Curious to know what the ‘falta’ may have been at this late stage, if you know yourself?
My opinion is opposite. I think it is normal and it has been always normal that IRNs approved cases of March/April 2025 and at the same time many cases submitted from March April 2023 were not concluded. This happens all the time across all IRNs.
In addition to that, it is understandable that an application submitted earlier have longer time to be concluded. It is just impossible that all applications have to wait for the conclusion of just one application before it. Let’s assume that IRN has one application submitted in March 2023 and applicant comes from Ethiopia. Until now it has been 3.5 years and still not concluded due to external entities. Shall everybody behind have to wait? or just leave this particular application to the separate box and move on with the ones which already have all responses from external entities? The most sensible solution, in my opinion, is just put it in a different box and move on with other applications.
Hey hey, what you have written is right and of course you can’t wait the odd case from month X to be completed to start processing month Y.. That might take ages… In this case, it seems as if they literally skipped December… and moreover don’t forget that for some reason unlike what’s happening right now, November cases were put on hold for 7-8 months.. While October cases were getting approved since last Dec, no single Nov case was approved till mid-late August.. I think Nov and Dec 2023 cases suffered the most delays overall.
That’s what I’m pointing out..
It does not matter from which month the applion is. As long as there is not enough responses from external entities, the application is put into a different box.
There is no reason for IRN to skip applications of a whole month of December. You have not seen it because many people got approved and did not share it publicly. Data from this group and all FB’s groups does not reflect the true accuracy.
Here is one approval of December to show that the whole month is not being neglected:
My main data source is the citizcheck, and the whatsapp +fb groups I’m in. Yes there might have been some odd December cases that are approved, yet they are far less numerous, whereas we see numerous Nov and many Jan cases getting approved. It seems as if one team is tackling cases from 2022-2023 and the other is 2024, as 2nd half of Nov and Dec are far from completed while we see numerous Jan cases.
For your info we were able to confirm twice that my file was completed and there was no pending action other than the final approval. My submission is early Nov here. Still I’ve not received the final approval (nor there is any falta) , I’m not the only one in this situation.
When you connect the dots
- there are ready to be approved files waiting from November
- and there is very little Dec approvals while suddenly there is a stream of Jan approvals
some of us anticipated that there is a group is working on 2022-23 cases and the other started to approve 24 cases have emerged.
Live2learn I might be wrong, and I’m not here to say you are right or wrong, but I’m here to share my observations.
Cheers
Honestly I would not connect dots because we do not have enough data to construct a concrete pattern.
It’s always good to have some dots but only IRNs have the complete and full information to give out a true accuracy.
Therefore, I only comment on a single case and avoid to speculate or draw out any pattern.
What docs have to be updated? Are they requiring fresh birth certificates / police checks all over again years after submitting?
Hi all, so with regards to questions around missing documents, one was about providing a criminal record from Italy where my friend was born, she left the country while she was still a baby- still a criminal record was asked.
They also asked “certified” copies of the ID document - I believe passport’s first page serves that purpose, and I heard that lawyers are able certify documents in Portugal - though I can’t confirm this.
One question I have is, earlier on, I just provided the first page of the passport (as for the ID) and I have not provided all pages of the passport when I applied for citizenship. Chatgpt sees no issues on this as what is required is a valid id document and I was told that there are people who received nationality with just providing the first page - but there are others who raise a concern on this..
Anyway hope this clarifies the queries on the “faltas” fyi, till now I’ve not received any falta.
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Hi Mr.E, when is your “em analise” date?
It is 14th of Nov 2023. Is there a particular reason why you ask?
Most of the recently approved cases I’ve seen have an “Em análise” date of 01-02-2024. Just checking whether there’s a pattern in the processing dates.
So here is the weekly update 
, though there has been some approved cases - again mostly from first half of Nov and some Jan cases, I still think the pace is relatively slow.. What makes me say that?
We started to hear approvals of Nov 2023 cases around mid August, and despite two months have passed there is a big group of Nov applicants waiting for the approval. The official progress tracker still states that they are still processing 1st half of Nov applications. There has been a good chunk of Jan 2024 approvals as well, but if you take the data on tracker apps and voluntary postings in groups as reference, December approvals are still very few in number..
For my specific case, which was twice confirmed to be "all done, just waiting for the final approval, should get the approval by October "; I still expect to hear for the final approval; my lawyers will go to the Porto IRN and follow it up by end of the month if we don’t hear it by then.
Well there might be some who might want to normalize the current pace; yet it is worth to mention that the backlog has reached 36 months, and it doesn’t seem to be decreasing - especially not at this speed.
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the pace has decreased. this is the number of cases that progressed in some way in the CitizCheck app in Porto under the 6.7 law in August-September and in 18 days of October.
393 in August.
218 in September.
58 in 18 days of October.
The 6.7 law (Sephardic descendants) was basically repealed a few years ago so the number of those processed should be winding down to 0 as there are no more applicants.
the 6.7 article queue in Lisbon is the longest out of all, with 63 months of waiting. in Porto it’s 51 months of waiting. I think that they are years away from zeroing those queues.
I also see people complaining on the facebook group that they don’t see progress with other queues. for example transcription processes of minors (Article 1.o-C) at the ACP in Porto.
new employees were hired, the pace has slowed down. something is not right.
It was repealed in April 1, 2024 which is already 30 months ago. From your description seems Porto is processing applications at most 21 months older than that cutoff.
IRN has over 690,000 pending nationality applications, 38% more than last year.
Only a quarter of applications are from residents, and 23% are from descendants of Sephardic Jews. IRN says it prioritises applications from minors of Portuguese descent.
October 21, 2026, 6:45 AMThe Institute of Registries and Notaries (IRN) has a backlog of 690,480 nationality applications accumulated over the years, 38% more than the previous year. Of these, only a quarter (26%) concern immigrants living in Portugal who applied based on their legal residency period. Last year, at the beginning of July, there were half a million pending nationality applications.
(rest is behind a paywall)
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Maybe this explains why 6.1’s appear to be largely going nowhere. If there are processing children as priority that means most of the other categories are stalled…
here is a translation of the new IRN guideline (7):
Without prejudice to urgent requests, priority must always be given to nationality attribution proceedings concerning minors born abroad to a Portuguese parent who do not acquire another nationality and remain undocumented. In these cases, when consular services intervene, priority should be given to the attribution of nationality through the registration of birth in the Portuguese civil registry, pursuant to Article 1, paragraph 1, item c) (first part).
shouldn’t this mean that a priority should be given mainly for undocumented (no other nationality) babies born abroad and not to all minors who applied under article 1C?
i’m trying to understand if these cases can hold up the entire queue.
thank you for the article, @PTbound.
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