I’m looking at plane tickets and wondering if this would count as 7 days:
Arriving on a Saturday at 15:10 and leaving the following Saturday at 15:35.
I could say an extra day, but I’d rather not since I have to be back to work on Monday.
I think that only counts as 6 days.
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My attorney only counted full says i.e. midnight to midnight so 6 days.
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Our lawyer said the opposite, that partial days count towards your stay. I don’t know if there’s any official AIMA guidance…
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There are no official guidelines. She basically said it is not worth the risk that SEF rejects partial days. I would work with your attorney. BTW this is off topic about wait time for citizenship.
Agreed, I moved the discussion to its own thread. I know more people have asked about this in the past, so good to make it easier to find!
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My lawyer told me that for the first two years of the resident card a week is enough to get a renewal, then the normal 14 days period in the next two years.
Is that the case? So in 5 years a total of 35 days.
A week per year surely, not a week per two years?
First card issuance (one week)
After that normal two weeks
For example, Saturday arrival and next Saturday departure will constitue 8 days i.e. 1 week?
1 week for the first card was true earlier, when the first card was valid only for 1 year. Now that the first card is a 2-year card, you need to spend 14 days, not 7 days, in those first two years.
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I understand everyone has constraints related to school and work, but please, for your own sake, consider spending a few days extra, rather than attempting to shave off the last few hours of what is already a very modest stay requirement. Given what we know about how Portugal works, you definitely do not want your renewals to hinge on edge cases open to interpretation by individual AIMA officials. Not after all the trouble and heartburn and waiting you’ve gone through to get this far.
In place of 7 days per year, consider budgeting time for 10 days, coming in and going out may be partial days, but even a nitpicky agent would have to concede it’s more than 7.
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I absolutely agree. I’m just trying to figure out whether I should go for the week I have some time for in February considering that only my initial application is paid and in the system – no approval or talk of biometrics yet. Under the approved law that will hopefully be signed in whereby the 5 years will be calculated differently (still waiting to find out how, of course), will spending 7 days this February (before getting approved, before biometrics, before getting a card) count? Opinions? We don’t know for sure, but…
The consensus seems to be that the stay requirement is only relevant to card renewal, and therefore there is no requirement for any stay prior to the car being issued.
My non-legal opinion is: no, it won’t count. The law governing nationality is different from the laws and regulations governing residence permits. It is only the nationality law where the start date has been modified; the Aliens Act remains as is, and the clock for all permit and renewal related requirements starts from the issue date of the first card. Though one may hope that for the sake of consistency, it too will be modified in the near future.
These are the latest Aliens Act regulations I could find (the regulations lay out the fine-grained detailed rules to implement the associated law), all changes consolidated up to 9/2022:
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The conflict between the Regulations (quoted in the previous post) and the 2 year validity of the first card comes up in these forums now and again. See for example:
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To avoid all unnecessary conflict and damage that could harm the citizenship’s application, it is best that we spend 10 days/ year. No matter how they count it (include or exclude the first/last days), it will always end up at least 8 days/ year.
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Yes. Though I’m usually a stickler for meeting the letter of the law, I’m not losing sleep over this. I spent my 2+ weeks in the second year of the first card, the first year being impossible for travel on account of Covid restrictions. My lawyer thinks it’s fine.
But if I’m reading @kh123 right, their lawyer said 1 week is enough for the first card (rather than the first year), which is incorrect by any reasonable interpretation of the regulation.
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Unsure why you would want to have to spend 7 days a year in PT before getting a visa? Or would you prefer to have to renew while your visa application is still being processed? 
I can deal with the regulation asymmetry in exchange for fewer pre-visa demands.
(Not that you can’t want to visit, obviously!)