By “those people who fulfill 5 year via expression of interest (EOI)” I assume you mean the ones who have not followed that up by filing a PT Nationality application?
If they’ve already filed under the current 5-year rules, they should be grandfathered. There can’t be many left who haven’t been spooked into filing by the upcoming changes (although I know we’re talking about ~400k MIs here).
I concluded my investment in December 2024, and I got a biometric appointment date for March 2026, a wait of 15 Months. I was mentally prelared for 18 months at the earliest. One of my friends applied in August 2025, and got a date in April 2026, a wait of 8 months. We are using the same legal firm and the same investment company, so it appears that AIMA are cleaning up their act.
Enjoy the moment. We already know AIMA is currently prioritizing GV applications to balance their budget (it was in the budget speech). That means they’ve deprioritized some other suckers (as they explicitly did with the GV over the past 3 years), not that they’ve cleaned up their act.
Once you’ve been messed around by AIMA for 10 years, your citizenship application has been sitting in a black hole for 3, your kids have aged out, and your lawyers have gone AWOL, we can talk again.
We start to see few September approvals landing in, let’s see if finally things are moving again or these are just few outlier cases… We should be able to find out soon, but in short what this shows is there can be unexpected delays at any point in this long journey - even in the last few meters of the marathon, someone can add an additional kilometer to the race.
Where can we see this?
The progress at the various IRNs? I haven’t seen the reports from the IRNs collected together anywhere. Every so often the schedules come in email autoreplies. There are also a number of Facebook groups where IRN responses and timelines are posted, as well as WhatsApp groups. It is the way to madness to be honest.
Hi there are several dedicated facebook pages and also few whatsapp groups.. Below is a whatsapp-group link for one of the nationality application groups that is for Porto.. Usually if you are one of them it is sufficient, people who are on multiple groups share the updates from other groups.
I just saw on a WhatsApp group some people posting approvals for citizenship applications submitted in Porto in July last year, so 16 months. That seems faster most of the recent reports I’ve seen.
Those are usually for articles of minors - but at least we now see a modest wave of Sep 2023 applicants getting approved. If the process is not paused we should be seeing October approvals pretty soon - as the Sep approvals are from the end of Sep.
I’ve not seen any 2024 6.1 applications on any group and the registrars are adamant about not jumping the queue. I have seen them from Braga, Guimarães and Santarém (for now). But things do change (not often for the better - but then if you’re a recent GV applicant you might actually think the system works!). What is definitely coming through fast and furious after very lengthy delays is registration of Portuguese kids born overseas. That was a hot issue in the papers and parliament and they’ve obviously pushed resources into it.
Please just note that it is a WhatsApp group SPECIFICALLY FOR 2023
APPLICANTS to compare notes.
I dip into far more AIMA/IRN-related FB and WhatsApp groups than is good for me (although the upside is that I had a front row view of the extraordinary tech immigrants working out what was wrong with the AIMA system and how to fix it 
). The one I’ve found most useful, well moderated, not obviously a grift, and generally ahead of the information cycle is https://www.facebook.com/groups/3077493862367368/
Only thing is that it is in Portuguese but easy enough to translate.
During past two weeks there has been some momentum, we have seen some September applications getting approved and even some Oct 3rd applications - though 3rd of Oct approval’s application number starts with 9xxx not 10xx, meaning that they are most likely processing applications starting with 9xx. I expect to see applications numbered as 10xx to get approved this week - this will actually indicate a real progress.