Portugal's citizenship test: is there an official site?

Official information about the test will appear in specific places, and this page names them — none of them is tnic.pt. An official website for the test does not exist yet: as of this update — 21 August 2026 — it is not at tnic.pt and not at any other address, and 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.

The government's deadline expired, and nothing came

Until mid-August there was a simple explanation for the silence: the clock was still running. That explanation is gone. 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 — a Sunday, which would carry the expiry to Monday 17 August if you apply the rule that a term ending on a non-working day runs to the next working one. Take whichever reading you prefer: both are behind us.

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 16 August is the right date.

And nothing came. You can verify that negative directly, without trusting us. The consolidated text of Decree-Law 237-A/2006 in the Diário da República records its most recent change as 23 July 2025 — Constitutional Court ruling 522/2025 — and the last amendment to the wording of the Regulation itself is older still, Decree-Law 26/2022 of 18 March. Not one 2026 instrument touches it. Until one does, Article 6(1)(c) is a requirement with no mechanism to satisfy it.

What happens when the government misses the deadline

Nothing, and that is the part worth understanding before you make plans. The provision sets the deadline and attaches no consequence whatsoever to missing it: no penalty, nothing lapses, no fallback rule takes effect in the missing regulation's place, and having missed it once obliges nobody to publish by any particular date now. It was a duty to act addressed to the government, not a trigger.

Three things follow, and waiting fixes none of them:

• The requirement stays in the statute. Sub-paragraph (c) has been in force since 19 May 2026. The regulation being late does not suspend it.
• The test still does not exist. With no regulation there is no body to run it, no syllabus, no registration and no exam date — and nobody can book you one.
• There is no longer a date to watch. There was one, 16 August 2026, and it went by. The government has announced no replacement. Anyone naming a specific month today is guessing.

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 this sub-paragraph (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 test are 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 the naturalisation article at all.

Stop waiting for a date; watch a source instead. The regulation's deadline expired on 16 August 2026 with no regulation and no new date, so "set a reminder for August" has stopped being useful advice. What has not changed is where the news will surface first, ahead of anywhere else: the Diário da República. Checking costs the same two minutes it always did — and it saves you from the next invented date offered by somebody with something to sell.