June 2024 – Portugal Residency Renewal Process

The SEF profile we created in 2024

Search for “Portugal residency renewal” > Click the Justiça.gov.pt link.

Click “AIMA online service.”

This will redirect you to the SEF website. DO NOT change the language to English. Click the first highlighted “aqui” in blue to register in the SEF Portal (if you don’t already have a login).

Enter your email.

For our kids, we used their individual Gmail accounts so that in the future we don’t have to deal with changing the emails attached to their profiles but you can use a parent’s email. Click OK. On the next screen you enter your resident number (the one consisting of letters and number in the top right corner of your card), date of birth, nationality, create a password, etc.

After you complete the fields and submit you’ll get the following screen asking you to confirm your email.

Go to your email provider. The email looks like this. Click the link to activate your profile.

When you click the link in your email you’ll be taken to the below page indicating you’ve successfully registered. Then you can login to your account – click Login in your window.

Once logged into your SEF account, in your Pedidos section, you will see “Renovação Automática” this is where you can request your renewal.

At the time of creating this post, our expiration date is too far in the future for us to complete the renewal process. When I attempted to renew online I received the below message saying that I couldn’t use the automatic renewal feature.

WHAT NEXT?

Our permits were due to expire at the end of September 2024, so our plan then was to keep checking every week. What happened next: we had in-person appointments in April 2025 and received our renewed cards in October 2025. The November 2025 update has the rest of that story.

PAYMENT

Our friends who have successfully completed the automatic renewal process above say that they receive payment instructions, which cannot be completed until 48 hours after requesting the renewal online.

RECEIVING YOUR CARDS

The friends who have completed the online renewal process, and successfully made their payments 48 hours after submission, have not yet received their cards. Currently, they’ve been waiting one month for their cards.

The extension announced in June 2024

In June 2024, the government extended acceptance of the covered documents until 30 June 2025. That date has passed. At the time, I wasn’t sure what it meant for international travel. We had our first trip back to the US planned for Christmas, and our visa specialist recommended connecting in the US rather than another European country. So we rebooked to connect on the east coast before arriving home in Lisbon. That was our travel decision then, not current entry advice.