Starting at the end of this month, immigrants who go to AIMA to regularize their residency status will be given their Social Security identification number, the NISS, automatically, without having to visit a Social Security counter at all.
The change comes from a new data link between AIMA and Social Security. Until now the two systems were not integrated. In the description given by Luís Farrajota, president of Social Security's IT institute, AIMA would tell an applicant it needed both their NISS and their tax number, and send them off to obtain each one from a different body. Under the new arrangement, AIMA enters the person's identifying details and the number is issued during the appointment itself.
The problem it fixes
Farrajota told Público that in 2025 alone roughly 250,000 people made two separate trips to Social Security counters purely to deal with the NISS, one visit to request it, and a second to pick it up. Because the two systems were not connected electronically, both journeys were required.
The agency enters the person's identification, Farrajota said, and "we assign the NISS in real time."
The result, according to Farrajota, is that the applicant no longer has to go to Social Security at all, the number arrives as part of the AIMA process.
What it doesn't fix
Read the detail carefully and the reform is narrower than the headlines suggest. The link that has been built runs between AIMA and Social Security. But Farrajota's own account of the old process has AIMA asking for both the NISS and the NIF, the tax number, issued by the tax authority, a different body altogether. Nothing in the reporting indicates the tax authority has been brought into this integration, so applicants should not assume the NIF will be issued automatically as well.
It is also worth being precise about who benefits: the automatic assignment applies to people going through regularization at AIMA. This is not a general overhaul of how foreign residents obtain a NISS.
Part of a wider digital push
The measure belongs to a Social Security digital transformation programme that has been running since 2025, aimed at shifting services out of physical counters and onto digital and telephone channels. Other pieces include a new online tool that lets people authorize third parties to access specific Social Security declarations on their behalf. And in a later phase, according to Correio da Manhã, WhatsApp is to become a "transactional channel" through which citizens can receive declarations and handle documents with Social Security directly.
For foreign residents, this particular runaround has been one of the most reliably infuriating parts of settling in Portugal. Each agency demands a document only another agency can issue, none of them share a database, and so the applicant becomes the courier, carrying paper between counters that could have exchanged the data electronically. Removing one leg of that relay, for a quarter of a million people a year, is a meaningful and concrete improvement.
But it is also worth keeping expectations calibrated. The measure was reported by Público and picked up from there; no implementation guidance has yet been published by AIMA, and no firm start date has been given beyond "the end of July." If you have an appointment in the coming weeks, plan for the old process and check the current requirements until AIMA confirms the new one is running.