PT GV - Health Insurance

Residencies & citizenships Portugal Golden Visa
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The list of required documents for the Portuguese Golden Visa (Article 90-A – Residence Permit for investment purposes – The Official Website of Portuguese Immigration) includes the following: “Document proving the Applicant is the holder of an internationally recognised
health insurance for the time period of the legal residence requested or featuring the
automatic renewal of the insurance.”

I have two questions about this:

  1. Does this document need to be included in the initial application packet, or can it be shown at the SEF biometrics appointment?

  2. What is the scope of the required health insurance? Is it just travel insurance, or primary health insurance?

(I reviewed a previous thread on this topic - Using American Health Insurance for Golden Visa - but it does not answer these two questions explicitly.)

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I am not still not clear on this requirement myself. The official SEF manual further qualifies this as only required for those applicants who are based in Portugal.
There are some posts here from folks who did not present this never, ie neither initially online nor at the bio appointment, and still apparently passed the test.
What I am going to do is just submit my EHIC card because I already have it for free, and let SEF come back to me if they need anything extra.

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To quote the SEF manual, they appear to only require this ‘health insurance’ in the following situations:
“ Para as situações em que o requerente permanece em TN”

Whatever that means…

Direct link to the manual here:

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Thanks a lot. This is very helpful. I still need to read that Manual in detail. Overall, it is unfortunate that there’s some ambiguity here.

I guess a somehow similar requirement is this: “Evidence of entry and legal stay in the National Territory”. Logically, this should only be a requirement at the SEF-biometrics stage, not the remote online / postal application stage.

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(unless, as you say, one is applying within PT, which is theoretically possible, but in practice I guess very few will do this)

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Nomadgate just posted this piece on heath insurance.

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Thanks, I had seen that. It’s a great article, but doesn’t cover the specific question of PT GV requirements. I would, however, be interested in knowing whether one of the primary insurances listed in that article - for example GeoBlue Xplorer or Cigna Global - would meet Portugal’s requirements (I assume they would, but nice to get confirmation).

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Basically, you need health insurance if and when you are actually going to be physically resident in the country. If you are not planning to actually physically move there immediately, then you do not need to have health insurance, and you/the lawyer submit a written statement to that effect.

AFAIK, the insurance needs to be primary, such that you are not a burden on SNS. I imagine the easiest thing to do is to look at the various policies the D7 people are acquiring, since that would be the same basic requirement I believe. Not that I know, though.

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Sounds logical, but I don’t think this is necessarily mandatory though, as one of the two options given by SEF is this:
“Documento que ateste que está abrangido pelo Serviço Nacional de Saúde”

Which is why I am planning to show them my EHIC, which is basically an equivalent of being covered by SNS…

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A bit offtopic, but I have just realized reading the Manual that they require a copy of all passport pages, not just the main bio page. Oh well, gotta redo my copy now with the lawyer’s certification…

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EHIC is more like travel insurance, though. It’s not “primary insurance”. What remains ambiguous to me is whether primary insurance is actually necessary. If one spends just a week a year in Portugal, travel insurance seems sufficient.

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that sounds like a form of primary insurance to me. :slight_smile: though not knowing what it is, will it reimburse you for services during time spent in portugal?

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well, exactly. if you are there for a week and not establishing a physical residence, then it doesn’t matter.

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AFAIK, the passport photocopy doesn’t have to be certified or anything. my wife had mine copied at the shop downstairs from the SEF office while waiting for my appointment. It wasn’t certified at the time we handed it to her, and I don’t imagine the lawyer certified 50 pages of passport copy at the SEF clerk’s desk. But YMMV. However, if your passport changes (e.g. gets a new stamp) then you have to get a new copy.

You don’t submit the entire copy with the packet anyway, you only submit the bio page. I infer this from the fact that my lawyer never had a copy of all pages of my passport. You hand the clerk the full copy at the appointment.

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Thanks Jeff, that’s very helpful.
I already got my passport’s bio page certified by the lawyer. If that’s sufficient for the online application then I’ll just keep it like this, and then do the full copy just before the physical appointment.
The SEF’s Manual does not really say which part is online vs in-person appointment in terms of the required docs…

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EHIC is a useful remnant from days gone by when my country was part of the EU.
I used it in Germany and in Spain without any issues. Just turned up at a local healthcare place, showed the card and had treatment like a local, no qs asked.

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I guess I’ll soon find out )

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If it’s still actually valid and the EU agreements under which it was created still apply, that would seem to be sufficient. I would have thought that would have died with brexit, though?

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No, surprisingly it has not died out, and they even claim that it will be renewed as GHIC upon expiration.

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An update for what it’s worth - I did submit a scan of my EHIC card (along with its notarized translation) as per my earlier posts and now got my pre-approval. Hope the same will suffice when I come for biometrics.