructions.
• irn.justica.gov.pt — the IRN, the body responsible for nationality files.

As of today, we found no page about the civic test on any of the three. The Ministry of Justice page on submitting a nationality application walks through the whole procedure and mentions no examination at all. That is not an oversight — it is the current state of affairs.

Why hasn't the regulation been published?

Because the deadline has not passed. Article 4 of Organic Law 1/2026, headed «Regulamentação», instructs the government to amend the Portuguese Nationality Regulation — the one annexed to Decree-Law 237-A/2006 — «no prazo de 90 dias a contar da publicação da presente lei»: within 90 days of the law's publication.

The law was published in the Diário da República, 1st series, no. 95, on 18 May 2026. Ninety days from that date is 16 August 2026. Do the arithmetic yourself, because it is done wrong in public: counting from the date the President signed the law (3 May) gives 1 August. The provision says publication, not promulgation — a fortnight's difference, and August is the right month.

You can also verify the negative directly. Decree-Law 237-A/2006 still stands, today, in the wording given to it by Decree-Law 26/2022 of 18 March. No 2026 instrument has amended it. Until one does, Article 6(1)(c) is a requirement with no mechanism to satisfy it.

Where does «TNIC» come from?

Not from the law. The name «TNIC», expanded as «Teste Nacional de Integração e Cidadania», appears nowhere in the legislation— not in Organic Law 1/2026 and not in the republished Law 37/81 annexed to it. We checked the full text as published in the Diário da República. We also found no occurrence of it on the Portuguese government, Ministry of Justice or IRN websites.

In fact, the word teste appears exactly once in the entire republished Nationality Law, in Article 6(1)(c):

«c) Comprovarem, através de teste ou de certificado, conhecer suficientemente a língua e a cultura portuguesas, a história e os símbolos nacionais;»

That is: applicants must prove, through a test or a certificate, sufficient knowledge of the Portuguese language and culture, history and national symbols. Point (d) adds fundamental rights and duties and the political organisation of the State; point (e) adds a solemn declaration of adherence to the principles of the democratic rule of law. That is the entirety of what has been legislated.

The acronym appears to have come from outside the state — from private preparation sites that needed a product name before the state had given the exam one. There is nothing wrong with that in itself. It becomes a problem when the acronym is then treated as an official designation and someone writes, of it, that "the official website is tnic.pt". That exact sentence is online today, on a preparation site, and it is false — not because tnic.pt is fraudulent, but because no private site can be the official site of an exam the state has not yet created.

Does that make every preparation site a scam?

No, and the distinction matters more to you than a blanket warning would. Preparation sites — this one included — are private products. That is entirely legitimate, as long as they say so.

The useful question is not "is it official?", since the answer is always no. It is: does the site tell you plainly what is still unknown? Honest study material on Portuguese history, culture, symbols, rights and the organisation of the state has real value right now — the subject matter set by the statute is already known, and time spent on it is not wasted. What is not acceptable is a private question bank presented as "the official questions", or an invented format presented as "the exam format".

We are a private site with no connection to the Portuguese state, and the questions in our free mock testare written by us. They are not official. Nobody's are.

What an official exam looks like in Portugal

There is a working example, which makes a useful yardstick: the PaN, the Portuguese language test for nationality purposes. It is a different thing from the new civic test — a distinction we untangle in CIPLE vs the citizenship test— but it shows what "official" concretely means here:

• A published instrument creating it. For the PaN, a chain of ministerial orders, including Portaria 1262/2009 and Portaria 176/2014.
• A named public body running it. The PaN is administered by IAVE, I. P., the public educational assessment institute. The CIPLE — again, a different exam — is run by CAPLE at the University of Lisbon.
• An institutional domain. PaN registration happens at iave.pt, not at a generic domain bought for the purpose.
• A published fee — €65 for the PaN.

The civic test has none of these four. When it has them, you will know, because they arrive together in one instrument.

How to check any claim in two minutes

This habit protects you more than any list of trustworthy sites, and it applies to what you are reading here too.

1. Ask for the number. A rule always has an instrument number and an article: «Article 6(1)(c)», «Organic Law 1/2026». A claim about the test that cannot point at a number is not yet a rule. It may be a reasonable prediction, but that is a different category.

2. Look the number up in the gazette. Search the instrument on diariodarepublica.pt and read the article. It is quicker than it sounds, and legal text is often clearer than the summaries of it.

3. Check you have the current version. Less obvious, and it catches people out. Organic Law 1/2026 was itself corrected: Declaração de Retificação 17/2026/1 fixed Article 6(11), which had been published reading «pena de prisão igual ou superior a 2 anos» and now reads «pena de prisão efetiva superior a 3 anos». Anyone who copied the text on day one and never went back is quoting a wrong version of the law today.

4. Distrust round numbers with no source."800 official questions", "60% pass mark", "two retakes a year" — none of this is defined. If it were, it would be published, with an instrument number attached.

What changes on the day the regulation lands

On that day, and not before, there will be answers to the questions everyone asks and nobody can currently answer: how many questions, what pass mark, in which language, what it costs, where you book it, how often you can retake it, and which certificates exempt you. An official page on a state domain will most likely appear alongside.

Until then, the honest position is this: the requirement exists and is in the statute; the exam, as an actual sittable thing, does not. The format that remains undefined is precisely what the regulation exists to define.

What to do in the meantime

Don't pay for "official questions". They do not exist. Paying for well-made study material is a defensible choice — as long as you know which of the two you are buying.

Check first whether the test even applies to you. A lot of people are studying who do not need to. Anyone whose application was already pending before 19 May 2026 stays under the old law, and several routes to citizenship never pass through Article 6 at all.

Set a reminder for mid-August. The Article 4 deadline falls on 16 August 2026. Whether the government meets it is a separate question: the provision sets the deadline but attaches no consequence to missing it, so treat the date as a target rather than a guarantee. It is still the point from which it becomes worth checking the gazette again.